A Conversation with Saji Prelis on Youth, Peace, Recognition, and Exposure

For most of the past decade, the global conversation about young people and conflict has circled a single question: why do youth turn violent? Saji Prelis, a peacebuilding practitioner whose work helped shape the United Nations' youth, peace, and security agenda, argues that the question itself is misguided. The more useful question is ultimately why most young people, even in the most fragile and violent settings, remain peaceful.

Prelis’ reframing of this question is rooted in his own upbringing in Sri Lanka, which eventually helped him move an idea from an informal, almost improvised working group that collectively advocated for the unanimous adoption of a UN Security Council resolution. The following draws on a conversation that the Centre for Youth Policy had with Prelis about this working group initiative. He explains how it navigated various institutional agendas spanning different UN agencies, INGOs, and youth groups to shape a collective agenda, and what aspects of the push for more youth participation in government are unfinished.

His Childhood in Sri Lanka

Prelis grew up in Sri Lanka during a period of ethnic conflict between the government and a militant organization that wanted to establish an independent homeland within the island. He says that his politics and ideals were heavily influenced by his proximity to violence. As a boy, he watched both the ugly and the beautiful sides of human nature unfold in front of him. News of unrest he once thought was far away swept through his town he grew up in --impacting family and friends. And living through that forced him to ask: why can people be so cruel, and yet—at the same time—do so much good, with real courage?

When he realized his own family, part of the ethnic majority, was safe, he became even more confused: people his family was trying to protect – those who were visibly darker-skinned and part of the targeted minority – were not like him. Furthermore, he recalls being unable to report the violence to authorities because it was taking place at such a rapid speed and no one could be trusted. The contradiction between the identity he was born into and the loyalty he held to his peers is what he now describes as the foundation of his life and career in peacebuilding.

Abstaining from Violence

We asked Saji Prelis how young people are supposed to choose the morally right path when it conflicts with what their family or community is doing. Prelis resists the idea that there is a formula to avoid it, as history has shown just how easily people can be manipulated into committing atrocities. Instead, he argued that what is important in moments of violence is what ideas, morals, and values young people can draw on to navigate them. For him, that meant remembering what his family meant to him, and recalling the values and principle of what it is to be a good person as instilled in him by his family, in moments when he might otherwise have been pulled toward violence.

We then asked about how to uphold morals in times when violence has already erupted, instead of being able to stop it before it begins. Prelis responded with a metaphor: what the world sees of conflict, he says, is the eruption: the sudden, visible violence. What’s underneath the surface and not often visible – the shifting tectonic plates in this metaphor – are the decades of pressure, history, and generational trauma that built up the eventual violence.

This is where he returns to his central argument. Societies that ask why young people join armed groups rarely ask the inverse question: why do the majority of young people, even in the same environments, remain peaceful? He referenced that roughly 99.2% of the protests around the world are nonviolent, yet public attention gravitates towards the violent minority. While fragile states tend to have more young people prone to violence, the cause of the violence is not youth but the systems that maintain the fragility itself. Similarly, a system that has normalized violence should not be surprised when the young people living in it become involved.

Why a Working Group?

The institutional turn in Prelis' story begins with a practical problem: none of the existing international bodies, including agencies like UNICEF, had a dedicated focus on youth and peacebuilding. Institutionalizing something new inside the UN system is a slow process, and Prelis admitted that if the effort went about institutionalizing formally, it would have been far more unproductive and may have never gotten off the ground at all.

Instead, the group launched what was framed to the public as a two-day workshop to have a dialogue on institutionalizing youth agendas, with no formal initiative attached to the label. By the end, though, a working group that met once a month was formed. By the time anyone might have asked whether it had authority to exist, Prelis says, it had already gone far enough that it could not easily be dismantled.

Prelis highlighted the importance of creating a “common language” to use in youth and peacebuilding. The first in its field, the working group “Youth Participation in Peacebuilding” was breaking barriers set by bureaucracy hoping to keep older, tenured officials on the frontlines of peace making. The working group, then, came with the added challenge of having to define what they were working towards.

Guarding Against the UN's Weight

A coalition built partly inside UN space, and partly around international NGOs and youth groups, faces the risk that UN's money, hierarchy, and institutional weight will dominate the youth-led side of the effort. Prelis frames the group's defense against the weight of bureaucracy as a natural product of time and trust within the group.

He also adds that the speed with which the working group was formed prevented any sort of gatekeeping process. Instead, the working group learned to work with the UN instead of against it. As more organizations wanted a seat at the table, the coalition learned to treat the UN's resources as one input among several rather than the only one that mattered.

Resolutions That Outpaced Recognition, and the Recognition to Come

The Security Council Resolution 2250 on December 9th, 2015 was historic because it was the product of the collective voice of over 11,000 young people from over 109 countries who advocated for it. Their demand was met by the members of the Security Council when they adopted this historical landmark resolution for the first time, recognizing the political agency young people have and the importance of engaging them as partners in peace building efforts. Before 2015, he says, he watched rooms full of decision-makers where young people simply were not present. The resolutions were an attempt to correct a disproportionality: the people who would end up living with the long-term consequences of peace and security decisions were not part of making them. He connects this directly to a broader trend he sees as troubling, a shrinking of civic space globally.

Prelis is candid that political commitment has, in some respects, outrun actual outcomes, with fewer explicit references to youth showing up in newer resolutions even as more youth are supposedly involved. Part of the ongoing challenge, he suggests, is proving that these agendas produce measurable change rather than symbolic recognition. He also flags an unresolved tension in how youth representation is understood: a common question about youth at the table is who they represent. A solution to this question is to support youth who purposefully form coalitions, bringing people across various dividing lines to collaborate on a common agenda. Then they have more power because they represent the collective voice, not just the perspective of a single project or organization. This has credibility, authenticity, practicality, solution oriented--key superpowers of coalitions. That should be enough to justify the representation of youth in coalitions.

Why This Still Matters

Prelis' account is a case study in how fragile, deliberately slow-moving institutional change actually is a unanimous Security Council resolution. The youth peace and security agenda was not achieved by a UN body deciding that young people deserved a seat at the table. Instead, it arrived because a small group of determined young people built trust and worked faster than bureaucracy could. The work is not over – the group then spent years afterward discovering that formal recognition does not, by itself, guarantee sustained outcomes. Now, the fight for youth recognition is ongoing.

Prelis brought our attention to another motivating factor in the fight for youth representation in peace and security efforts: investing in youth peacebuilding and livelihood programs benefits many stakeholders beyond just youth themselves. Research pioneered by Prelis shows that every $1 invested yields a $5–$10 social and economic return. Thus, the combination of the private sector’s button line, monetary investment from the public sector, and the broader civil society yield benefits that extend far beyond just young people. Investing in young people is worth more than just the virtue it signals – it provides economic savings and returns for local governments.

Prelis' personal account of Sri Lanka is a reminder of what is lost when young people cannot act on their own values, and default to their hereditary identities. If the shrinking of civic space he describes continues unchecked, the choice he faced at twelve, between the safety of his own community and the conscience telling him to protect people outside it, becomes a choice fewer young people will know how to navigate. The unfinished work of the youth, peace, and security agenda, is about preserving the conditions under which the quieter, less visible majority of young people who choose peace can keep doing so. With this, the work done will give the public exposure to the majority of young people who avoid violence for the sake of peace, too.