The voice of youth? Performative liminality and the ambiguities of political representation in global governance

Abstract The political representation and agency of young people in international politics is still poorly understood, notwithstanding sustained interest in the pluralisation and diversification of transnational civil society and the ‘opening up’ of IOs in international relations (IR) scholarship. In this article, we put forward a theoretical framework for the study of youth representation in IR that is at once responsive to the specificities of youth and, at the same time, contributes to theory-building on political representation of newly recognised constituencies in international institutions overall. Theoretically, we build on constructivist and performative theories of representation, and we use our empirical insights to extend and qualify these theories. Empirically, we provide the first in-depth study of youth representation in global health governance. Based on an interpretive analysis of policy documents and qualitative interviews with youth participants at three major global health events, our study explores prevalent portrayals of youth as a constituency and problematises the legitimising effects of these portrayals. Moreover, we expose how multiple barriers and intersecting inequalities constrain young people’s encounters with exclusive spaces of global health policy-making and we point to the reflective and ambiguous ways in which young people embrace, enact, and question ‘youth’ as a political category.