Why Canada Needs to Promote a Children, Peace, and Security Agenda

There is an urgent need to advance our global understanding of the fragile contexts that threaten children, increase their vulnerability to extreme violence and insecurity, and diminish their agency to positively impact global peace and security. These challenges perpetuate cycles of inequality and violence that continue over generations. Creating and collectively building a global Children, Peace, and Security (CPS) agenda would address these challenges by placing a primacy on children’s perspectives and their protection in our efforts to achieve sustainable peace. Preventing children’s involvement in and exposure to armed violence, coupled with concerted efforts to work directly with children and youth to build and sustain peace is necessary to break intergenerational cycles of armed violence. A Children, Peace, and Security aoxy_insert_endgenda would complement existing frameworks, such as the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda and the Youth, Peace, and Security (YPS) agenda. While these policy frameworks are recognized as being interlinked, they are rarely discussed in terms of mutually reinforcing action. This chapter proposes that building lasting peace and security requires a new approach that addresses the unique challenges that children face before, during, and after conflict and one that recognizes that children’s perspectives and protection are at the core of our humanity. It will conclude by exploring the role that Canada may play in the development and implementation of this agenda and its relationship to fulfilling its ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.