A self-fulfilling prophecy? Constructions of youth-as-troublemakers in UN DDR processes

Abstract

Youth as a category that informs international interventions in conflict-affected settings has gained currency in the past decade. This article traces the rising rhetoric of youth in UN Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) discourse and demonstrates how changes in its dominant representations have implications beyond the matter of semantics. Drawing on post-structuralist traditions, the article highlights how the DDR discourse delineates problems through particular framings that call forth certain solutions, which in turn reinforce the very (mis)understandings that underlie the interventions. A case study from the Central African Republic illustrates how the hegemonic representation of youth-as-troublemakers in UN documents, together with a compelling narrative that naturalized the link between youth, unemployment and violence, made possible and conferred legitimacy to the proliferation of projects with an overwhelming economic focus. The article discusses how the resource landscape, such as opportunities to unlock earmarked funding, incentivizes the reproduction of certain constructions of youth that align with today’s policy panic around violent extremism. In so doing, it puts into question the instrumental approach towards discourse by pointing to surprising ways in which discourses become appropriated by both international peacebuilders and the ‘subjects’ of these interventions.

Introduction

Youth as a category in international interventions has risen in prominence in the past decade. Whether in reports addressing young people themselves or those on peace processes, gender equality or health, regardless of the principal topic concerned, the youth question is seeping into, and sometimes saturating, international policy debates. This recognition of the importance of youth is particularly evident in the United Nations (UN), signalled by the appointment of the first-of-its-kind Special Envoy on Youth in 2013, the establishment of Youth Strategy Plans by various UN agencies and the deployment of advisors on youth-based programmes in both mission and non-mission settings. This growing interest in youth extends to Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR), with the UN Security Council (2015) Resolution 2250 on Youth, Peace and Security outlining ‘Disengagement and Reintegration’ as one of its five pillars.

This surge in attention notwithstanding, remarkable ambiguity besets the concept of youth. Across time and space, youth have been represented in multiple, at times contradictory, ways. In northern Uganda, youth ex-combatants were primarily perceived as ‘traumatised, stigmatised and broken’ victims (Blattman and Annan, 2008: 103). On the other hand, in the case of Sierra Leone where a young boy holding an AK-47 rifle has become a symbol of war, it was widely, and in hindsight incorrectly, expected that its troubled youth would trigger a return to war should peace fail to meet their needs (MacKenzie, 2012; Mitton, 2013). ¹ Such popular myths surrounding youth ex-combatants, whether as potential threats or traumatized victims, do not only drive fundraising and advocacy narratives; these representations also form part of the working definitions that underpin DDR programmes targeting youth. Indeed, identity constructions go beyond semantics: they have consequences in how policy frameworks are conceptualized and privileged. For example, an understanding of youth ex-combatants as passive victims readily justifies rights-based protection policies. On the other hand, when youth are prevailingly represented as a threat, approaches to mitigate security risks, both real and perceived, likely follow.

Given the recent surge in attention and resources devoted to youth programmes across major international institutions (Bersaglio et al., 2015; Pruitt, 2020), critically reviewing the dominant representations of youth that underpin DDR programmes and their implications is a matter of particular urgency. In such a light, this article addresses the question: How do discursive constructions of youth shape DDR activities and their consequences? Through a case study from the Central African Republic (CAR), the article demonstrates that the hegemonic representation of youth-as-troublemakers produces certain realities and incentive structures: it orients DDR interventions towards narrow economic interventions and can strain the relations between ex-combatants and the communities into which they are supposedly reintegrated. The article further points to a paradoxical situation where youth are prioritized on paper but excluded in practice.

Earlier studies on DDR have focused on its mechanics – ‘how best to plan, organize, coordinate and fund DDR activities’ – and have approached the challenges largely in technical terms (Berdal and Ucko, 2013: 316). Recently, a more conscious engagement with the political dynamics of DDR has emerged, triggering a corresponding shift in the policy world; the revised 2019 Integrated DDR Standards contain a new strategic module titled The Politics of DDR, which emphasizes that DDR needs to be anchored in politics in order to contribute to long-term security and stability (UN Inter-Agency Working Group on DDR, 2019). Still missing, however, is a sufficient understanding of how discourse is implicated in this process. Following a post-structural theoretical framework, the article seeks to diversify and cast a new light on the DDR literature. Any particular understanding of youth that underpins DDR programmes at a given moment is a social construct, even when seen as an ostensibly objective and apolitical starting point for policy discussions. Indeed, for Foucault (1980), the very tendency to treat a particular construction as ‘truth’ rather than a discursive manufacture is itself a result of sustained exercise of power that masks its contingency. Discourse, understood as ‘a system of statements in which each individual statement makes sense’, does not stand apart from ‘reality’ but is the very thing that produces and maintains a certain version of it (Doty, 1993: 302). Policymakers function within such discursively produced frameworks, basing their calculations and decisions on pre-existing ideas about ‘reality’. The constituted reality in turn gives rise to a set of possible actions and precludes others by delineating the acceptable from those that are not.

In this light, the production of knowledge through discourses is an integral yet oft-overlooked channel through which power is expressed and sustained. For instance, Curtis et al. (2022: 3) show how interests of power reduce complex narratives about women ex-combatants into ‘consolidated representations and sturdy tropes’. Further, given the productive nature of discourse, any particular representation of identity is unstable, implying that over time a different version of reality may emerge that allows for alternative approaches that had been previously unthinkable. A case in point is the Colombian government’s intentional de-vilification of the FARC ahead of the Havana negotiations as an attempt to shift the public image of the rebel group to make negotiations possible and the eventual outcome more acceptable (Haspeslagh, 2021: 366). It is then not surprising that dominant representations of youth underpinning DDR programmes have also evolved over time as various actors reinforce and contest any particular understanding, with significant implications.

