Security for Whom? Local Dialogue, Youth Inclusion and Security Governance

When peace processes shape how security institutions are governed and how accountability is enforced, they make choices that communities live with long after agreements are signed. Yet, formal negotiations rarely capture how security is experienced, contested and negotiated at the community level. That gap, between security as arranged at the negotiating table and security as lived on the ground, often remains unaddressed. 

This high-level panel explores how inclusive people-centred dialogue approaches can connect local security concerns, community trust, and institutional security governance. Drawing on national experiences in security sector governance and inclusive security dialogues in Sudan and Yemen and on Interpeace’s Youth Peace Mediators’ Mentoring Programme, panellists will examine how the core questions of security sector governance, including accountability, oversight, and the distribution of coercive power, are first addressed in community dialogue processes and what it takes to carry them into national processes and institutional reform agendas. Young people are central to this. Disproportionately exposed to insecurity and least likely to shape the arrangements that govern it, they are also increasingly recognised as insider mediators, building trust across lines that formal processes often cannot cross. 

The panel is deliberately intergenerational: senior security sector governance and mediation expertise in direct conversation with youth-led community security and young mediation practice.