Lessons From the 1970 UN World Youth Assembly for Contemporary Youth Engagement
Over the last decade, the United Nations (UN) system has increasingly invested in creating institutional space for greater youth participation and leadership. Launched in 2018, Youth2030 is a UN-wide youth strategy that prioritises “meaningful youth engagement in policymaking and decision-making processes”.[i] Other efforts to systematise youth participation include the UN Youth Office, the UN Youth Envoy, and the 2024 Summit of the Future.
Attempts to reform institutional architectures to enhance meaningful youth participation have elements that are both new and old, inventive and anachronistic, symbolic and material. Indeed, current attempts to fashion institutions and processes that represent multiple generations have historical antecedents. While many of the UN’s contemporary youth engagement efforts are cast as novel, they are situated within much longer stories of the UN as an institution that is invested in involving and reaching young people.
This chapter explores the reinvention of intergenerational politics through the case study of the 1970 World Youth Assembly, held at the UN headquarters in New York. The chapter details several complex aspects of youth representation and offers three lessons for understanding youth engagement in multilateral decision-making today.
First, it is important to pay critical attention to the framings of “generation” and “youth” adopted by different actors to different ends. Examining the varying interpretations of these concepts highlights contradictory narratives that are still relevant for intergenerational politics today.
Second, it is essential to centre analyses of youth engagement in questions of power. Focusing on power enables a nuanced analysis of the intersections of representation, geopolitics, gender, class, and age in shaping the potential and limitations of youth inclusion.
Finally, this case study highlights how young people adapt inherited processes to offer more expansive conceptions of what is political. This suggests that research on youth politics must deal not only with the formal politics of youth engagement in institutions but also with the micropolitics of how young people reimagine politics more generally.
Mark Ortiz is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor of Geography at Pennsylvania State University whose research explores youth politics, climate justice, and digital storytelling in global youth climate action
The 1970 World Youth Assembly
To commemorate the UN’s 25th anniversary in 1970, then Secretary General U Thant spearheaded a first-of-its-kind World Youth Assembly at the organisation’s headquarters in New York. Over 600 participants from some 120 countries convened in July that year to discuss a broad range of topics, such as education, peace, development, and the environment. The average participant was reported to be in their early 20s, with nearly half engaged in some sort of education or university training, and many involved in youth organisations.[ii]
The videos, documents, and speeches that remain from the assembly form a unique archive that illustrates how the UN and its officials articulated their roles in generational language. As U Thant said in a radio broadcast before the assembly, the project’s ambition was to forge a “relationship of mutual confidence and cooperation … between generations so that we can transmit the goals and ideals with which the United Nations was brought into being a quarter of a century ago”.[iii] Here, U Thant articulated a mission of progressive betterment intended to engender a sense of global citizenship.
Generational conflict and geopolitics
Framing this mission was a notion of nascent generational conflict. Victor Mills, the assembly’s executive officer, alluded to broad youth dissatisfaction with the sluggishness and inefficacy of institutional politics.[iv] Similarly, in his opening remarks to the event, U Thant described the central generational fissure as being between the “older generation”, with its emphasis on the “legacy of achievements passed on to the youth of today”, and the younger generation focused on “injustice, waste, [and a] lack of love and understanding”.[v]
Ghana’s permanent representative to the UN, R.M. Akwei, also focused parts of his speech on diagnosing a generational chasm and identifying different articulations of democratic thought. He, like Mills, mentioned a prevailing sense of frustration among young people because of the “inability of individuals to influence institutions in order to make them more humane and responsive to new social values”. He described a “virtual civil war” between an older generation interested in affluence and younger citizens critical of the “emptiness and callousness” that affluence produces.[vi] He went on to suggest that the younger generation was interested in a vision of democracy that embraced “spontaneity”, in contrast to rigid institutions.
