Global Dialogues

I don’t think young people experience the world in neat categories—war over here, climate over there, technology somewhere else. For us, everything collapses into daily life. Crises don’t arrive as headlines; they show up in group chats, airport lines, tuition bills, and family conversations. We learn early that instability is not an exception; it’s the norm. What stands out to me about this generation is how relational our thinking has become. We don’t encounter injustice in isolation. We see patterns: how environmental collapse accelerates displacement, how digital surveillance reshapes protest, how economic precarity bleeds into mental health. Our politics are formed less through institutions and more through proximity, through watching friends navigate borders, seeing violence unfold in real time on our phones, and realizing how unevenly risk is distributed. This constant exposure has produced a generation that thinks transnationally by default. Solidarity no longer feels abstract. It feels personal. 

At the same time, youth participation is often framed as symbolic. We are invited to speak, but rarely to shape. Panels include one student. Consultations ask for feedback after decisions are already made. Elevation, in practice, becomes visibility without power. If young voices are to matter, they must be trusted with responsibility, brought into spaces where agendas are set, not just discussed. This means including young people in policy design, institutional planning, and long-term strategy, not just storytelling. It also means compensating youth labour and recognizing lived experience as a form of expertise rather than an anecdote.

I also think young people are more comfortable sitting with contradiction. We don’t expect clean solutions. We understand that solidarity is messy, that dialogue across difference is hard, and that progress is uneven. Many of us are navigating identities shaped by migration, diaspora, and hybrid belonging, which makes us attentive to nuance and resistant to rigid binaries. We are learning how to hold multiple truths at once: that technology connects and isolates, that protest can be both hopeful and exhausting, that institutions can be necessary and deeply flawed. 

What young people bring is not certainty, but urgency, and a willingness to question inherited frameworks that no longer make sense. We are less invested in preserving systems simply because they exist. Instead, we ask who they serve, who they exclude, and what alternatives might be possible. This instinct to interrogate rather than accept is one of our greatest strengths. 

What I hope for are spaces that allow this complexity to exist: spaces that prioritize listening over performance, sustained engagement over one-off participation, and collective learning over polished consensus. Young people do not arrive with finished answers. We arrive with questions, connections, and a deep awareness of what is at stake. My generation is growing up inside overlapping crises. But we are also learning how to imagine differently within them. If institutions are willing to listen seriously and share power, youth engagement can move beyond symbolism toward transformation.

Sama Alissa (SFS'27) is a senior in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Qatar.