From Custodians to Creators: Youth and the Reimagining of Intangible Heritage in Conflict Zones

Abstract: In areas that experience continuous wars, the places that were destroyed along with the cultures that were erased are leading to the youth of the place becoming the promoters of the preservation and the update of the cultural heritage of the community. This article presents an analysis of young people in Palestine, Syria, and the Afghan diaspora, who are taking advantage of digital platforms—like TikTok, Instagram, and virtual museums—to register, change the interpretation of, and pass along traditional knowledge, oral histories, rituals, and performative practices. A comparative, desk-based analysis forms the backbone of the study, which celebrates these youth-led initiatives not only as the vehicle that carries the safeguarding of heritage, but also as the means of its changing of the histories that help colonialist narratives of geography and institutional gatekeeping. The paper embraces participatory heritage theory and decolonial digital epistemologies and is a thesis that those practices are very much the kind of cultural resistance and identity reconstruction that is apt especially in those places where heritage is treated as the enemy or is the hand that wields political power. Through positioning youth as the creators—not merely the custodians—of cultural memory, the study discloses the prodigious power of digital storytelling in constructing more diversified and strong heritage futures, and highlights four themes: youth authorship, platforms as resistance, intergenerational transmission, and hybrid diasporic identities.