Speeches and historical reporting present contradictory narratives about young people that oscillate between idealism and chaos. A cautionary report for the Boston Globe in May 1970 wondered: “What happens if the gathering decides its own agenda, different from that offered? And what if it produces a psychedelic manifesto of revolution and irreverence?”[vii] The central dialectic that emerges is of youthful idealism as either an engine of possibility or a harbinger of social breakdown.
UN Chef de Cabinet C.V. Narasimhan identified two potential pathways the assembly could take. The first was that the “the young will bring a new dimension to our own thinking about how the world should be run … and how the future affairs of mankind should be handled”. The second was a “rambunctious youth assembly” that “would end in chaos”.[viii]
U Thant’s opening remarks leaned into an optimistic vision that framed participants as part of a long historical lineage of young people leading “inspirational” and transformational change.[ix] Both Narasimhan’s and U Thant’s understandings of young people embodied a faith in them as progressive catalysts. But across the archival materials, a thin line distinguishes youthful idealism and innovation from the omnipresent threat of disorder.
Each stage of the assembly was animated by the geopolitical conflicts of the era, suggesting the need to take seriously power dynamics in studies of youth engagement and intergenerational politics. For example, countries disagreed over whether a youth assembly should happen at all, with one western representative reportedly suggesting that the Soviet Union was more “worried about [the] unpredictability of youth than we are”.[x] Another report suggested that “the big powers, sensing they would be the prime targets of the youthful participants, became wary”.[xi]
U Thant appealed to a sort of universalist generational thinking to elevate the gathering’s importance as transcending geopolitical interests. He suggested that if the event did not happen, its absence would be “likely to affect the relations between generations for a long time to come”.[xii]
Thus, generational ideas interacted with questions of geopolitics. In western reporting, many of the delegates who represented communist-affiliated youth fronts were described as older and interested in pursuing a manipulative realpolitik. New York Times reporter Kathleen Teltsch described the discussions being dominated by “not-so-young professionals who had learned their tactics at youth festivals in various communist capitals”.[xiii] In the same way, a write-up in Time magazine decried the presence of “professional Youths” in the conference.[xiv] Here, depictions of young people function as sites of geopolitical contestation that distinguish subversive, not-so-young attendees from communist countries, on the one hand, from their innocent or naive counterparts from the west, on the other.
Delegates’ views
Many young attendees criticised the way their conversations unfolded along predictable lines and implored other participants to embrace a spirit of possibility. Dennis Smith from Jamaica lambasted the assembly for “quarrelling” in the way that national leaders did in the UN and suggested that the outcomes of such bickering would be “foolish”.[xv]
Speeches by young delegates in the early stages of the assembly challenged the forum’s purported universality: there was criticism of the presence of young people selected by China’s nationalist regime, of military action by the United States (US) in Vietnam, and of global imperialism.[xvi] Some participants withdrew from the forum entirely, including one Puerto Rican participant who cited a “climate of ideological intolerance”.[xvii]
A delegate from Mali exhorted participants to “have faith in our capacity to persuade, in our capacity to change each of these youth into the men of tomorrow”, suggesting a promising view of the possibility of negotiation and interpersonal change. Australia’s Kenwin Smith suggested that “virtually no one has managed to break beyond the concepts of the adult generation”.[xviii]
A young participant from the US offered a different view: “There has been an overt sign of entire chaos, but I think underneath a lot of work has been getting done.” Lars Thalen, who chaired the assembly, insisted that the role of young people was to take a “longer view” and inject politics with a future-oriented moral vision.[xix] Overall, the participants’ experiences emphasised that young people cannot be shoehorned into reductive symbols of progressivism or future-oriented politics.
