The historic distinction in obligation and response to regional security challenges has been leveled by the continuous rise of transnational threats to peace and security. Today, nonstate actors, social media, and corporations overwhelmingly influence geopolitics while migration flows instrumentally shape political discourse and responses to democratization challenges—all of which complicates the search for appropriate answers to contemporary security challenges. Through direct engagement of the young and digitally connected generation, the project intends to amplify their individual perspectives garnered from their experiences and exposure to new technologies. The project content will span questions from regarding how digitalization and artificial intelligence may affect future economies to questions about social media’s effects on democracy and international relations.

By bringing together young adults—independent of gender, race, belief, socioeconomic, and other backgrounds—throughout OSCE territories, the project intends to highlight security trends that may not be apparent to the elites that predominate throughout these contexts. Fundamentally, the Generational Perspectives on National and International Security project is a response to today’s polarization of basic communication and aims to empower a new cohort of young people to better reach out to their peers and to overcome security vacuums in their own communities.