To advance these arguments, the article proceeds as follows. The first section sketches the discussion around the challenges of defining youth. The subsequent part presents a discourse analysis of relevant UN documents to trace the conceptualization of youth and its multiple constructions in UN DDR; in particular, it shows how the category’s gradual move towards the centre stage of the policy debate has gone hand in hand with the rising dominance of the youth-as-troublemakers construction. In so doing, it highlights the linkages between identity constructions, policy changes and wider geopolitics and structural forces. Next, the implications of such a representation are illustrated through the case from the CAR, drawing attention to the mutually constitutive relationship between the youth-as-troublemakers representation and the growing prominence of primarily economic interventions. Finally, it shows how this construction interacts with today’s resource landscape and highlights surprising ways in which these discourses are appropriated by various actors.

Deconstructing ‘youth’: What is youth?

Despite growing policy concern for youth, the term remains a contested concept. The notion refers to different groups in different societies; even within a single society, people of wide ranges claim the place of youth at specific times and in specific places. Youth is indeed a ‘very shifty category’ that fits many people at some time but no one consistently (Durham, 2000: 116).

The term ‘youth’ has been conceptualized in diverse, and at times contradictory, ways. Firstly, an age-based perspective dominates the policy sphere, although international organizations differ as to how they delineate the age range. The UNSC Resolution 2250, for example, classifies youth as persons between the ages of 18 and 29 years, while the World Bank sets a younger bar, as those between 12 and 24 years. Regional organizations have their own definitions; the African Youth Charter for example defines youth as individuals aged from 18 to 35. Such discrepancies among the institutional definitions are helpful reminders of how the meaning of youth is more qualitative than a simple age cohort.

As opposed to policy definitions that are necessarily constrained by operational purposes, academic discussions have conceptualized youth in ways that better reflect the notion’s multifaceted reality and heterogeneity. Bersaglio et al. (2015) explain that the concept of youth, like all identities, is perhaps better understood as a social construct, an approach that allows for a denaturalization and the historicization of the term. While institutional definitions tend to approach youth as an all-encompassing category where differences related to, for example, gender, race, class, disability, ethnicity and geography are considered secondary and subsumed under a common identification of youthhood (Specht, 2008), understanding youth as a social construct sheds light on the pertinence of abovementioned intersectional considerations (Kimari et al., 2020: 694). Literature on youth politics in Africa, drawing on anthropological notions of liminality and rites of passage, have in particular made significant strides in approaching youth in transformative and relational terms (Durham, 2004). Further, youth is a political label that denotes political contestation (Christensen and Utas, 2008: 516), and perspectives of what it means to be youth vary across political climates and cultural contexts; these debates often take on racial and gender-related overtones. A telling example is today’s popular representation of ‘male youth’ around the European migration ‘crisis’, which is deeply underpinned by stereotypes around gender, race and age (Pruitt et al., 2018). Through such a lens, one can observe that the category of youth is culturally, historically and politically dependent and has more to do with status than simply age.

Youth in the DDR discourse has been underpinned by several questionable assumptions about their role, position and contribution within a society in transition. Building on Bersaglio et al.’s (2015) understanding of youth as a social construct, this article follows Özerdem and Podder’s (2015) framework of three ideal-type constructions of youth in conflict settings: youth-as-victims, youth-as-troublemakers and youth-as-peacebuilders. While in reality, these ideal-type constructions overlap and are more complex, programmatic interventions tend to ‘vacillate between the two extremes of infantilizing and demonizing youth’ (Özerdem and Podder, 2015: 40). The following section applies this framework to the specific case of DDR and shows how youth are rendered knowable across different generations of UN DDR programmes.

The evolution of understandings of youth within UN DDR frameworks: Victims, troublemakers or peacebuilders?

Defined as a process that contributes to security and stability in a post-conflict recovery context by removing weapons from the hands of combatants, taking the combatants out of military structures and helping them to integrate socially and economically into society by finding civilian livelihoods’, DDR has undergone several fundamental changes since the end of the Cold War (UN Inter-Agency Working Group on DDR, 2006: 6, 1.20 Glossary and Terms). These shifts have been accompanied by notable changes in the significance and constructions of ‘youth’. This section traces the evolution of representations of youth within UN DDR documents through a textual analysis of UN reports, the original and updated standards, guidelines and principles on DDR. Structured into three time periods (1989 to 2010; 2010 to 2018; 2018 to present), it locates the changing constructions of youth against the backdrop of the evolving thinking of DDR. ² This particular periodization reflects the UN’s self-assessment of major shifts in the nature of DDR programmes and is elaborated in the respective sections below.

From absence to crystallization of youth as a concept in the early years of DDR: 1989–2010

Although DDR assumes a kind of orthodoxy in international peacebuilding efforts today, DDR as an internationally driven activity is a relatively recent idea that emerged after the Cold War. Prior to the 1980s, DDR was largely executed through the military, approached as a technical exercise to right-size armed forces. The end of the Cold War ushered in two changes with particular relevance: the securitization of (under)development and the emergence of reintegration as a popular coordinated international activity. Already by 1990, the UN had become engaged in its first flurry of peace operations. The seminal 1992 ‘An Agenda for Peace’ report (UN Secretary General, 1992) reflected the zeitgeist of the time and signalled the expansion of UN peace operations by defining the concept of peacebuilding in broad terms as ‘action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict’. DDR became crystallized as a concept, rapidly spread to development and security discourse and was grafted into a growing array of UN Security Council resolutions. Throughout the 1990s, on the basis of donor enthusiasm and accumulated experience, provisions for DDR became more commonplace in peace agreements.

The internationalization of DDR has been marked by the proliferation of actors involved, from grassroots NGOs to the UN and the World Bank; by the early 2000s, over 20 UN agencies alone were involved in DDR activities (Muggah, 2009: 8). Given the growing need to coordinate, the UN assembled an Inter-Agency Working Group (IAWG) that published the Integrated Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Standards (IDDRS) in 2006. The IDDRS in 2006 and the establishment of the DDR Section in the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) in 2007 consolidated the role of the UN as the primary actor for DDR-related activities (McMullin, 2013: 74).

