In 2025, the Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) Agenda marked its tenth anniversary. Over that decade, the agenda has undeniably gained visibility. Since the adoption of Security Council resolution 2250 in 2015, youth participation in peace and security discussions has expanded, institutional spaces for youth engagement have grown, and the United Nations (UN) has strengthened its broader youth architecture, including through the establishment of the UN Youth Office by the General Assembly in 2022. The Pact for the Future, adopted at the Summit of the Future in September 2024, also included commitments to accelerate implementation of YPS. These are meaningful developments, and they should not be dismissed.
Yet the anniversary should not invite complacency. The real question is not whether YPS has become more visible, but whether it has become operationally consequential. On that point, the record is less convincing. Behind the language of participation, inclusion, and recognition, major structural weaknesses remain. In September 2026, the second Independent Progress Study on YPS is expected to be issued, building on the momentum generated by the agenda’s tenth anniversary and the commitments set out in the Pact for the Future. As part of the consultation process for that study, I submitted and published an independent thematic paper ‘The Missing Pillar: Re-centering Disengagement and Reintegration in the Youth, Peace and Security Agenda for a More Innovative Approach to Sustaining Peace‘ in January 2026. That paper argued that YPS has matured unevenly and that one of its five original pillars, Disengagement and Reintegration, has been left fatally behind.
This is not a minor technical gap. It goes to the heart of whether YPS can meaningfully contribute to sustaining peace. Security Council resolution 2250 identified five pillars: (1) Participation, (2) Protection, (3) Prevention, (4) Partnerships, and (5) Disengagement and Reintegration. But over time, later implementation efforts, policy discourse, and political messaging have concentrated heavily on participation and enabling environments, while Disengagement and Reintegration has not received a comparable operational architecture. Even the Pact for the Future, a major condensed political document intended to signal priorities for the UN system, speaks to youth participation and inclusion but does not give corresponding political visibility to Disengagement and Reintegration. That omission is revealing. It shows not simply oversight, but the political economy of what is easy to endorse multilaterally and what remains too sensitive, too controversial, or too operationally difficult to champion.
The second argument of my paper is that YPS is, by its nature, structurally weaker than the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. WPS has benefited from a longer and more consolidated normative trajectory since resolution 1325 in 2000, a broader ecosystem of follow-on Security Council resolutions, stronger routinization across the UN and international organizations, and more established patterns of political sponsorship. By contrast, YPS remains newer, thinner in institutionalization, and more vulnerable to being treated as aspirational rather than binding in practice. In other words, it is easier to praise YPS than to build budgets, mandates, and incentives around it. This makes implementation shallow and leaves youth participation at risk of becoming performative when detached from real authority and financing.
This diagnosis resonates with conversations I have had with policymakers, including from Japan and other member states, who have pointed out that YPS is difficult to politicize. In one sense, that sounds positive: few states openly oppose the general proposition that young people should contribute to peace. But precisely because it is hard to turn into a contested issue, it often lacks political drive. It becomes an agenda that everyone can endorse in principle, but few are willing to prioritize when resources are scarce and difficult trade-offs must be made. That helps explain why YPS remains weak.
At the same time, Disengagement and Reintegration is arguably the most politically charged element within YPS itself, which makes it even easier to neglect. Unlike generic support for youth participation, Disengagement and Reintegration immediately raises questions about former combatants, people associated with designated terrorist organizations, detention, screening, accountability, stigma, and public risk. It is therefore the point at which the soft consensus around YPS meets the hard politics of security and governance.
That is also why this pillar matters so much. Disengagement and Reintegration did not emerge primarily from youth policy. It has historically belonged to fields such as Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR), counterterrorism, and Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE). These have always been recognized as important, but they have rarely been politically easy or broadly popular sectors. They are sensitive, high-risk, and often underfunded. This is especially true in contexts without peace agreements, and even more so where the target populations are associated with groups affiliated with Al-Qaida, Islamic State (IS), or similar violent extremist groups. In such settings, reintegration support has often been treated as a security necessity but not as a normatively attractive area for sustained international investment.
