ABSTRACT
Girls and young women feature on many international development agendas as key change agents with the ‘Girl Effect’ campaign providing a striking illustration. Advocates of investing in adolescent girls argue that providing girls with resources, education, and support will lead to better outcomes not only for the girls themselves, but also for their families, communities, and nations. In this context, girls are powerful. When it comes to international peace and security agendas, however, girls often appear more as victims in need of assistance or rescue. Girls seem to lack agency and need protection, suggesting tensions between these prominent discursive constructions of girls. Considering United Nations peace and security policy (UN Security Council, UN Women, UN General Assembly), this chapter explores understandings of young women’s potential as leaders in the field of peace and security. Has the sense of girls as change agents, prevalent in international development policy, emerged in this arena? This chapter will offer an analysis of girls’ and young women’s agency in UN policy discourse, as well as providing examples of young women’s leadership opportunities helping to reshape this discourse. I argue that an analysis of where/how young women appear in international peace and security policy reveals the critical dimensions of the gendered leadership structures of international relations.
