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Intergenerational dialogue has increasingly been recognized as a meaningful tool for engaging diverse actors in discussions on peace, security, governance, and rights. By convening individuals from different age groups, intergenerational dialogues create spaces that are co-designed, co-planned, co-moderated, and co-created, allowing younger and older participants to engage on an equal footing. These spaces function as arenas in which perspectives, experiences, and priorities related to specific political and social issues can be shared, critically examined, and transformed.[1]
A close examination of the Libyan case demonstrates that intergenerational dialogue constitutes a key mechanism for the transformative implementation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) and Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agendas in contexts of protracted conflict.When meaningfully, such dialogue has the potential to reinforce both agendas in mutually beneficial ways, promoting more inclusive, legitimate, and transformative approaches to peacebuilding.
The mere numerical inclusion of women or youth in decision-making processes is insufficient to generate sustainable political and social change. While representation matters, long-term impact requires deeper transformations in gender norms, power hierarchies, and leadership models that continue to sustain political exclusion. Intergenerational dialogue plays a crucial role in enabling such transformations by reshaping relationships between actors, redistributing symbolic authority, and challenging entrenched norms regarding who is considered legitimate to participate in peace and governance processes.
Therefore, intergenerational dialogue is not simply a participatory approach, but a mechanism for structural change.
Protracted conflict, youth marginalization, and gendered exclusion in Libya
Since 2011, Libya has experienced a prolonged period of armed conflict, institutional instability, and political fragmentation. Despite the current absence of large-scale armed violence, it remains analytically accurate to describe Libya as a country in conflict, given the persistence of militarized actors, contested governance structures, and unresolved political divisions.[2] This protracted conflict has profoundly shaped patterns of political inclusion and exclusion, particularly along generational and gendered lines.
Libya’s population is predominantly under the age of 30, yet the social meaning of “youth” in the Libyan context extends well beyond chronological age. The term shabab (Arabic for “young people”) often includes individuals over the age of 35 or even 40, reflecting not a biological category but a social condition characterised by economic dependence, limited autonomy, and restricted access to decision-making power. In this sense, “youth” functions as a relational category of exclusion: being young is frequently equated with lacking political authority, regardless of one’s formal adulthood.[3]
Young people engaged in civic initiatives, political dialogue, or civil society activism are often perceived as marginal, inexperienced, or naïve by more established political actors. These dynamics are further compounded by gender. Women and girls face additional structural barriers, including restrictive socio-cultural norms, risks of harassment, limited access to public platforms, and weak institutional representation. As a result, their contributions to peace and governance processes frequently remain informal, invisible, or undervalued, despite their substantive impact at the community level.[4]
Women have nonetheless played crucial roles in local peacebuilding efforts across Libya, including mediating tribal disputes, facilitating access to humanitarian assistance, and supporting families and communities in contexts of war and post-conflict recovery.[5] However, these field-level contributions have rarely translated into meaningful participation in formal political negotiations or institutions. Women’s representation in national political processes—such as the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF)—has remained limited and largely symbolic, reinforcing a persistent gap between informal influence and formal power.[6]
Moreover, the absence of a national Women, Peace and Security (WPS) framework following the failure of the first National Action Plan (NAP) process in 2021 reflects deeper resistance to gender equality within Libya’s political and institutional culture. While a resumption of NAP discussions appears highly unlikely, the UN Women Strategic Note for Libya (2022–2025), developed under the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework, has emerged—albeit with difficulty—as a parallel platform for advancing WPS-aligned priorities.
Intergenerational dialogue as a lever for a transformative WPS and YPS agendas
Libyan youth have consistently emphasized the lack of structured and institutionalized channels through which they can meaningfully influence political decision-making processes. Prior to 2018—when the Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agenda began to be formally operationalized within the United Nations system through Security Council Resolution 2419—UN engagement with youth in Libya remained largely ad hoc, sporadic, and weakly embedded within formal political and governance frameworks.
