The Young WILPF Network is an integral force within the feminist peace movement, challenging power structures, exposing silences, and reimagining what solidarity looks like across borders and generations. Today, we invite you to read The Cost of Silence: A Youth Declaration—a powerful call to listen deeply, act with integrity, and invest in the futures youth are already building. Their words reflect not only urgency, but clarity and care. We are humbled, inspired and proud to stand with them.
We dream of a world rooted in peace and justice. A future we can truly believe in. But each day, we wake up to headlines soaked in war, fear, and injustice. Day by day, the situation is worsening. From the genocide in Gaza to the silence of global powers, from military occupations to climate collapse— we are witnessing a world unraveling.
This year’s International Youth Day, we stand in support and solidarity with youth around the world who are enduring the inhumane consequences of war and conflict. We speak for the generations still too young to raise their own voices – for a world where they don’t have to risk their lives to eat, where they can learn, play and live free from hatred and discrimination.
It’s 2025. Technology evolves fast, AI helps do our jobs and we can cross continents in hours. And yet, people are still dying under bombs, disappearing in refugee camps, suffocating under regimes that punish freedom. This world plays horror on repeat — wars, genocides, tortures — while those in power press mute.
From Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Myanmar, Yemen to Syria, Afghanistan to Haiti, the DRC, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Niger, Cambodia — the list keeps growing. Every name marks a place of pain, resistance and loss. And still, governments choose profit over people. Diplomacy becomes a game of compromise instead of a practice of courage. They say “never again” – as it happens again, right in front of all of us.
Today, we claim our right to shape the decisions that shape our lives. We refuse to be tokens or footnotes in the peace process. We are storytellers, negotiators, organisers and bridge-builders. We carry the weight of history and the vision of what is possible. Silence from world leaders is not neutrality – it is complicity.
To world leaders and institutions, we say this: peace is not merely the absence of war. It is justice, it is dignity. It is access to education, to healthcare, to opportunity. It is a world where no one fears for their life when they speak the truth. What the world needs now is not more military power, it needs more moral courage.
As young people, we bring that courage. Where is justice when Palestinians are still dying? Where is justice in the face of femicides? Where is justice for the environment? We are not waiting for your permission to transform this broken system. We are already doing it – in our villages, in refugee camps, on the frontlines of climate resistance, and through our networks and voices online.
We envision a future where justice is lived, peace is protected, and sustainability is practiced – not as abstract goals, but as everyday realities in every community. Peace is not passive, it is a movement. And we want to be part of that movement.
Let us be the last generation that has to struggle just to survive. Let peace be a demand, not a distant dream. A collective one. A feminist one. A global one.
We are not just witnesses to this moment – we are agents of change. We will not sit quietly while injustice, conflict, and destruction define our future. We demand a world where every person, regardless of gender or identity, has the right to speak, to decide, and to live freely and safely. Anything less is not peace – it’s injustice maintained by silence.
The future doesn’t belong to tomorrow — it belongs to those who act, together, today.
In Feminist Peace and Solidarity,
The Young WILPF Network Members