In closing the assembly, U Thant remarked that “the ideological, political, and other preoccupations of the world were bound to reflect themselves in the attitudes of youth”. His sober concluding assessment departed from the aspirational tone with which the assembly was opened and imagined. Interviews with attendees after the event painted a negative image of the affair, with one Chicago Tribune headline reading “U.N. parley disillusions youth”.[xx] Meanwhile, an appraisal for the Boston Globe claimed that “adult cynicisms and ploys crept into the attitudes and voices of the young supplanting the dreams of a better world with polemics of the present”.[xxi]
A Norwegian delegate quoted in the Chicago Tribune recounted being disillusioned that young people were not “more capable of international cooperation than their elders”; another delegate remembered how her “hopes sank lower and lower” as she watched the assembly unfold.[xxii] Even amid the maelstrom of the gathering, Thalen hoped the forum would provide the basis for the creation of a “permanent channel through which youth or young people can speak to the General Assembly and to the U.N.”, indicating modest ambitions for institutional innovation.[xxiii]
Reflections on 1970 in the context of intergenerational representation today
As U Thant remarked presciently at the closing of the 1970 World Youth Assembly, “the United Nations will probably never be the same”.[xxiv] While the assembly’s organisers expressed an ambition that the delegates would “inject new ideas” into the conversations unfolding on the international stage, participants and news reporters converged on how congruent the assembly was with the broader geopolitics of the moment.
So, what, if anything, did the assembly accomplish, and what can scholars and practitioners interested in youth engagement today glean from this historical moment? Three lessons stand out.
The importance of framings
First, analysts must be attentive to “youth” and “generation” as symbolic constructs loaded with complex and often contradictory meanings, depending on who is using them. This results in tensions that mark young people as unsettled political subjects and materially shape the politics and possibilities of participation. While some observers extol young people as bridges to a new historical formation, the same commentators often describe the potential for youth politics to become unruly, chaotic, or destructive.
Young people are often depicted as the political foils to older adults. However, as institutions like the UN increasingly carve out space for youth participation, the contrary expectation is that young participants will inject new ideas, practices, and energies into inflexible institutional settings while embodying the norms of staid, bureaucratic dialogue.
The centrality of power
The second lesson is that any study of young people that does not take seriously questions of power will be limited in its analytical utility. As with the World Youth Assembly, in any political deliberations involving young people today, articulations of youth are key battlegrounds on which states, corporations, and other actors seek to articulate, curate, and control their images and extend their influence.
The World Youth Assembly was undeniably shaded by the great-power geopolitics of the cold war, the rising tide of decolonisation and anti-imperial insurgencies, and the countercultural youth and student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Within today’s power dynamics, youth representation in settings like UN climate negotiations is vitiated by concerns about so-called youth-washing – the careful selection and curation of young spokespeople to exhibit representativeness, which presents potentially misleading images of governments and corporations.[xxv]
Still, as one researcher has suggested, while youth-led change may be “partial and incomplete”, it is “always playful in the sense that it is generative and creative”.[xxvi] While it may be impossible to trace any large-scale changes emerging from the 1970 assembly, a sense of the micropolitics of youth advocacy helps analysts understand the modest advances that emerged across the gathering. U Thant’s closing remarks alluded to some of them:
Your informal manners, the practice of certain commissions to limit the statements to five minutes or even less, the recognition of speakers by number rather than country, and most of all the principle of individual participation rather than governmental representation … all of these may affect in some way the practice of the United Nations organs in the long run.[xxvii]
The value of history
The third finding is that as the international community pursues ever more substantive modes of intergenerational inclusion, it is essential to look back at the histories of youth and intergenerational politics in order to more perspicaciously look forward. The stories of generational tension and the divergent representations of youth that unfolded at the World Youth Assembly resembled the stories that shape multilateral negotiations, local forums, and political conversations around the world today.
The assembly’s final declaration expressed “regret that the conditions of the World Youth Assembly did not permit the participation in the Assembly of all the youth organizations and movements” and did not embody a “universal character”.[xxviii] The document also prioritised representation of young people from the “Third World”, the importance of protections for those in work, and efforts to promote literacy among “out-of-school youth”. These priorities offer important precursors of what would become an interest in meaningful youth engagement that takes broad inclusion seriously.
