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Hungry for Peace explores some of the extraordinary and ordinary, but valuable, ways young people’s food practices in Melbourne, Australia produce and sustain conflict and peacebuilding. Food touches all aspects of life, yet its metabolical, political, and ecological impacts on conflict can be easily overlooked. Recent food shortages and unstable food supply chains – caused by pandemic lockdowns, economic volatility, and climate extremities – are stark reminders of how human survival and livelihood depend upon food. Drawing on peacebuilding, feminist peace studies, food research, and agential realism, this thesis considers how food affects peace and conflict. Over eight chapters, it develops a ‘posthumanist peacebuilding’ framework and adopts a ‘peace-led diffractive methodology’ whereby the understandings of peacebuilding and the foci of peace research are not restricted to human activities alone. Rather, food, bodies, animals, and other more-than-humans are envisioned as contributing agentically towards ‘becoming-peace’ as well. Informed by two years of participatory fieldwork with young people that included cooking, eating together, and interviews at food spaces like kitchens and supermarkets, this research investigates some of the ways that food facilitates ‘food peacebuilding’ and ‘food violence’. In adopting a posthumanist peacebuilding framework, Hungry for Peace’s unique intervention in peacebuilding is the foregrounding of food’s affordances in everyday peacebuilding. The central argument pivots on the notion that more-than-humans can become both instruments and active agents of peace and conflict (or ‘peace-conflict’) in a highly connected world. In advancing this conceptual shift, this thesis moves the locus of understanding peacebuilding beyond human actors to demonstrate how more-than-humans (like food, smells, tables, and atmospheres) are more than contextual features of food-related conflicts; they are, instead, key characters directly shaping how pea

Examination of how the United Nations ('UN') and World Bank construct youth affected by armed conflict and political instability (referred to as 'youth-in-conflict') in their respective youth policies reveals that the UN constructs youth-in-conflict as 'victims' requiring protection. This results in humanitarian/rights-based approaches to youth development. In contrast, the World Bank constructs youth-in-conflict as 'capital' that has potential to bring about economic growth, resulting in economics-driven policies. Such divergent identity constructions are because 'youth' and 'youth identity' are fluid concepts used in various ways by different people in different contexts. In peace and conflict studies, the dominant discourses in relation to youth-in-conflict are that youth are either 'victims' of war or 'troublemakers'. Both discourses are contested by an emerging third discourse of youth as peacebuilders, which challenges the representation of youth-in-conflict as passive victims or as negative threats. While the UN and World Bank’s respective humanitarian/development and neo-liberal economic approaches shape these divergent youth-in-conflict constructions, both institutions are also influenced by the global trends in youth-in-conflict discourses. This 'discursive' relationship means that as the UN and World Bank engage in the global youth debate and are shaped by more complete understandings of youth-in-conflict, they will also have an influential role in perpetuating or challenging dominant discourses.

Examination of how the United Nations ('UN') and World Bank construct youth affected by armed conflict and political instability (referred to as 'youth-in-conflict') in their respective youth policies reveals that the UN constructs youth-in-conflict as 'victims' requiring protection. This results in humanitarian/rights-based approaches to youth development. In contrast, the World Bank constructs youth-in-conflict as 'capital' that has potential to bring about economic growth, resulting in economics-driven policies. Such divergent identity constructions are because 'youth' and 'youth identity' are fluid concepts used in various ways by different people in different contexts. In peace and conflict studies, the dominant discourses in relation to youth-in-conflict are that youth are either 'victims' of war or 'troublemakers'. Both discourses are contested by an emerging third discourse of youth as peacebuilders, which challenges the representation of youth-in-conflict as passive victims or as negative threats. While the UN and World Bank’s respective humanitarian/development and neo-liberal economic approaches shape these divergent youth-in-conflict constructions, both institutions are also influenced by the global trends in youth-in-conflict discourses. This 'discursive' relationship means that as the UN and World Bank engage in the global youth debate and are shaped by more complete understandings of youth-in-conflict, they will also have an influential role in perpetuating or challenging dominant discourses.

Examination of how the United Nations ('UN') and World Bank construct youth affected by armed conflict and political instability (referred to as 'youth-in-conflict') in their respective youth policies reveals that the UN constructs youth-in-conflict as 'victims' requiring protection. This results in humanitarian/rights-based approaches to youth development. In contrast, the World Bank constructs youth-in-conflict as 'capital' that has potential to bring about economic growth, resulting in economics-driven policies. Such divergent identity constructions are because 'youth' and 'youth identity' are fluid concepts used in various ways by different people in different contexts. In peace and conflict studies, the dominant discourses in relation to youth-in-conflict are that youth are either 'victims' of war or 'troublemakers'. Both discourses are contested by an emerging third discourse of youth as peacebuilders, which challenges the representation of youth-in-conflict as passive victims or as negative threats. While the UN and World Bank’s respective humanitarian/development and neo-liberal economic approaches shape these divergent youth-in-conflict constructions, both institutions are also influenced by the global trends in youth-in-conflict discourses. This 'discursive' relationship means that as the UN and World Bank engage in the global youth debate and are shaped by more complete understandings of youth-in-conflict, they will also have an influential role in perpetuating or challenging dominant discourses.

Examination of how the United Nations ('UN') and World Bank construct youth affected by armed conflict and political instability (referred to as 'youth-in-conflict') in their respective youth policies reveals that the UN constructs youth-in-conflict as 'victims' requiring protection. This results in humanitarian/rights-based approaches to youth development. In contrast, the World Bank constructs youth-in-conflict as 'capital' that has potential to bring about economic growth, resulting in economics-driven policies. Such divergent identity constructions are because 'youth' and 'youth identity' are fluid concepts used in various ways by different people in different contexts. In peace and conflict studies, the dominant discourses in relation to youth-in-conflict are that youth are either 'victims' of war or 'troublemakers'. Both discourses are contested by an emerging third discourse of youth as peacebuilders, which challenges the representation of youth-in-conflict as passive victims or as negative threats. While the UN and World Bank’s respective humanitarian/development and neo-liberal economic approaches shape these divergent youth-in-conflict constructions, both institutions are also influenced by the global trends in youth-in-conflict discourses. This 'discursive' relationship means that as the UN and World Bank engage in the global youth debate and are shaped by more complete understandings of youth-in-conflict, they will also have an influential role in perpetuating or challenging dominant discourses.

Examination of how the United Nations ('UN') and World Bank construct youth affected by armed conflict and political instability (referred to as 'youth-in-conflict') in their respective youth policies reveals that the UN constructs youth-in-conflict as 'victims' requiring protection. This results in humanitarian/rights-based approaches to youth development. In contrast, the World Bank constructs youth-in-conflict as 'capital' that has potential to bring about economic growth, resulting in economics-driven policies. Such divergent identity constructions are because 'youth' and 'youth identity' are fluid concepts used in various ways by different people in different contexts. In peace and conflict studies, the dominant discourses in relation to youth-in-conflict are that youth are either 'victims' of war or 'troublemakers'. Both discourses are contested by an emerging third discourse of youth as peacebuilders, which challenges the representation of youth-in-conflict as passive victims or as negative threats. While the UN and World Bank’s respective humanitarian/development and neo-liberal economic approaches shape these divergent youth-in-conflict constructions, both institutions are also influenced by the global trends in youth-in-conflict discourses. This 'discursive' relationship means that as the UN and World Bank engage in the global youth debate and are shaped by more complete understandings of youth-in-conflict, they will also have an influential role in perpetuating or challenging dominant discourses.