Institutionalizing youth in the United Nations

This article examines how youth activists challenged the United Nations’ tokenistic efforts to include young people in its activities and policies in the 2010s. Drawing on a long-term ethnography of two large international youth groups UN staff turned to for youth input, this study details how members of those groups established institutional protocols to allow representatives from youth-led and–serving organizations to represent youth as co-governors with decision-making power in internal UN mechanisms. Youth activists shaped the UN’s work on youth by explicitly requiring the UN to formalize their right to be institutional actors and establish participatory terms they defined as ‘meaningful youth engagement’. This seemingly mundane, nonpolitical, and bureaucratic form of activism to influence institutional procedures is an important component of understanding youth activism and social change.