Abstract
Youth have been a malleable resource in the fight against hunger, variously conceived as volunteers, political activists, global citizens and financial donors. This article uncovers competing (and sometimes complementary) visions for the participation of British youth in Youth Against Hunger, part of the United Nations Freedom from Hunger Campaign. In doing so, it makes two key contributions to the field. First, by uncovering the professionals and commentators who sought to involve adolescents in humanitarian activity, it accounts for the agency of a more diverse range of non-state participants and experts than are usually included in histories of humanitarianism. Second, in highlighting the pragmatic difficulties in aligning humanitarian and youth-work contexts, it illustrates how domestic concerns about British youth actively shaped the development of the humanitarian sector in this period.
Highlights
Youth engagement has been at the heart of non-governmental organisations’ donor-focused work since the emergence of the modern humanitarian movement in the post-war period.1 Yet, despite the scale of youth operations undertaken in this period, the history of adolescent humanitarians remains relatively unexplored
Attention to young people has instead focused on two main areas: the representation of children as victims in need of aid; and activist youth movements made up primarily of university students.2. These polarised discourses map onto broader debates within the humanitarian sector in 1960s Britain: should organisations prioritise relief, or should they promote a politically engaged model of development targeted at structural inequality?3 Ideas of young people as passive victims and engaged activists did inform how adolescents were encouraged to participate in humanitarian activity, but they cannot capture the complexity of youth involvement, not least because they leave little room for understanding the place of recalcitrant teenagers and the tireless adult organisers who sought to engage them
This article uses the British Youth Against Hunger campaign to talk about why humanitarian organisations sought to engage with adolescents in the 1960s, the visions that they and the wider public had for the mobilisation of young British humanitarians, and the difficulties they faced in realising these visions
Summary
Youth engagement has been at the heart of non-governmental organisations’ donor-focused work since the emergence of the modern humanitarian movement in the post-war period.1 Yet, despite the scale of youth operations undertaken in this period, the history of adolescent humanitarians remains relatively unexplored.
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