Tracing young people's engagements with the diplomacy and geopolitics of a British Overseas Territory

Abstract

Research from political geographers has increasingly identified the diverse actors, practices, and performances of diplomacy, challenging narrow conceptions that had tended to associate them with the state alone. The following paper engages this plurality directly through, on the one hand, its focus on young people as diplomatic actors and, on the other, the diplomacy of a British Overseas Territory (OT)—the Falkland Islands—a polity characterised by its liminal subjectivity between colonial dependency and independent statehood. In 2022, to mark the 40th anniversary of the Falklands War, we partnered with the Falkland Islands Government Office (FIGO) in London, to design, deliver and evaluate a national schools' competition. The Falklands Forty Schools Competition (FFSC) culminated in an eight-day trip to the Islands for seven prize winners. The paper reflects on our role in co-organising the competition and the opportunities it afforded to observe young people probe and critically question the official narratives presented to them by government representatives. This offered us the opportunity to explore how geopolitical and diplomatic narratives can be projected, negotiated and challenged by young people in the context of a highly curated trip with narrative projection at its heart. We show how young people through their participation in the competition and, more specifically, a trip to the Falkland Islands, were able to identify slippages and inconsistencies in these ‘stable’ narratives related to governance of the Islands. The young people, far from being passive diplomatic ‘delegates’ unquestioningly imbibing the information presented to them were, instead, highly aware of narrative tipping-points, tensions and slippages in their engagements with government representatives and diplomats.