From 2020 onwards, youth participation was partially institutionalized through the establishment of a youth track within the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF), the UN-facilitated political process aimed at advancing a negotiated political settlement. While the creation of a youth track marked an important symbolic recognition of young people as political stakeholders, participation remained primarily consultative in nature. Youth representatives were not granted meaningful decision-making authority, nor were formal mechanisms established to ensure that their inputs influenced political outcomes. This limitation illustrates the broader challenge of moving from inclusion as presence to inclusion as power.
In response to these shortcomings, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) adopted a renewed Youth Engagement Strategy in 2024, after appointing a Youth Engagement Lead in 2022. The strategy aimed to move beyond episodic consultations by systematising youth participation across UNSMIL’s political dialogue, governance, and peacebuilding workstreams. This approach culminated in the implementation of the YouEngage Programme (2024–2025), which combined capacity building, structured consultations, and digital participation platforms.[7] Through this initiative, approximately 1,200 young Libyans participated in 40 workshops nationwide, contributing to improved perceptions of the UN’s role among youth and to increased levels of trust and engagement.[8]
More recently, in December 2025, UNSMIL convened the inaugural meeting of the Structured Dialogue, a core component of the UN-facilitated political Roadmap. The meeting brought together 124 representatives from a wide range of institutions and stakeholder groups, including political actors, civil society organizations, and community representatives, with women accounting for 35 per cent of participants. While not explicitly framed as intergenerational, this initiative nonetheless reflected growing recognition of the need to broaden participation beyond traditional political elites.[9]
Complementing national-level political processes, civil society actors have also played a central role in advancing intergenerational approaches to peacebuilding. Initiatives such as the Mediterranean Platform and the Peace Makers Libya network have long supported inclusive reconciliation dialogues and youth engagement in mediation efforts. One example is the Youth Platform, which has provided safe spaces for political debate and collaboration with local and academic institutions, reaching over 400 members across 60 localities[10]. In 2024, the World Bank, in partnership with the Mediterranean Platform, launched the Youth Economic Research Forum that built on these experiences, strengthening research skills and policy dialogue capacities among young Libyans and integrating their perspectives into analyses of the country’s economic challenges.[11]
Another example is the organization Together We Build It, founded by activists including Rida Altubuly and Hajer Sharief. Through civic education, mentorship, and youth participation programmes, the organization has actively fostered dialogue between senior women activists and younger generations of women. These intergenerational spaces have contributed to the emergence of more resilient and context-sensitive forms of women’s leadership, capable of challenging traditional gender norms while remaining rooted in local realities.[12]
Collectively, these initiatives demonstrate how intergenerational dialogue can disrupt conventional boundaries defining “who counts” in decision-making processes. By enabling young people, including women, and senior women to jointly articulate priorities for peace, intergenerational dialogue facilitates the integration of historical memory and innovation within WPS and YPS strategies. In a country marked by generationally distinct experiences of conflict, such dialogue allows diverse forms of knowledge and authority to coexist and inform peacebuilding efforts.
Through mentoring and sustained exchanges of experience, intergenerational dialogue contributes to the development of peace-oriented leadership that is both socially legitimate and locally grounded. These processes enhance the credibility of political initiatives and programmes focusing on WPS and youth, reducing the perception that they are externally imposed. At the same time, conversations across generations help deconstruct entrenched norms and foster new, more inclusive narratives, a critical step toward long-term cultural and institutional transformation.
Conclusion
The Libyan case suggests that intergenerational dialogue can go beyond a participatory tool, pointing toward a possible mechanism for questioning who speaks, how decisions are made, and which values underpin peace and governance processes. In Libya—as in much of the MENA region—the transformative potential of intergenerational dialogue remains only partially evidenced, though it may still offer an entry point for advancing the implementation of the WPS and the YPS agendas, moving beyond numerical inclusion toward sustained change in gender norms, power relations, and leadership models.