Comparing two texts from the 1999/2000 period – DPKO’s first principles and guidelines on ‘Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration of ex-combatants in a peacekeeping environment’ (UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, 1999) and the Secretary-General’s report to the UN Security Council under a corresponding title (UN Secretary General, 2000) – with the relevant modules of IDDRS published in 2006 (UN Inter-Agency Working Group on DDR, 2006), the following section highlights the gradual conceptualization of youth as a category. In 1999/2000, despite the explicit call to move away from viewing ex-combatants as a homogeneous caseload, this specificity was not yet extended to youth. At the same time, this period saw the issue of child soldiers rise to global prominence; the release of Graça Machel’s 1996 landmark UN report ‘Impact of armed conflict on children’ (UN Secretary General, 1996), for example, helped to entrench a gripping image of children and youth – not yet differentiated – as traumatized victims of war in need of protection. In both texts, except for one mention of a potentially positive contribution of youth civil society groups to community–combatant relations, discussion of ‘youth’ is entirely absent; in this absence, ‘youth’ are conflated with ‘children’ and by extension given strong victim identities. In stark contrast to youth, the term ‘children’, or variants thereof, appears 151 and 74 times in DPKO’s principles and guidelines and the Secretary-General’s report respectively. Then, it is in the 2006 IDDRS that ‘youth’ enters the DDR discourse as an explicit category. In line with the emerging discussion of youth-in-conflict more generally at the UN, the module titled ‘Youth and DDR’ appeared as one of IDDRS’s seven ‘Cross-Cutting Issues’; ³ here, youth were identified as ‘an important and special category of people’, whose ‘particular needs’ ‘must be effectively’ addressed (UN Inter-Agency Working Group on DDR, 2006: 5.20 Youth and DDR).

An analysis of IDDRS, with particular attention to ‘2.10 UN Approach to DDR’ and ‘5.20 Youth’, ‘4.30 Social and Economic Reintegration’ and ‘Briefing Note for Senior Managers’, reveals all three ideal-type constructions of youth, though the dual dominance of youth-as-victims and youth-as-troublemakers comes through clearly. Firstly, the UN constructs youth-as-victims who deserve protection. In the Youth module, for example, the following terms or variants thereof appear frequently: protect (20); rights (7); vulnerable (12); abuse (7); exploit (4). Through processes of linking and differentiation, the UN links youth to ‘victimhood’ and differentiates them from adult ex-combatants who have the power to ‘abuse’ and ‘exploit’ youth, thereby constructing a compelling narrative that youth require ‘protection’ because they are ‘vulnerable’. Notably, youth are at times presented as the worst victims of conflict, compared to both children and adults, since they are said to have been exposed to ‘bad effects. . . at an important time in their development’ (UN Inter-Agency Working Group on DDR, 2006: 5.20 Youth and DDR: 16). It is also worth noting that the drafting of the ‘Youth’ module of IDDRS was led by UNICEF.

Alongside this construction of youth-as-victims is also a persistent representation of youth-as-troublemakers. The labelling of subtitles in the Youth module draws a direct association between youth and violence. Subtitles such as ‘Violent youth’, ‘Youth and violence’ and ‘Youth and small arms’ and the failure to interrogate these links suggests that in these documents, these relationships are presumed to be automatic. Similarly, in the Reintegration module, discussions of youth are concentrated in a half-page subsection titled ‘Reducing armed violence’, reinforcing the assumed association. This concentration is acutely telling of the understanding of youth-as-troublemakers, given that ‘youth’ is entirely absent from every other element of this section of ‘Social reintegration’, which includes, amongst others, subsections on ‘Restoring social cohesion’ and ‘Human rights’.

Gendered representations of youth further strengthen the youth-as-troublemakers construction. The following quote by a veteran youth expert summarizes the heavy accent on masculinity embedded in the UN’s approach towards youth: ‘If you’re focused on dangerous male youth, then call it a youth program. . . The title is misleading if it refers to anyone else’ (Sommers, 2015: 158). ‘Stereotypical images of masculinity that emphasize brutality and strength’ are identified as one of the main factors that prompt youth to join armed groups; ‘find[ing] alternative ways of expressing masculinity’ and ‘changing violent masculinity’ are then proposed as solutions to addressing youth violence (UN Inter-Agency Working Group on DDR, 2006: 5.20 Youth and DDR, 7, 22). The case study selection in the Youth module also reinforces the youth-as-troublemakers representation. The only concrete example of youth ex-combatants in this module is that of mercenaries in West Africa: depicting youth as those who move from ‘conflict to conflict’ paints a picture of opportunistic youth, driven primarily by wealth, ‘power and status’ instead of other grievances that are considered more legitimate by the international community (UN Inter-Agency Working Group on DDR, 2006: 5.20 Youth and DDR, 6).

While youth-as-victims and youth-as-troublemakers are clearly the two dominant representations in this period, the youth-as-peacebuilders construction still features significantly. For example, the term ‘assets’ to depict youth’s potential is continuously repeated across IDDRS modules. It is noteworthy that this representation is discussed in a way that is compatible with and even reinforces the two dominant ones. While there are repeated calls to ‘encourage youth leadership, participation and decision-making’, the reasons behind considering youth as assets are supposedly because a failure to do so would lead to destabilization: ‘Seeing youth as positive assets for society and acting on that new perception is vital to preventing them from becoming alienated and turning to activities that destabilize society’ (UN Inter-Agency Working Group on DDR, 2006: 5.20 Youth and DDR, 24). What is significant here is that the youth-as-peacebuilders discourse gains authority insofar as the alternative would leave them as troublemakers, and evoking the latter is intended to lend legitimacy to the ‘new perception’ of youth-as-peacebuilders. Furthermore, the youth-as-peacebuilders representation is predominantly used in conjunction with UN programmes, most often economic such as job-creation measures. This framing attributes tremendous importance to UN engagement, implying that youth are currently and inherently troublemakers, and that intervention is indispensable if youth are to become peacebuilders.

