Youth are often marginalized in peacebuilding scholarship and policy, yet they are significant actors in challenging violence. Few studies engage with youth to understand their experiences of conflict and ideas of peace. Building on work in Australia, this comparative project broadens our research by exploring youth peacebuilding projects in three different contexts— Australia, Laos and Sri Lanka. By gathering stories from a diverse range of youth engage in peacebuilding, we are developing insights about their experiences of peace and conflict while seeking a more complex understanding of the ways peacebuilding occurs within broader sociocultural, and historical contexts. Through our research we have developed new insights into how youth locate and navigate spaces of power in order that they might transmit information, transform structures and self, and create understandings of reconciliation in their post-conflict societies.
These articles examine how storytelling between differently positioned young people can foster intercultural conversations and new understandings of self and other. Click on the links below to take you to the journal site:
Negotiating belonging through story-telling and encounter (Sonn, Quayle, Mackenzie, & Law)
Perspectives of youth peace-builders in Laos (Law, Sonn,& Mackenzie)
Responding to Racialization through Arts Practice (Sonn, Quayle, Belanji, & Baker)
Some articles advocate for different epistemological grounds for exploring reconciliation and displacement.
Mackenzie, C., Mwamba, C. and Mphande, C. (2014) Ancestors and the Politics of Reality: Housing, Home and Belonging in Australia, Critical Sociology, online publication
(Researchers:Siew Fang Law, Cynthia MacKenzie Christopher Sonn)