Youth activism : A reminder for next G20 Summit Deviana W Dewi  ;   The writer has been engaged in aid and development work as a coordinator for a nutrition project in Palu since September 2012

JAKARTA POST,  03 Maret 2014

                                                                                                                        

                                                                                         

                                                      

With global citizenship as one of the key policy areas to be discussed in the Youth 20 Summit in parallel with the G20 2014 Summit in Sydney next July — a summit that will host 120 youth delegates from G20 member countries — there is a great opportunity for the voice of youth to be heard by world leaders. The discussion on global citizenship has been evolving but such a concept remains unfixed. As global citizens are not recognized legally, according to Taso G. Lagos, global citizenship is expressed associatively affecting “the development of civic engagement and citizen-state relations”. As stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 3, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person,” it is crucial that people need to scrutinize their assumptions on the definition of security more critically. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has found in its annual Human Development Report, that the concept of security has for too long been interpreted narrowly: as security of territory from external aggression, or as protection of national interests in foreign policy or as global security from the threat of a nuclear holocaust. For many ordinary people security means protection from the threat of disease, hunger, unemployment, crime, social conflict, political repression and environmental hazards. A sense of insecurity for most people will emerge more from the anxiety about daily life issues than from the fear of world apocalypses. Inequality of Indonesia’s development progress between western and eastern parts of the country potentially generates insecurity for more people in the east. For instance, the poor and marginalized children in Palu are more likely to suffer malnutrition as their families lack potential resources. These real people exemplify the citizens who are not safe or secure, since poverty and disease remain as possible threats. To this extent, their human rights have not been fulfilled. According to the Office of Global Youth Issues, people under 30 make up more than half of the world’s population. Thus, global citizens are composed mostly of young people. Young people identify themselves as global citizens when they have a sense of belonging to the world community that has a shared set of values and practices. Ron Israel (2013) argues that such values are not obscure and have been continuously advocated by world leaders for the past 100 years, including human rights, poverty alleviation, sustainable worldwide economic growth, religious pluralism, gender equity, the rule of law, environmental protection, prevention and cessation of interstate conflicts, humanitarian assistance, elimination of weapons of mass destruction, and preservation of cultural diversity. Furthermore, the emerging global citizens are (supposedly) engaged actively in global efforts for any causes that refer to those values through their daily activities, in the belief that such collective activism by youth in local contexts would contribute to the progress toward greater social justice and more sustained economic growth in the global scale — common hopes for the G20 this year. This correlation between youth civic engagement at grassroots level and fulfillment of global issues complies with the nature of global citizenship proposed by Lagos, that due to the absence of authority regulating it, global citizenship is not a top-down but rather a bottom-up scenario, in which “a common thread to their emergence is their base in grassroots activism”. There are two main tangible challenges to youth global citizenship nowadays. First, to get young people to feel morally and civically responsible for social problems. Most global governance organizational leaders consisting of representatives of states and technocrats are often distant from the people they serve. Second, the human security of youth is not yet protected from the threat of unemployment. How can we expect youth to actively contribute to global citizenship if they feel disempowered because they have no jobs? Thus, the 2014 G20 should work to firstly encourage youth to create a stronger sense of willingness for getting involved in civic engagement, and to enable youth to do so by providing adequate tools, resources and support. G20 leaders must continue to work with various other groups including youth and civil society by empowering young people in civic engagement on various social issues including human rights in their daily lives. This includes creating youth-friendly mechanisms at a global scale that enables greater youth participation to contribute to global citizenship itself and the progress of the G20 agenda. ●

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