While youth-as-victims and youth-as-troublemakers compete for dominance, the relative balance among all three main constructions of youth points to the instability of the understandings of youth in this period. This is perhaps not so surprising given that in 2006, youth was a new category, one that was only beginning to be recognized as having distinct needs and motivations. That said, the emergence of youth-as-troublemakers as a powerful concept by 2006, as opposed to the primary emphasis on the victim construction in 1999/2000, can be explained by considering the geopolitical developments that had transpired since the early 2000s. The crystallization of youth as a separate category, itself a reflection of the growing focus on youth by the international policymaking community, is crucially tied to a global political project of securitization and new expressions of militarism, triggered by the 9/11 attacks (Abrahamsen, 2018; Kimari et al., 2020).

The rise of youth-as-troublemakers in ‘Second Generation’ DDR: 2010–2018

The 2010 report titled ‘Second Generation Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration practices in peace operations’ (UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, 2010, hereafter referred as ‘Second Generation report’) signalled a major shift in the UN’s conceptualization of DDR. This, together with the Secretary-General’s Report on ‘Disarmament, demobilization and reintegration’ released in 2011 (UN Secretary General, 2011), represents the organization’s attempt to provide new tools to address what was perceived to be an increasingly complex reality in which its operations are deployed to ongoing conflict settings where prerequisites of traditional DDR do not exist. The idea of ‘new wars’ (Kaldor, 2001) that had gained ground since the end of the Cold War and had become prevalent in the policymaking circles by 2010 also influenced the need for revised policy guidelines.

The ‘Second Generation DDR’ model is said to provide complementary options to reinforce traditional DDR efforts. Community Violence Reduction (CVR), which encompasses ‘a range of initiatives from labour-intensive projects, business incubation and community dialogue forums, to direct engagement with members of armed groups, as well as youth-at-risk, to prevent further recruitment’, emerges ‘at the forefront’ of the new approach (UN Peacekeeping, n.d.). While the differences between ‘traditional’ and ‘Second Generation’ DDR are often blurred in actual programming on the ground, at the centre of this new framework was a shift away from the previous combatant-centric approach and towards a community-focused one. This shift was in line with the broader ‘inexorable’ evolution from a minimalist to a more maximalist orientation in DDR programming (Muggah, 2009: 15). DDR now included the much broader goals of building the conditions for sustainable peace, ambitiously tasked to promote reconciliation between soldiers and communities, rebuild social institutions and promote economic livelihoods for combatants, their dependents and neighbourhoods.

The position of youth in the DDR discourse became significantly pronounced in this period, clear from the fact that the term ‘youth’ was mentioned 51 times in the Second Generation report while ‘child’ was only used five times; this was in stark contrast to the terms’ relative frequencies in the previous period. The elevated importance of youth can be partly explained by one of the three overarching guidance of Second Generation DDR: ‘Targeting specific groups with different approaches with incentives’. This trend holds particular significance for youth, since ‘at-risk youth’ is repeatedly mentioned as one of the main target groups.

As youth rises in the discourse, youth-as-troublemakers emerges as the hegemonic understanding in these texts. The ‘youth bulge’ argument is influential in entrenching this construction. Although the relationship between large youth population and violence has been a subject of much debate, ⁴ the 2010 report speaks of the supposedly ‘known links between youth bulges and violence’ (UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, 2010: 26). The representation of youth-as-troublemakers is reinforced through the association of youth with ‘gang programmes’: in fact, youth ex-combatants are grouped together with ‘violent gangs’ over 20 times in the said report. Similarly, CVR, one of the main policy suggestions to address at-risk youth, draws on lessons learned from Haiti and the United States, both of which were designed to lower gang violence. The supposedly self-evident association between youth and violent gangs presents youth as troublemakers, whose criminal and violent tendencies should be tamed by external intervention.

Similar to 2006, what appears at first to be a competing discourse of youth-as-peacebuilders in these texts is again a secondary discourse subsumed into the dominant youth-as-troublemakers discourse. The Second Generation report suggests that former combatants and at-risk youth can undergo ‘positive behavioural change through civic education and peer mediation training and counseling’ and subsequently make a positive contribution in combatant–community relations (UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, 2010: 52). While this hints at the potential transformation of youth, it is underpinned by the notion that youth are currently a threat and that without external intervention, they will most likely retain their identity as such. Similarly, the report tends to compare the existing state of youth as ‘trapped in a vicious cycle of violence’ to idealized contributors to ‘reconstruction and community development’ (UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, 2010: 13, emphasis added).

As youth emerged as one of the key categories of DDR in this period, they were overwhelmingly presented as troublemakers. While present, the element of contingency embedded in the peacebuilder construction renders it inherently less natural and self-evident than that of troublemaker, failing to pose a significant challenge to troublemaker’s hegemonic position. Likewise, the victim construction is only given a cursory treatment in both of these texts, signalling that alternative imaginations of youth were largely omitted and stifled in this period.

‘Youth at risk of recruitment’ in contemporary approaches to DDR: 2018–present

The analysis for the third period is based on the 2018 report ‘The changing landscape of armed groups: Doing DDR in new contexts’ (UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, 2018; hereafter referred as ‘Changing Landscape report’) and the revised Integrated DDR Standards (UN Inter-Agency Working Group on DDR, 2019). Although the new Standards have been validated by IAWG principals and were launched internally in November 2019, as of March 2022, most modules, including the one on youth, have not been made publicly available. The following analysis is based on the modules that are both accessible and considered to capture the essence of the revised IDDRS – the strategic module ‘2.10 UN Approach to DDR’ and the new module ‘2.30 Community Violence Reduction’ – as well as the ‘Briefing Note for Senior Managers’.

DDR has conventionally followed broader trends in international peacebuilding, and in line with today’s rising ‘sustaining peace’ agenda and the language of ‘peace continuum’ at the UN, the updated module on ‘UN Approach to DDR’ signals a shift from DDR programmes to DDR processes. DDR, which now includes a greater range of options under the umbrella of DDR process, is said to play an important role across the ‘peace continuum’, from supporting mediation efforts, to preventing recruitment in conflict, to providing reintegration assistance.