This is precisely why the inclusion of Disengagement and Reintegration in resolution 2250 was so important. In theory, it meant that the large number of young people involved in or affected by non-state armed groups were no longer only a concern of DDR or P/CVE practitioners. They were also part of a youth agenda. That normative connection was and remains significant. It creates an opening to reframe these young people not only as risks to be managed, but also as actors whose reintegration is indispensable to sustaining peace. Put differently, the YPS agenda created a bridge. The problem is that the bridge has not been used seriously enough.
This matters even more because the broader multilateral environment is now extraordinarily harsh. The UN is operating amid deep geopolitical fragmentation, declining confidence in multilateralism, and chronic financial crisis. Across the system, the logic is no longer one of expansion but of contraction: scaling down, cutting back, and choosing fewer priorities. In that context, no field can assume that moral importance alone will secure resources. YPS, especially Disengagement and Reintegration certainly cannot.
For that reason, the way forward must be strategic and connected. Disengagement and Reintegration should not be treated as something that lives only in New York or only inside the Security Council. If Security Council paralysis continues, other normative and institutional entry points must be used more effectively. The Human Rights Council offers one such avenue for example. Its resolutions on Youth and Human Rights have created a more formalized space for youth-related human rights engagement, and its work on the rights of the child has already identified violations against Children in Armed Conflict as a central theme for 2026. Those platforms can help build protections and visibility for young people affected by armed conflict, including those who have long fallen between child protection, youth policy, and security practice. In that context, it may also be possible within the Human Rights Council to begin defining such populations, drawing on the logic of the Children and Armed Conflict / Children in Armed Conflict framework, as “Youth and Armed Conflict / Youth in Armed Conflict.”
It is equally important to connect these debates to broader human rights and international legal frameworks. One possible avenue is the ongoing intergovernmental process on the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Humanity, for which preparatory work is already underway at the United Nations. This is not to suggest that Disengagement and Reintegration should be simply folded into a crimes-against-humanity framework. Rather, the point is that, as new norms and legal instruments are developed, greater attention is needed to how conflict-affected and violence-affected youth, including those who may later become subjects of Disengagement and Reintegration efforts, are understood and treated. Otherwise, the gap between legal accountability frameworks and the practical realities of rehabilitation, reintegration, and long-term peacebuilding may persist or even deepen.
YPS can still become a more full-fledged agenda. But that will not happen through commemorative language alone. It will require sharper strategy, cross-agenda coalition-building, and a much more realistic understanding of power, incentives, and institutional weakness. Disengagement and Reintegration has been the missing pillar of YPS for too long. In a more turbulent and austere international order, bringing it back to the center is no longer optional. It is one of the clearest tests of whether the agenda is prepared to move beyond symbolism and confront the difficult terrain where sustaining peace is actually decided.
Dr. Yosuke Nagai is the Executive Director of Accept International and the Founder of the Global Taskforce for Youth Combatants. Since 2011, he has led the design and implementation of deradicalization, reintegration, and rehabilitation programs for disengaged members of non-state armed groups in Somalia, Yemen, Kenya, Indonesia, and Colombia. He has also actively promoted dialogue and reconciliation initiatives in highly sensitive contexts, including Palestine. Dr. Nagai is currently a Visiting Fellow at Global Security Programme, University of Oxford, an Associate Researcher at Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST) and a Visiting Member at RCAST Open Laboratory for Emergence Strategies (ROLES), University of Tokyo, and an Adjunct Lecturer at Waseda University. He holds a PhD in Social Science from Waseda University and a Master’s degree in Conflict Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
This blog is related to an event held on November 24, 2025 titled “The Role of International Norms and Global Agendas in Transforming Youth Combatants into Unique Agents of Peace“. Watch the event here.
