Youth Architects of Peace

Our fall 2025 Buffett Symposium on youth-led peacebuilding brought together activists, politicians, NGO leaders, and negotiators from across the world to explore how youth are transforming the future of conflict resolution and justice.

This panel brought together three young peacebuilders whose work spans Belarus, Colombia, and Uganda to explore how the next generation is transforming the theory and practice of peacemaking. Each panelist came to the work through personal experience with conflict, repression, or injustice in their home country, and each has built organizations or movements that center youth leadership as essential — not peripheral — to lasting peace. The conversation examined how young activists break into national-level conversations, build coalitions across lines of difference, and sustain their commitment in the face of setbacks and slow progress.

Panelists included:

• Alana Gebremariam, a Belarusian pro-democracy activist and elected member of the Coordination Council facilitating a democratic transfer of power in Belarus

• Amos Kiyingi, Founder and National Director of Uganda Unites

• Cristina Rosero-Arteaga, Senior Legal Adviser for the Center for Reproductive Rights’ Latin America & Caribbean Program

• Moderator Giavanna Chopra, fourth-year undergraduate student in the School of Education and Social Policy and a Buffett Undergraduate Research Fellow

Key Takeaways:

• Meaningful youth participation in peace processes requires more than representation — it requires ownership. Kiyingi described how Uganda Unites deliberately involved young people from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds in developing the curriculum for its Peace Clubs, rather than delivering a top-down program. Rosero-Arteaga echoed this, tracing how young Colombian feminist lawyers and activists did not simply join the peace process but drove the inclusion of gender mandates into the 2016 peace agreement — a historic first — by building trust with grassroots communities, mobilizing in the streets, and strategically placing themselves inside transitional justice mechanisms.

• Expanding the scope of what counts as a peace issue is itself an act of peacebuilding. Rosero-Arteaga described how Colombian feminist movements connected reproductive rights to the armed conflict by documenting previously invisible forms of reproductive violence — including forced abortion, forced contraception, and forced pregnancy — across more than 68 civil society reports. By naming these patterns, advocates were able to bring reproductive justice into peace negotiations and eventually into the final report of Colombia's Truth Commission, the first in the world to recognize reproductive violence as a distinct category of gender-based violence warranting comprehensive reparations.

• Courage in the face of fear and persistence in the face of failure are the defining qualities of effective young peacebuilders. Gebremariam, who was imprisoned for her activism in Belarus, reflected that courage is not the absence of fear but the refusal to be ruled by it — a lesson she described learning concretely in prison when she chose to help a fellow prisoner who had repeatedly betrayed her. Since her release, she has continued to take personal risks in the service of peace, including negotiating with the U.S. State Department and European authorities on behalf of Belarusian political prisoners. Kiyingi offered a complementary vision of resilience, describing peace work as laying bricks in a building you may never see completed, and finding sustenance in small wins, in the stories of young people whose lives have been changed, and in the knowledge that peacebuilders around the world are laying their own bricks alongside you.