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Developing Education and Youth-Promotion Measures, full text, pdf-document
Abstract
This study links two highly topical challenges facing development cooperation. Both crisis prevention, conflict management and peace-building, and the question as to how adolescents and young adults can be strengthened as motors for social development, are of central importance for the future orientation and sustainability of Technical Cooperation. Peace-building and youth promotion are therefore very closely linked, and in combination can make a contribution to preventing intra-societal crises.
Social transformation and development processes always entail some form of conflict. Economic, social and political tensions and changes can trigger or reinforce feelings of powerlessness, uncertainties, a lack of direction and fears of the future. In such situations of radical change and conflict, people are always more prone to resort to violence in an attempt to assert their own interests and needs. If peaceful and constructive ways of dealing with conflicts fail and conflicts escalate into intra-societal crises and wars, then young people are particularly badly affected.
On the one hand, many young people are misused in the course of internal wars and crises in that they are forced to take part in combat, or become victims of violent confrontations. On the other hand, the use of violence is often a source of great fascination to young people in particular, and violence is accepted and used by adolescent offenders as a means of settling conflicts. Over and above this, young people represent a great potential for creativity and innovation, which is why they are considered to be bearers of hope for non-violent conflict resolution, reconciliation and understanding in crisis regions.
Against this background it is obvious that educational peace-building work with young people is a component of crisis-prevention and conflict-management activities that should not be underestimated.