Such broader conceptualization has significant implications on redefining the ‘beneficiaries’ of DDR. The 2018 Changing Landscape report states that today’s conflicts often ‘transcend conventional conceptual boundaries’ and require DDR practitioners to respond to different ‘scales of violence’ as opposed to conflict per se (UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, 2018: 2–3). This, combined with the explicit aim to prevent future recruitment and the continued promotion of CVR, importantly redefines the subjects of these interventions. Given that DDR practitioners are no longer just concerned about recidivism – the revolving door phenomenon – but are increasingly tasked with preventing first-time recruitment of people, the ‘beneficiaries’ of DDR are broadened from former combatants to include essentially anyone who is considered to be ‘at risk’ of joining armed groups.

It is in this context that ‘youth’ as a category has been brought into the spotlight. The clause ‘at risk’ has become prominent, to the extent that it is almost always mentioned as the second group, after ex-combatants, in the discussion of ‘potential DDR clients’. The youth-as-troublemakers construction gains authority through this rising rhetoric of ‘at risk’, given that ‘youth’ appear to be the category that this clause refers to. In fact, in the revised ‘UN Approach to DDR’ module, ‘youth’ is mentioned in direct conjunction to ‘at risk’ in each of the four times the latter phrase was used. The very definition of CVR – ‘a bottom-up approach that targets children and youth at risk of recruitment, community members and armed groups’ – also reflects this almost-automatic association (UN Inter-Agency Working Group on DDR, 2019: 2.10 UN Approach to DDR, 20, emphasis added).

The ‘othering’ of youth from the receiving communities reinforces this understanding. While community-based approaches such as CVR are given prominence, these new frameworks speak of youth as ‘other than’ the receiving community. For example, in the CVR module, youth, frequently mentioned in tandem with inherently negative notions such as ‘terrorism’ and ‘harmful notions of masculinity’, are positioned in opposition to community, which is associated with inherently positive concepts such as ‘gender equality’ and ‘non-violence’ (UN Inter-Agency Working Group on DDR: 2.30 CVR). The association with terrorism is particularly notable given the echoes around the world today; this association frames youth as a threat to local, national or even international security and in turn accords the category urgency. Youth are constructed as everything the community is not, with little regard as to how such discursive practices may affect their reintegration.

Given the importance attributed to targeting ‘at-risk’ youth, the silence around how such youth would be selected is striking. It is perhaps this discursive lacuna that allows for an alternative understanding of youth-as-victims. Across the revised IDDRS, youth are often grouped together with children and persons with disabilities, categories widely assumed to be particularly vulnerable. In fact, ‘youth and child protection’ is mentioned twice as an issue for which a DDR Working Group should be established, accompanied by calls for ‘protection, care and support for young people (15-24)’ (UN Inter-Agency Working Group on DDR, 2019: 2.30 CVR, 7–8). These competing ideas as to whether youth should be ‘protected’ or ‘prevented’ create confusion as it is left unclear whether these are two distinct categories or if all youth should be simultaneously protected and prevented. Youth’s identity instability is further confused by references to another construction: youth-as-peacebuilders. Intermittent yet significant characterizations of ‘youth organizations’ (3) as ‘potential partners’ to ‘prevent ongoing recruitment’ of at-risk youth qualify, though limitedly, the dominance of the youth-as-troublemakers construction. This recent intensification of conflicting understandings of youth as victims, troublemakers and peacebuilders, after a more muted contestation in the second period, can be partly explained by today’s growing call to recognize youth’s positive agency. ⁵

Through textual analysis, this section has shown how the UN imagines youth along three main constructions, while implying that the trajectory of youth into peacebuilders depends upon international intervention. By tracing the conceptualization of youth and its different understandings, it becomes clear that youth is a fluid term, one that is continuously constructed and contested, and that gains salience at different times and under different political pressures. That youth can have markedly different meanings raises important questions about their consequences. What are the implications of different UN constructions of youth? How do they play out, and how are they embraced or resisted when implemented on the ground? The rest of the article addresses these questions through a case study from the Central African Republic.

From discourse to programming: Case from the Central African Republic

Evolving representations of youth have practical consequences. Narratives that rely on narrow understandings of youth define problems in particular ways and construct particular realities, engendering certain possibilities while precluding others. The following section illustrates how policy discourse affects policy programming through a case study from the Central African Republic (CAR). After a summary of the extensive history of DDR in the country, it presents key findings from a discourse analysis of over 70 UN Security Council resolutions, reports and presidential statements on the CAR, as well as successive peace agreements. Focusing on the latest phase of DDR since 2015, it draws attention to the mutually constitutive relationship between the troublemaker representation of youth found within UN documents and the rise of CVR programmes in the CAR. Drawing on project documents, budgets and annual and evaluation reports of the CVR pilot project in Paoua from 2015 to 2018, this section highlights how the resource landscape, notably earmarked funding for counter-terrorism and violent extremism, may facilitate the reproduction of certain constructions of youth with questionable implications. The drive to present youth as threats risks sidelining other potential roles they can play and leads to missed opportunities to harness their capacity for peacebuilding.

DDR in the Central African Republic

Bitterly described as ‘the world champion of peacekeeping’, the CAR has seen the deployment of at least a dozen international and regional peace operations intended to restore security and build peace (Lombard, 2016: 213). Many of these included a DDR component; in fact, a resounding critique of international interventions in the country has been that the vast majority of peace agreements have privileged DDR schemes and other security arrangements at the expense of addressing socio-economic issues, sentiments of marginalization and poor governance. DDR has been at the centre of international peace efforts in the CAR to such an extent that critics of peacebuilding there often point to ‘the DDR panacea’ to account for the shortcomings of international initiatives in bringing peace to the country (Zahar and Mechoulan, 2017: 9).

For more than 15 years, the CAR has had a DDR programme being planned or carried out. The CAR’s first major DDR programme began in 2004, when the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) executed the Programme for Reintegration and Support to Communities (PRAC; Programme de réinsertion et d’appui aux communautés), a government-led reintegration project funded by the World Bank’s Multi-Country Demobilization and Reintegration Program. Between 2009 and 2011, UNDP was again the executing organ of the Steering Committee efforts (Comité de Pilotage), a group presided by the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General and comprised of representatives of both the government and rebel groups. Then, the third major stage of DDR programming began in 2015 and is ongoing; United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) has been carrying out several DDR-related activities, including a pre-DDR from October 2015 to June 2017, CVR since November 2016 and the national DDR programme since December 2018. While precise information on the demographic composition of armed groups in the CAR does not exist, it is estimated that 40% of armed group members in the CAR fall into the age category of youth between 15 and 24 (ACCORD, 2017).

