Thousand Reflections: The Role of Young Leaders in Peacebuilding
Issue #18
About Thousand Reflections: Thousand Network is full of people from all walks of life and background. Here, we try to tap into this collective wisdom by offering a prompt every week and sourcing short responses from the members.
This week’s prompt (courtesy of Abhineet Kumar):
Last week we took a hard look at ourselves with Marcel’s prompt. This week, we look at our role in the future of peace.
Abhineet asks, Where do we as young leaders feature in? How do we play our part to mitigate the risks of war? Do we join the government and work on ways to prevent war? Or do we play our part as citizen influencers?
How do you see yourself contributing to the future of peace?
Whatever being a young leader means there’s one thing that we lack: influence. The ability to get the attention of the older ones and sway their actions like they do among themselves. Why is this ? Because they no longer sympathize with us as their problems have become quite different from ours, and because they know it’s very difficult for the young people to remove them from power. Especially if they can send the young to war almost at the touch of a button.
So, in order to have a say in the mitigation of the risks of war we need to somehow make our problems their problems, e.g. by lowering the age of vote, (or by exposing both old and young to the perils of war) and increase our political influence, e.g. by supporting political parties that promote younger political leaders. Because if we join the government, we’d only be able to promote change when we’re no longer young. Which means that in order to contribute to the future of peace we need to be at war with the political establishment.
The reason this prompt came to my mind was because this year was fairly eventful in terms of global as well as Indian politics, and is definitely going to affect our communities moving forward.
In this period, I’ve also shaped a better understanding of how I could contribute to building a better world.
I’ve realized that passive voting simply does not provide the best tools to push forward the mandate one desires — it may do if the right candidate wins of course, but as we have seen a lot of times, politics are unpredictable.
So, do we get into politics ourselves?
Maybe, we do. If we have the necessary resources to finance a campaign, and the passion, skills and the vision needed for the job, there is nothing better than running for office. Being a legislator, or a representative allows us to work with decision-makers and impact maximum change.
What else?
I do feel that politics isn’t exactly for all of us — but we all want to impact the world in a better way — I believe one of the simpler approaches definitely would be to work with the government in government-run enterprises, organizations, and agencies working on peace-building and push issues you want to deal with foremost. I am not a fan of standing against the government (it isn’t exactly constitutional in my book) — yes, it is all right to disagree of course, but I feel that if we dissent, it leads to chaos and in short gives zero outcome. You see, at times when we disagree with others, we forget about the causes we want to stand for and start focusing more on bringing the other party down.
I believe that the best way to drive change is from inside the machinery — yes, it is slow, but who said change happens fast?
It takes years to build consensus, and more years to get laws passed. Even after that, the impact of the change happens in a decade or more. We, as young leaders, can definitely play our part in reducing the time if we join the movement from the inside.
If we do not have that bandwidth, we must work with our local representatives and have our thoughts heard while understanding their work. We must go out and vote for the ideas we believe in.
For me, I hope to carry on the baton as a citizen influencer standing up for what I believe is right, engaging in constructive dialogue and supporting ideas fostering world peace. At the moment, it is more important for me to create value with the work I do as an entrepreneur and understand the challenges facing the world as well as how politics and government works. And if the right opportunities come my way a couple of decades down the line (yes, I’ll have to design my life like that) I’d be more than eager to jump ship and join politics or work with the government.
If we take a lesson from history there are very few people who have been charged with running a country at a young age and elected in a democratic way. If we look around the world, currently the world’s youngest national leader is North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un, who is a dictator.
I personally like the concept of mixing fresh ideas with experience to change the civilization from its turmoil-ed condition and building peace. But unfortunately I have seen very few young peoples who are motivated to do so. In millennial age protest mostly means writing something on Facebook, creating a virtual event or writing an earth-shattering cry-mongering blog post.
I have also seen people who believe in change, but unfortunately they are mostly practicing extremist ideologies(extreme left i.e communism or extreme right i.e religious supremacist). I have found the brightest young leaders are being attracted by these ideas; liberals are failing to attract them.
I think something is fundamentally wrong with society, maybe it’s the economic conditions, endless corruption and unnecessary wars brought in by nationalism, that’s what moves young people away from taking initiative to build actual peace and moving forward to take leadership roles.
I would definitely love to see young peoples fighting head to head with politicians of their double or triple age to take leadership roles, bring in new ideas of bringing people together, creating a peaceful harmonic society. I also believe that real change only can be done by being on the ground, not just influencing few people.
Leadership by definition really just is an offering. It’s the opposite of forcing your opinion on anybody but just offering an idea that could lead to a better life for the people involved.
And as we are the young it is our natural role to innovate, to come up with new ideas, to see the connections that are there, probably only recently made possible by technological advancements or recently surfaced through new research.
So yeah, we are most likely to come up with the new solutions.
We don’t need to implement them necessarily. For that we need partners with the means to put them in, but that’s what investors are for.
But to innovate, to see, to connect, to point out, that’s our role.
Do we need to do it that way? No. It’s not a responsibility. It’s our natural role, yes. But the degree of action differs. We are not going to come up with a game changing idea every day. Maybe just once in our lifetimes actually.
In the meantime we can focus on the people we meet within the day. And when we see something that could change, that could improve — let’s speak up.
How shall we then live?
I am only one person, so how can I possibly make a difference?
Why is it that the young become old and lose their energy, their passion, their fearlessness, their compassion?
If the violence and fear we see is the dying breath of the old world as it fights the inevitable change, will it destroy all of us with it?
How do we become heard, how do we excuse our youth with compassion and empathy?
I have no answers, only questions. I have each day, as it passes. I have me, and what I can do today, to make tomorrow better.
I am trying.
