Building Peace with Children – Expanding Children’s Participation in Peace Processes

The purpose of this policy paper is to understand barriers to, and promote the advancement of, children’s participation in peace processes. This is done by explaining why and how children should participate and why they have been systematically left out and by providing practical recommendations for ways forward. All of this is essential to fulfilling children’s right to participation and to building sustainable peace.

This paper aims to answer four key questions:
1. Why is it important to include children in peace processes? (Section 2.1)
2. What are the roles children could play in peace processes? (Section 2.2)
3. What are the primary challenges preventing their participation? (Section 2.3)
4. What practical actions are needed to increase children’s systematic, meaningful and ethical participation in peace processes? (Section 3)

The paper also includes a set of practical tools to support the implementation of the paper’s recommendations (Section 4).