For this reason, it is essential that international donors and institutional actors continue to support and institutionalize youth-focused and intergenerational dialogue-based initiatives. Such support should prioritize long-term, process-oriented investments rather than episodic interventions. As demonstrated by recommendations developed during various programme implementations, effective approaches include identifying young Libyans of diverse backgrounds who are interested in public affairs; providing them with safe spaces to exchange views and strengthening their capacities to access information, build knowledge, and engage constructively with senior decision-makers and influential actors.[13]
Only through sustained intergenerational approaches that link youth and women’s participation to structural change will it be possible to move beyond symbolic inclusion and promote durable transformations in gender norms and decision-making processes. The Libyan experience suggests that intergenerational dialogue may offer a transferable model for advancing transformative WPS and YPS agendas implementation in other contexts of protracted conflict.
[1] The United Nations has explicitly acknowledged intergenerational dialogue as a critical opportunity to build trust, foster mutual understanding, and articulate shared aspirations across generations. Source: Garcia A. (2023), “The significance of intergenerational dialogue in the global landscape”, UN Today, available at: https://untoday.org/the-significance-of-intergenerational-dialogue-in-the-global-landscape/(Accessed: 28 December 2025).
[2] Eaton, T. (2025), Escaping the cycle of conflict in Libya: Why an enhanced ‘economic track’ must be integrated into political negotiations, Research Paper, London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.55317/9781784136499.
[3] A. Skouri, (2025), Youth as Catalysts for Shaping Libya’s Future Pathways for Inclusion in National Dialogue and Vision -Making, LUISS Mediterranean Platform, https://mp.luiss.it/archives/youth-as-catalysts-for-shaping-libyas-future-pathways-for-inclusion-in-national-dialogue-and-vision-making/ (Accessed: 28 December 2025).
[4] R. Ibrahim, (2023) ‘Women’s Changing Roles in Times of Conflict’, in Virginie Collombier, and Wolfram Lacher (eds), Violence and Social Transformation in Libya (2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 18 Jan. 2024), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197756492.003.0003, (Accessed: 28 December 2025).
[5] Elbarlament (2025), Policy Brief: Women, Peace, And Security In Libya May 2025, available at: https://elbarlament.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Policy-brief-WPS-Libya_design.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com (Accessed: 28 December 2025).
[6] Council on Foreign Relations, “Libya Case Study”, available at: https://www.cfr.org/womens-participation-in-peace-processes/libya-4?utm_source=chatgpt.com (Accessed: 28 December 2025).
[7] UNSMIL, “Youth Engagement Overview”, available at: https://unsmil.unmissions.org/en/youth-engagement (Accessed: 28 December 2025).
[8] UNSMIL, “Youth Voices: Toward a Better Future for All Libyans”, September 25, 2025, available at: https://dppa.dfs.un.org/en/youth-voices-toward-better-future-all-libyans (Accessed: 28 December 2025).
[9] UN Libya envoy Hanna Serwaa Tetteh’s speech at the Security Council on December 19th, 2025, available at: https://media.un.org/unifeed/en/asset/d351/d3519177 (Accessed: 28 December 2025).
[10] The Peace Makers Youth Platform, launched in October 2022 by Peace Makers Libya and LUISS Mediterranean Platform, provides Libyan youth with a safe space for dialogue, raise political and policy awareness, and connect young leaders with decision-makers while building a nationwide youth network. The network comprised over 400 members from more than 60 localities, with discussions focusing on economic futures, governance, and climate-energy challenges. In 2024, the platform’s impact was further expanded through the launch of the Youth Economic Research Forum in partnership with the World Bank and the Mediterranean Platform. More information available at: https://mp.luiss.it/news/youthplatform/?key=guest (Accessed: 28 December 2025).
[11] LUISS Mediterranean Platform, “Youth Economic Research Forum”, available at: https://mp.luiss.it/news/youth-economic-research-forum/ (Accessed: 28 December 2025).
[12] Together We Build it, “About us”, available at: https://togetherwebuildit.org/about-us/ (Accessed: 28 December 2025).
[13] A. Skouri, (2025), Ibid.
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