The final statement also envisaged the creation of a “UN International Youth Centre” that would “work through a decentralized structure … through many local bases directly”. These modest visions, along with Thalen’s insistence on creating a more permanent platform for UN youth engagement, have stood the test of time and find their institutional forms in the youth-focused strategies and offices of today.
The current younger generation may leverage social media, digital technologies, and pop culture to articulate their political dissatisfaction.[xxix] But the “do-it-ourselves” politics of youth climate activism in the 2010s and 2020s is not so different from the visions of democracy and shared generational consciousness expressed by many attendees back in 1970.[xxx]
The 2024 Summit of the Future
Comparing more recent efforts to engage young people in multilateral institutions with the 1970 World Youth Assembly reveals both parallels and contrasts. One major event was the UN’s 2024 Summit of the Future, which focused on meaningful youth engagement, reflecting commitments made in the Youth2030 strategy.
Before the two-day negotiations on 22–23 September, UN Secretary General António Guterres convened two action days to set the tone for the talks. The first was entitled “#YouthLead for the Future”. Speaking at this action day, UN Assistant Secretary General for Youth Affairs Felipe Paullier described the summit as an opportunity to “put young people at the centre” of multilateral decision-making.[xxxi]
The media that documented the summit and the preceding action days reveal a diverse range of young participants. The involvement of marginalised individuals, such as disabled people, Indigenous groups, children, and others, signalled an evolution of inclusion since 1970. Similarly, the language used in the outcome document of the 2024 event reflected a greater emphasis on generation-spanning challenges and insisted on the importance of factoring future generations into today’s decision-making.
Juxtaposing the highly curated media, interviews, and celebratory tone of the 2024 summit with the grainy, amateurish footage of the 1970 assembly, it would be tempting to believe that youth inclusion has evolved in a singularly positive direction. And indeed, the organisers of the 2024 event took strides to contribute to the aspiration expressed in the final outcome of the 1970 assembly that future gatherings should evolve towards a more “universal character”.
But today, the central question is pivoting from the mere inclusion of young people in traditionally adult-dominated meetings to more meaningful ways to link multilateral processes with transformative, youth-centred outcomes on the ground. As young climate change commentators such as Greta Thunberg have noted extensively, and as could be heard even in the youth speeches of 1970, although young people may be at the table, too often the words, promises, and commitments of older political figures do little to enable intergenerational equity in practice.
A continuous legacy of youth leadership
There remains work to be done to translate the lofty promises of forums such as the 2024 summit to the layered and often unjust realities experienced by children and young people around the world. Worryingly, progress in the representation and inclusion of young people in multilateral governance is set against the backdrop of declining faith in multilateralism, antidemocratic turns in many nations, and widespread youth dissatisfaction, as evidenced in protest movements around the world.
And yet, the outcome of the 2024 summit, particularly the first-of-its-kind Declaration on Future Generations, enshrined an intergenerational ethic at the heart of the multilateral system. The declaration considers the past, present, and future as a set of interlinked flows that shape the material realities of the children and young people of today and tomorrow.
This type of intergenerational outlook is something that young people have been campaigning for through their participation in multilateral institutions – from Thalen’s speech at the 1970 World Youth Assembly to then 12-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki’s words at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit or Thunberg’s many speeches at UN climate summits. From the 1970 assembly to the 2024 summit and beyond, there is a continuous legacy of youth leadership. This legacy, which is embodied in young people’s insistent demands that global institutions evolve to more meaningfully represent them and their successors, continues to influence the shape and scope of multilateralism today.
This chapter is part of a Deep Dive of Young Researchers who worked on Youth Participation for three years. This deep dive is a global collection of 12 case studies unpacking how young people are reshaping political engagement.
The Young Researchers’ Network is an initiative developed in the framework of the European Democracy Hub and EPD’s Women and Youth in Democracy WYDE Civic Engagement project, supported by the European Union.
