Rejuvenating International Politics: The Youth Promise
(2023) Séminaire de la Chaire en Économie Politique internationale de l’Université Laval — Location: Université Laval (9.March.2023)
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- Abstract
- Recent youth actions, especially on climate change issues, are reminding us that youth is a key actor of international politics. Yet, very few studies of International Relations analyze youth and when they do so, they come with limited understandings of youth. This contribution aims precisely at explaining how current youth understandings in International Relations, most of the time vehiculated by international institutions, have developed and shaped youth roles in international processes. It presents such youth understandings or narratives, discuss their limits, and opens-up new perspectives on youth and international politics. More precisely, the contribution brings theoretical reflections about the way youth has been conceptualised in the literature on international politics. Such conceptualisation evolved around several narratives, that all, to some extent, instrumentalize youth by imposing expectations and needs on young people. In particular, youth have been mostly conceptualised as: (i) victims to protect; (ii) risks to control; (iii) potentials to monitor for the future. Young people have therefore been mostly conceptualised as recipients of policies, policies needed for their protection and empowerment. Only recently have youth been conceptualised as participants to international politics in their own rights, especially in domain of global environmental politics and even more particularly climate change. But this recent ‘youth as participants’ narrative still comes with limits. While studying where these four narratives of youth in international relations come from, the contribution also goes beyond and highlights how youth actors could also be conceptualised as agents in international politics and what such a narrative change entails for international policymaking.
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Orsini, A. (2023). Rejuvenating International Politics: The Youth Promise. Séminaire de la Chaire en Économie Politique internationale de l’Université Laval, Université Laval.