Political Corruption Impedes Development and Peacebuilding Processes by Excluding Young People from Political Decision Making

Young people are often seen as victims or perpetrators of violence. This is a common narrative that gets reflected both in media and through policy. However, young people can be a source of positive influence and sustainable peacebuilding. By adopting resolution 2419 (2018), as a follow up to resolution 2250 on Youth, Peace and Security, the United Nations Security Council has called for an increased role of youth in negotiating and implementing peace agreements. It is clear that young people need to be represented at high level meetings and in negotiations that directly affect them. However, why they are not already included in those negotiations is less clear. The organisation Interpeace (2017) researched the challenges and aspirations of Palestinian youth based on UN resolution 2250 in a recent study. It revealed that the youth population in Palestine is incredibly active but faces a lot of challenges and lack of political support, which is why Palestine will be used as a case study for the purposes of this research. This research argues that political corruption impedes development and peacebuilding processes by excluding young people from political decision making. The research will be based on existing literature on corruption, predominantly by looking into the work of e.g. McFarlane (2013), Smith (2010) and Mushkatel & Weschler (2987), and research on the impact of active youth participation. Given the relatively recent attention given to the positive importance of youth inclusion, there is less research available on that. The main conceptual challenge when researching youth is to define “youth” and what that means. This research will use the UN definition of youth, which is young people aged 16-24. In order to fill the research gap, primary research will also be conducted. It will be done to both find how corruption is currently impacting young people, both economically and socially, as well as how young people in Palestine are combatting it. The main epistemological challenges with this approach are twofold; to look at how political corruption hinders certain actors from accessing the decision-making space, and to measure how young people actually have a positive impact. Mainstream economics tends to focus on how corruption impedes development. There is a large focus on petty corruption while failing to look at the bigger picture and how grand corruption affects different sectors of society. While professors such as Di John (2017) and Khan (2017) have taken a new approach to this by addressing the concept of good governance and how it fails because its neither necessary or feasible in promoting growth in the least developed countries, since there is no empirical evidence that it has worked up until now. As a variable, corruption is impossible to isolate. There is further a need to look at how political corruption impedes young people from accessing political spaces. While there is significant research on how corruption hinders civil society, there’s a gap in the research literature on how it affects youth directly.