[i] “Youth2030: Working With and for Young People”, United Nations Youth Office, 2018, https://www.un.org/youthaffairs/sites/default/files/2024-12/Youth2030_UN%20Youth%20Strategy_EN.pdf.
[ii] “International Zone: Unlike Their Elders” (video), United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 1970, https://www.unesco.org/archives/multimedia/document-5119.
[iii] “U Thant on the World Youth Assembly” (radio), WNYC, 6 May 1970, https://www.wnyc.org/story/u-thant-on-the-world-youth-assembly/.
[iv] “International Zone,” UNESCO.
[v] “World Youth Assembly, United Nations Headquarters, New York, N.Y., 9-17 July 1970. Message to the General Assembly of the United Nations, Reports of the Commissions, Statements to the World Youth Assembly”, United Nations (UN) Digital Library, 30 July 1970, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3906570?ln=en&v=pdf.
[vi] “World Youth Assembly”, UN Digital Library.
[vii] Darius S. Jhabvala, “World youth assembly runs into new snags”, Boston Globe, 14 May 1970.
[viii] “International Zone”, UNESCO.
[ix] “World Youth Assembly”, UN Digital Library.
[x] Robert H. Estabrook, “Powers argue over U.N. youth assembly”, Washington Post, 10 January 1970.
[xi] Darius S. Jhabvala, “World youth assembly opens today at UN”, Boston Globe, 9 July 1970.
[xii] Jhabvala, “New snags”.
[xiii] Kathleen Teltsch, “World Youth Assembly”, New York Times, 20 July 1970, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/20/archives/world-youth-assembly-parroting-of-elders-slogans-in-familiar.html.
[xiv] “United Nations: Professional Youths”, Time, 27 July 1970, https://time.com/archive/6843354/united-nations-professional-youths/.
[xv] “International Zone”, UNESCO.
[xvi] “International Zone”, UNESCO.
[xvii] William Fulton, “U. N. youth parley invites reds”, Chicago Tribune, 11 July 1970.
[xviii] “International Zone”, UNESCO.
[xix] “International Zone”, UNESCO.
[xx] “U.N. Parley disillusions youth”, Chicago Tribune, 20 July 1970.
[xxi] Darius S. Jhabvala, “Faith in young deeply shaken by world youth assembly”, Boston Globe, 19 July 1970.
[xxii] “U.N. Parley”, Chicago Tribune.
[xxiii] “International Zone”, UNESCO.
[xxiv] “International Zone”, UNESCO.
[xxv] Mark Ortiz, Charles Mankhwazi, and Neeshad Shafi, “Who is going to talk about my granddad? Who is going to talk about me?”, Climate and Development 16, no. 10 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2024.2360618.
[xxvi] Stuart C. Aitken, “What happened to adventurous young people and their cool places?”, Children’s Geographies 17, no. 1 (2019): 9–12.
[xxvii] “World Youth Assembly”, UN Digital Library.
[xxviii] “World Youth Assembly”, UN Digital Library.
[xxix] Nuurrianti Jalli, “From anime to activism: How the ‘One Piece’ pirate flag became the global emblem of Gen Z resistance”, The Conversation, 24 September 2025, https://theconversation.com/from-anime-to-activism-how-the-one-piece-pirate-flag-became-the-global-emblem-of-gen-z-resistance-265526.
[xxx] Sarah Pickard, “Young Environmental Activists and Do-It-Ourselves (DIO) Politics: Collective Engagement, Generational Agency, Efficacy, Belonging and Hope”, Journal of Youth Studies 25, no. 6 (2022): 730–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2022.2046258.
[xxxi] “Action Days for the Future” (video), UN Web TV, 22 September 2024, https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k12/k12uooughw?_gl=1*llk69a*_ga*MjAwNzI3NTE3MC4xNzY5NTQ0OTYw*_ga_TK9BQL5X7Z*czE3Njk1NDQ5NTkkbzEkZzAkdDE3Njk1NDQ5NTkkajYwJGwwJGgw.