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December 13, 2024

Q&A with Saji Prelis, Senior Fellow at the Georgetown University Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues

In this interview, Saji Prelis, senior fellow at the Georgetown University Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues and co-chair of the Global Coalition on Youth, Peace and Security, shares his insights into youth engagement in peacebuilding, offering a personal and professional perspective on the transformative impact young people can have on building a more peaceful world. 

Saji Prelis
Saji Prelis

As a co-chair of the Global Coalition on Youth, Peace and Security, what inspired your commitment to youth involvement in peacebuilding? How have you seen young people impact global peace and security throughout your career?

This work is deeply personal and professional. Personal because when I was young, I experienced firsthand in Sri Lanka, where I was born, the evil people are capable of doing to each other. While I was witnessing people being killed, maimed, and their houses burnt, I also witnessed the good side of human nature. I witnessed people protecting, feeding, clothing, and caring for their so-called enemies. This left me rather confused: why are we able to do so much evil and, at the same time, do so much good at the cost of one’s own life and reputation? So, this question drove me to understand the good and evil existing in every one of us and how we can shift people toward the light versus the darkness as peacebuilders. 

I was also deeply touched by how many young people were dealing with conflict, violence, or humanitarian crises, yet responding in selfless ways. For example, a 14-year-old boy who witnessed the death of his parents from the 2004 Asian Tsunami and was displaced, living in a small 10x10ft tent, spoke volumes to me. After listening to his tragic experience of being a personal witness to the loss of his parents, his grandmother, and his own home, I asked him what he wanted to do. He looked me in the eyes and said, “I want to stay in school and make my parents proud. I know they are no more, but I want to make them proud.” As tears poured down my face, I asked him what he needed for that goal. He looked at me calmly and said he needed study notes for his sister so she could pass her exams. This is a 14-year-old boy who selflessly wants to do good. I questioned if I would be so magnanimous in such a time of turmoil in my life. I’ve seen similar stories from young people around the world. These are the personal reasons why I became a peacebuilder and wanted to work with young people. 

Professionally, working with young people requires us to work with adults. Therefore, doing this work intergenerationally is critical, and I have dedicated my life to focusing on how policies can help improve practice. The role young people play as co-partners in this process is what I am focused on now in my daily work. 

I have seen in many ways how young people have impacted their communities. Let me share one example. In Kenya, I was part of a research process that demonstrated that for every $1 invested in youth peacebuilding, there is a $5 to $10 return on investment not just to youth, but to the private sector, local government authorities, women’s groups, and religious actors in those communities, too. This shows that youth peacebuilding impacts society writ large. 

What challenges have you encountered when advocating for youth voices to be included in peace processes, and how can governments and international organizations better support these efforts?

There are a multitude of challenges. One overarching challenge is how adults view young people generally. There is a sense of not taking young people seriously or typecasting them as only good for music, sports, and culture while disregarding their political agency. For policymakers, they view young people from a sense of policy panic, grounded in fear, myths, and stereotypes, not facts. This is why I helped co-lead efforts to develop three UN Security Council Resolutions that recognize young people as a political force with political agency for peace. 

Governments are mandated to act on these resolutions, which requires recognizing the political agency of youth, responding to youth not from a place of policy panic but policy opportunity, and creating policies that make youth feel seen, heard, valued, and recognized for their agency.  Governments must also partner with youth to tackle the growing challenges that young people will inherit in the coming years.

As director of Children & Youth Programs at Search for Common Ground, how do you envision the future of youth peacebuilding, especially as conflicts and global challenges such as climate change continue to progress? 

The future of youth peacebuilding is focused on improving trust and collaboration between government actors and youth movements to tackle the policy crises young people will continue to experience. It involves creating innovative financing models that strengthen young people’s leadership to act in complex settings as co-leaders and work intergenerationally. It also involves measuring what matters, such as how young people’s sense of agency is improved, and how young people’s trust in various institutions improves as they better respond to people’s needs in society. The future of peacebuilding also includes increased trust in one another to collectively tackle problems and avoid resorting to the worst in us or the lowest common denominators of human nature. 

Having co-developed over 100 training curricula on peacebuilding and development, what advice would you give to young professionals or students interested in pursuing a career in international peace and conflict resolution?

I would offer the following pieces of advice: 

  1. Be patient with adults who don’t understand you. Recognize they do not know your wisdom, but engage them non-adversarially with purpose and find ways to collaborate.

  2. There is wisdom across generations. Wisdom is not academic but deeply personal, how people treat one another. Focus on that.

  3. Focus on attacking our common problems, not attacking each other.

  4. Ask disruptive questions that bring out the best in each other. In the youth peacebuilding space, we didn’t ask why young people join violent groups (we knew those were prominent questions already). Instead, we asked a disruptive question: Why are most youth peaceful? This led us to formally create the Youth, Peace and Security Agenda. So, by thinking outside the box and asking new questions about common old problems, you will help us find breakthroughs. 

  5. Always be humble. Ego doesn’t get us far, and it is only temporary. So, be humble, always leave the door open for others to follow, and pay things forward. Your success is dependent on so many others who have come before you because we are all interdependent.

With over 25 years of experience in conflict and transition environments across 35 countries, how has the field and your approach to youth engagement evolved? Where do you envision the field in the coming years?

The field is constantly evolving because younger generations coming in are cultural trendsetters setting new ways to look at age-old problems. This can be a blessing if we are humble enough, removed of ego to see it for what it is. If we ground that view in ego and selfish short-term profit and gain, we all lose in the long run. Young people’s mindsets embrace a horizontal leadership model—recognizing this helps us understand how to engage them better. We have a better vocabulary to understand youth movements over time. What is consistent is our own misunderstandings (ageism) that block us from understanding youth leadership. 

What has been your proudest achievement throughout your career?

One of my proudest achievements is helping to shape three global UN resolutions that impact over 3 billion youth globally. These resolutions are not the achievement in themselves, but rather the ability to use and leverage them to improve collaboration between governments and youth who don’t trust each other.

Recognizing and appreciating the role my parents played in influencing my life is another. As a young person, I took for granted a lot of their sacrifices and, with age, I got to learn more about their sacrifices. My achievement is making them feel proud of the person I am, not through degree, titles, or income, but by trying to be a good person. 

How do you see the collaborative benefiting your work and the field of global child rights advocacy and protection?

I get to engage young people in an academic setting and amplify young people’s contribution to peace and security. The collaborative is a wonderful platform to convene intergenerational dialogues and collaborative action.