Crystallization of youth-as-troublemakers since 2015

Since the upsurge in violence in 2012, the CAR has had at least six rounds of mediation between the government and armed groups, and discussions between these parties are said to have been limited almost exclusively to DDRR, with the additional R referring to the repatriation of foreign fighters (International Crisis Group, 2017: 22). DDRR is repeatedly identified as one of the UN’s priorities in the CAR and is an important part of MINUSCA’s mandate (UN Security Council, 2014: sec. 30.g). The basis of the current process was established through an agreement reached at the Bangui Forum in May 2015, which led to the creation of a national DDR committee comprised of representatives of the government and ten armed groups.

Youth are characterized as the main beneficiaries of DDRR. Article 6 of the ‘Agreement between the Transitional Government and the armed groups on the principles of disarmament, demobilization, reintegration and repatriation and of integration into the uniformed State forces of the Central African Republic’ (UN Peacemaker, 2015: 10), for example, stipulates that CVR programmes simultaneously target ‘combatants and at-risk youth’. Subsequent peace agreements in 2017 and 2019 also explicitly mention youth as one of the main groups of the DDR beneficiaries. The collective grouping of combatants, the traditional beneficiaries of DDR, and youth illustrate not only the prominence of youth in the CAR’s DDR discourse but also naturalizes the association between the two groups, revealing the crystallization of the idea that youth, like combatants, are a potential threat to be neutralized.

Multiple links between youth and inherently negative notions, such as ‘violence’, ‘local militia’ and ‘gang’, in the texts studied send a similar message. This representation is reinforced through detailed descriptions of specific cases of youth violence in the Secretary-General reports to the Security Council. Lengthy accounts of a youth attack on the St. Joseph Cathedral in Bambari (UN Secretary General, 2016: paragraph 26), armed Muslim youth attacks on civilians in Alindao and Dembe (UN Secretary General, 2017b: paragraph 20; emphasis added) and ‘young Muslim men’ attacking a camp for internally displaced persons, ‘targeting civilians and burning much of the camp’ collectively paint a threatening picture of youth (UN Secretary General, 2019: paragraph 19; emphasis added). It is noteworthy that these constructions of youth, with clear religious overtones, bear strong similarities with the rhetoric at the highest level of the international community around the same time; at the White House summit on countering violent extremism in 2015, for example, then US President Barack Obama raised the alarm that extremist groups were not only targeting their propaganda to Muslim communities, but to Muslim youth in particular (Williams, 2016).

A compelling narrative that links youth, unemployment and violence embedded in these texts brings this dominant troublemaker construction into conversation with those of victims and peacebuilders. According to this narrative, while perpetrators of violence, youth are at once victims of ‘lack of meaningful skills and low uptake in the labour market’ and are ‘compelled’ or ‘dragged into’ armed groups in search of ‘alternative forms of income’ (World Bank, 2017: 27; Accord Politique pour la Paix et la Reconciliation en Republique Centrafricaine, 2019: 19). The fact that young men are indeed actively mobilized to join armed groups in the CAR and are comparatively more vulnerable to recruitment lends a certain degree of support to the victim representation of youth. Such victim construction and the notion that youth are exploited in conflicts, albeit limitedly, qualify the dominance of the troublemaker construction. The peacebuilder representation similarly builds on this narrative; if lack of economic opportunities forces youth to join armed groups, provision of such skills and jobs, then, would act ‘as a bulwark against association with armed groups’ (UN Secretary General, 2017a: para. 80).

What is noteworthy is that representations of youth-as-peacebuilders almost always appear in conjunction with DDR activities that offer training and other economic opportunities. Subtitles of MINUSCA’s publications on CVR serve as clear examples. Often in capital letters and bolded for emphasis, these headings stress that CVR allows ‘unemployed youth’ to voluntarily renounce violence and contribute to the socio-economic development of the CAR (MINUSCA, n.d. b: 11). ⁶ Direct quotes from youth testimonies such as ‘I didn’t have a job but MINUSCA’s CVR programme is making me an asset for my country’ further reflect the idea that youth’s peacebuilder identity is contingent on the implementation of and their participation in DDR processes (MINUSCA, 2020). Given the narrative that it is unemployment that drives youth into violence, DDR, primarily through job provision, is constructed as indispensable if youth are to be ‘saved from delinquency’ (MINUSCA, 2017). What might appear at first as a competing construction, then, is a secondary discourse subsumed into the hegemonic youth-as-troublemakers discourse. Discursive shifts and emphases at the level of the UN headquarters find close parallels with those in the field, illustrating that discourses at these different levels tend to inform and build on one another.

Youth-as-troublemakers and the rising prominence of CVR

This period in which youth emerge as a clear priority area coincides with the growing prominence of CVR in the country. Although complementarity between CVR and PNDDRR is emphasized on paper, CVR is more often than not implemented in isolation without parallel DDR processes, resulting in situations where ‘CVR is the stabilisation programme’ (Transition International, 2017: 32, emphasis added). In light of continued delays and controversies surrounding the implementation of PNDDRR, CVR continues to be seen as a ‘critical’ and ‘strategic’ instrument that could restore a minimum level of order in the CAR (UN Peacebuilding Fund, 2020: 6).

The effective involvement of youth is closely tied to the legitimacy attributed to CVR itself: the very strength of CVR is said to lie in its capacity to ‘address the issue of violence and young people at risk in the communities’ and ‘reduce youth involvement in armed violence’ (UN Secretary General, 2015: paragraph 56). MINUSCA also speaks of CVR as ‘an opportunity for combatants and unemployed youth to voluntarily renounce violence and contribute to the socioeconomic development of the CAR with members of their communities’ (MINUSCA, n.d. b: 11), ⁷ and the goal of CVR in the CAR, in layman’s terms, has been summarized as ‘[keeping] young impressionable men – would-be spoilers – from joining criminal gangs and politicized armed groups in the first place’ (Muggah, 2018). Such stated aims neatly align with present-day militarism, under which donors have increasingly prioritized ‘harder’ interventions against the backdrop of the fusion of development and security assistance (Abrahamsen, 2018: 25).

