Conflicts Impact on Youth Identity: How children become soldiers?

CAIRO – 8 November 2017: Everything has changed in the world within the past years, including the definition of ‘identity’ and the consequences of losing it as individuals and countries. That was the main discussion idea of the ‘Conflicts impact on Youth identity’ session held during the fourth day of the World Youth Forum (WYF) on 8 November in Sharm el Sheikh.

Experts in social science, politics, economy and even celebrities were interested to express their points of view regarding the severe change that the world has witnessed, and what led us to the current moment in which terrorists and extremist managed to come up to society’s surface.

From Pakistan, political scientist Maria Sultan explained that the change is not just political, social or economic, but all of these factors came together specifically since 2006. It includes more countries not just from Asia or Europe but other global destinations as well.

“A lot of powerful parties and individuals have a strong affect on world change and movements that include Intelligence agencies and governments. They [intelligence agencies] have the ability to control wars and conflicts around the world,” Sultan said.

As a consequence for the political change, some countries lose landmarks and their civilizations destroyed. “The coming generations in these countries are at risk of losing their identity,” she added.

Those coming generations of children, who are at risk of losing identity are vulnerable, according to Sultan, and can be used for the purpose of serving some of the illogical and extreme goals and purposes.

Sultan added that many things that could be seen in the current day are actually not, unknowingly putting one p at risk, such as unmanned aerial vehicles. “What is the purpose of such revolutionary military inventions?” Sultan wondered. she noted that it would be one of the factors that will increase the “illegal military operations” around the world, leading to a new kind of wars.

“We need to stop Ignorance, terrorism, and parties that support it if we wanted to control the risk around us,” Sultan affirmed.President of the International Centre for Strategic, Security and Military Studies Badra Gaaloul from Tunisia spoke about the problems facing Arab societies and how it helped heighten extremist ideology.

“We suffer from verbal and moral violence; we feel that our society holds both of systematic and indiscriminate violence types. All these things have an effect on the individual’s characters in our societies,” she added.

Economic expert Sherif Delawar warned about the dangers of wars on the coming generations. He said that governments have to find appropriate means to face it; otherwise, we will not be able to deal with its consequences in the future.

The WYF, which launched on Sunday, is a forum designed to give global youth the chance to be heard by world leaders and influential individuals. Egypt’s first international youth event is set to run until 10 November. The event brings together 3,000 youth represented by 60 delegations.