From Discursive Exclusion to Rights Empowerment: Legal Dilemmas and Policy Governance of Youth Intercultural Communication under the SDG Framework

Under the normative framework of United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 4.7, cultivating global citizenship and ensuring inclusive cultural participation constitute imperative legal commitments for contemporary higher education. However, within the global governance architecture, youth from non-elite Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) encounter structural 'discursive exclusion'—a covert systemic dilemma denying substantive equality in cultural expression and transnational rights-claiming. To decode and address this inequality, this study operationalizes abstract legal concepts into concrete empirical indicators within an interdisciplinary 'Triad of Governance' framework, integrating Public Policy (Historical Institutionalism), Social Work (Empowerment Perspective), and Jurisprudence (Procedural Justice). Adopting an extended critical single-case ethnography at Xi'an Fanyi University (XFU) from 2024 to 2026, we examine 52 simulation sessions (180 observation hours) and 30 semi-structured jurisprudential interviews analyzed via systematic three-stage thematic coding. The empirical findings reveal that highly formalized legal Rules of Procedure (RoP) within simulated multi-lateral spaces function as an administrative scaffold that neutralizes socio-economic capital asymmetries, disciplines communicative logic, and fosters strategic empathy. By transitioning from a submissive 'deficit legal persona' to an authoritative diplomatic identity, underrepresented youth successfully execute a symbolic redistribution of discursive capital. Finally, acknowledging the boundary conditions of a single-case design, this paper shifts from universal prescriptions to context-conditional policy pathways, proposing scalable mechanisms to integrate simulated jurisprudence into national quality assurance audits and core curricula, thereby offering a highly operational strategy for democratic and resilient global citizenship education.