Clear about CVR in the CAR is its almost exclusive focus on economic aspects over social, psychological or political ones. The three most offered activities through CVR are short-term vocational training, labour-intensive cash-for-work schemes and start-ups of income-generating activities, all of which are primarily economic. This approach bears a striking resemblance to the compelling narrative that links youth, unemployment and violence, one that was uncovered through discourse analysis in the previous section: (1) youth are victims of limited economic opportunities who are pushed into armed groups in search of income; (2) external interventions that provide skills and jobs would transform those currently violent troublemakers into peacebuilders who contribute to development. By defining the main cause of youth involvement with armed groups as limited economic opportunities, this discourse calls forth a solution that would address the economic situation. An approach like CVR then neatly fits into what is seen as an acceptable solution by providing economic alternatives to a large number of youth who, seen through this lens and version of reality, would otherwise become violent.

While discourses, narratives and identity constructions neither ‘cause’ nor ‘determine’ action, they make it possible by establishing the conditions of possibility for them (Autesserre, 2009: 255). In this case, the assumption that youth are troublemakers whose potential to change hinges on the availability of economic opportunities legitimizes approaches such as CVR. These projects, in turn, reproduce the very constructions upon which they are predicated. The growing prominence of CVR among other options in the DDR toolkit and this particular narrative go hand in hand. Not so much through a linear causal relationship as a dispersed process, constructions and programmes mutually constitute each other; understandings shape programmes and programmes shape understandings.

Youth: Prioritized but excluded?

‘The youth sometimes try to create troubles to be identified.’

Focus group discussion, North Paoua (Transition International, 2017: 35)

Limitations of such a heavy reliance on CVR in the CAR and beyond have been discussed at length elsewhere. ⁸ This article suggests that the problem lies not only in the debatable effectiveness of the programmes, but also in their questionable relevance in the actual lives of youth. The final evaluation report of the CVR pilot project in Paoua highlights that non-combatant youth were in fact left out of the project, in stark contrast to CVR’s repeated rhetorical objectives (Transition International, 2017: 5). That this pilot initiative, often considered as ‘an exemplary project’ by the UN and thought to have played a key role in inspiring subsequent CVR projects in the country, failed to include youth in its implementation phase raises several critical questions (UN Peacebuilding Fund, 2019: 11).

Implemented by IOM, supervised by MINUSCA DDR section, and funded through the UN Peacebuilding Fund (UNPBF), the pilot project in Paoua aimed to reach 7000 beneficiaries. In the first document submitted to the UN Peacebuilding Support Office (UN PBSO) for funding approval, the beneficiaries were clearly outlined as follows: 4200 armed groups’ elements non-eligible for the national DDR programme (60%), together with 2800 other members of the communities (40%). At the outset of the document, these community members are defined as those ‘particularly prone to or vulnerable against violent activities’ (UN Peacebuilding Support Office/UN Peacebuilding Fund, 2015: 4). The document, however, goes on to state that ‘priority will be given to vulnerable people (women head of households, GBV victims, IDPs and returnees, religious and ethnic minorities)’ while remaining silent on the inclusion of at-risk youth (UN Peacebuilding Support Office/UN Peacebuilding Fund, 2015: 11).

Then, by August 2016 when the first annual report on the project was submitted, it was already clear that widows and female heads of households were being selected as community members to participate in the project while at-risk youth, such as young people involved in gangs, were excluded; a proposed inclusion of the latter group through a joint IOM-UNICEF proposal is noted to have been rejected (UN Peacebuilding Fund, 2016: 19). This is contradictory to, and undermines, the claim elsewhere in the document that the project ‘takes into account age. . . considerations, including those targeting youth-at-risk’ (UN Peacebuilding Fund, 2016, 2016: 9). One year on, by the 2017 annual report, even the term ‘youth’ had completely disappeared but as one fleeting reference in an optional section (UN Peacebuilding Fund, 2017:19). The creative reinterpretation of the word ‘vulnerable’ is noteworthy; while the official CVR document produced at the headquarters uses the word to refer to ‘“youth-at-risk of recruitment” who lack employment opportunities and may be vulnerable to recruitment by armed groups’ (UN Department of Peace Operations, 2017: 32, emphasis added), during the implementation of the project, the set-aside category for ‘vulnerable people’ was used to justify the inclusion of a very different group of people exposed to vulnerability of a markedly different nature. The final evaluation report states that the selection criteria for vulnerable people ‘ended up being mainly elderly women’ and describes that CVR had become akin to ‘a social welfare programme’ (Transition International, 2017: 33–34).

That at-risk youth were ultimately excluded in the project despite their prioritized status in official CVR guidelines lends support to the idea that the incorporation and reproduction of certain constructions of youth on paper is powerfully shaped by the resource landscape. Amid today’s policy panic around violent extremism, international actors have dedicated huge sums of funding and sought rapid responses to threats of terrorism. The discourse on countering violent extremism entails widespread representations of youth as at risk of engaging in violent activities; such misleading constructions ‘result in counterproductive policies that lack nuance, relying on (and further contributing) to stereotypes’ (Pruitt, 2020: 718–719). Notwithstanding their problematic consequences, for those responsible for resource mobilization, using certain constructions that fit into this policy panic remains a quick and convenient way to meet pressing funding imperatives. This incentive structure raises the question of whose interests are served through the youth-as-troublemakers construct. While evoking this image is a powerful way to align and situate a new pilot project within the broader programmatic trends and policy buzzwords, it does little to address the real needs of youth, particularly if they are sidelined during the implementation stage.

