Constituting ‘youth’: conditionality and compliance in UN discourses on youth, peace and security

The Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agenda acknowledges youth as positive contributors to peace and security in contrast to dominant negative stereotypes of youth. This article examines constructions of youth within a dataset of UN documents on YPS to reveal discourses for normative change on youth inclusion. We identify four key framings of youth: as future leaders, as resources, as deficient, and as exceptional. We demonstrate that conditionality of youth inclusion fosters normative institutional compliance indicating the complexities of normative claims for the inclusion of excluded populations, persistence of unequal power relations, and politicisation of marginal groups for strategic gain.