Academic research labeled Sierra Leone’s civil war a ‘revolt of youth’. Drawing on this analysis, post-conflict interventions have focused on youth’s social, political and economic integration. Guided by a highly securitized youth discourse to accommodate post-conflict funding requirements, this approach has significantly affected the perception of societal cleavages in Sierra Leone. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data collected between 2007-2010, this paper highlights the construction of conflict and peace in light of the youth discourse in Sierra Leone. Disproportionate focus on the potential dangers of un(der)employed youth has not only distracted from youth’s physical and intellectual capacities and their self-formulated problems but also neglects other societal faultlines, such as status and class. Meanwhile socio-generational categories such as youth and elder have gained such prominence that renewed conflict is appearing along this societal cleavage in two ways. First, targeted funding of ‘youth empowerment’ by international donors lets youth and established elites compete for project financing in an otherwise resource-starved environment. While youths enjoy unprecedented levels of participation in local governance institutions, elders are quick in employing counter-strategies to re-assert gerontocratic dominance, subverting larger-scale transformation of local power relations. Second, youths draw on the transnational human rights discourse to contest traditional rights and responsibilities. The language of rights serves as a powerful rhetorical and normative tool to challenge established modes of private and public intergenerational relations as well as question potentially exploitative communal practices. In both cases international interventions and ideas strongly affect local power relations, while local actors instrumentalize external interventions for their own aims and needs. In Sierra Leone, the disproportionate focus on one of the root causes of the civil war has led to the construction of a limited peace agenda, skewing the perception of societal problems and faultlines. This in turn endangers stability and sustainable peace-building.