The difference in the degree of emphasis on at-risk youth between documents produced for internal purposes and outward-orientated publications highlights the instrumental power of discourses in attracting resources. While the discussion on at-risk youth does not feature prominently in internal documents, the two main external publications on MINUSCA’s DDR webpage identify ‘youth’ and ‘unemployed youth’ as CVR’s main beneficiaries (MINUSCA, n.d. a: 7, n.d. b: 11). In both documents, these phrases are used as part of subheadings for their respective sections on CVR and are stressed in bold, as well as in capital letters or in a different colour, making evident their intended emphases. Given that countering violent extremism is one of the ‘key objectives’ that determine investment priorities in UNPBF strategy for 2020–2024 and that UNPBF has been one of the main sources of funding for DDR-related activities in the CAR (UN Peacebuilding Fund, 2020: 7), it is likely that the youth-as-troublemakers construct would remain useful for those in search of donor funding and hence dominant.

Such an instrumental approach towards discourses, however, fails to take seriously the power of discourse in producing reality. In the CAR, the dominance of the youth-as-troublemakers construction has directly influenced the behaviour of certain youth. A youth participant in a focus group, for example, explicitly stated that ‘youth sometimes try to create troubles to be identified’ as CVR beneficiaries (Transition International, 2017: 35). This points to an alarming possibility that while youth may not be inherently violent, they may appropriate and strategically internalize the prevailing construction for material benefits. Similarly, local leaders, IOM and government staff all shared the concern that ‘the project is actually creating new troublemakers’ and that youth are ‘stimulated’ to ‘take up weapons to become beneficiaries’ (Transition International, 2017: 75). These examples are evidence of how discourse can shape youth’s actions and choices, to the extent of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. This reality also points to another dimension of youth’s agency in the CAR, in ways that differ from assumptions in the policy documents. While the documents present youth’s role as peacebuilders to be contingent on their participation in DDR processes, it was in fact DDR and the representations of youth therein that became subject to youth’s instrumentalization.

A more conscientious reflection on the use of constructions for resource-driven purposes is of critical importance given its repercussions for everyday reintegration dynamics. Labelling of former combatants as either ‘heroes’ or ‘problems’ shapes their relationships with the communities (Özerdem and Podder, 2015: 44). In this regard, the representation of youth-as-troublemakers risks straining the already delicate relations between youth and their communities by strengthening the perception of youth as an object of fear. While this may be considered as a justifiable trade-off when weighed against gaining resources by tapping into the policy panic, it brings to the fore the question of accountability. The trade-off, and the subsequent crystallization of youth’s identity in an oppositional binary vis-à-vis their communities, is one that does not cost those who make the decisions or hold the discursive power to sustain the dominant representation, but youth and their communities whose experiences of reintegration and reconciliation may be further complicated. While these relational dynamics are less quantifiable and elude conventional monitoring and evaluation tools of international actors, they have important consequences for the everyday experiences of both DDR beneficiaries and the wider community, which collectively become termed ‘reintegration’ and ultimately determine the sustainability of the very security and stability that DDR aims to establish.

Conclusions: Towards accountability and responsibility

How youth are represented in the policy discourse has very real consequences on the lives of youth being ‘constructed’ and the programmes designed to target them. By delineating problems in a particular way and shaping people’s perception(s) of reality, dominant constructions orientate interventions towards addressing certain issues and away from others, as well as defining success in a particular way. The DDR response to violence in the CAR exemplifies how constructions inform programming: the hegemonic youth-as-troublemakers representation, together with the compelling narrative that links youth unemployment to violence, renders possible and confers legitimacy to the proliferation of CVR projects with an overwhelming economic focus. Such constructions and narratives are further incentivized by today’s resource landscape shaped by violent extremism concerns and the primacy of international security; funding imperatives often mean that the gap between the emphasis on youth on paper and their exclusion in practice may be overlooked. In the case of the CAR, these projects have produced perverse incentives for youth to reappropriate the popular discourse and created conducive conditions for the talk of youth as threats become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The risk of such self-fulfilling prophecy calls into question not only the effectiveness of the current approach of peacebuilding in the CAR, but also the longer-term implications of the constructions sustained by international peacebuilding actors. In the CAR, these interventions feed into the domestic-level narratives and attitudes that make people anticipate that young people cause violence, rather than participate in curbing it (International Peace Institute, 2016). More broadly, representations that rely on certain visions of securitized identities risk deepening present-day polarization along racial, religious and geographical lines.

The revised IDDRS in 2019 and the most recent UN Security Council resolution 2535 on Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) adopted in 2020, which respectively emphasize the need for a thorough understanding of the specific needs of youth and ‘the essential role of young people in advancing peace and security’ (UN Security Council, 2015: Resolution 2535, paragraph 19), may offer an opening to reconsider the hegemonic representations of youth. An enquiry into whether and how dominant constructions are received and contested by those in the CAR as well as in other host sites would be an important exercise towards this end. The discrepancies between international and various contextual understandings may account for some of the unintended consequences of DDR processes, and paying attention to these discrepancies may allow future efforts to be better informed by how the concerned populations view themselves.

The intention of this article is not to paint a picture of the UN as a monolithic, homogeneous entity that supposedly has a clear intent to misrepresent youth. Rather, it takes seriously that the individuals and offices that collectively make up the organization are often operating under pressure of many kinds, including personal and organizational survival in contexts of high competition. By highlighting that words have consequences beyond what one can easily trace, particularly on the lives of people for whom these programmes ostensibly exist, the article is an attempt to urge all those who call both the big and small shots, so to speak, to make the most of their respective agency and assume responsibility for their choice of words and narratives in their everyday work.

In a structure that incentivizes short-term calculations and often defines success by quick results in quantifiable terms, pockets of resistance to the temptations to take a convenient route for the sake of meaningful accountability can go a long way. In fact, recent research suggests that such accountability to host populations is indeed a necessary condition for positive peacebuilding performance (Campbell, 2018). The responsibility to reflect on the adoption and reproduction of certain constructions certainly extends to the research community. Given their possible entanglement in upholding dominant representations that can reinforce power imbalances, scholars should critically reflect on their choices of words and categories that are often taken for granted, as well as the representations and narratives they reproduce and sustain through their research on DDR.