Day 1 · Satyarthi Building Boardroom
Ms. Lilli von Wrede · Panel Discussion
Ms. Rajool Sanjay Patil · Panel Discussion
Aarman Roy · Campaign Methods Workshop
Over two days at Marwadi University, 48 speakers from 15 countries — academics, elected officials, civil servants, activists, and researchers — worked through the most consequential question in democratic politics today: why are young people systematically excluded from the systems they will inherit?
Speaker after speaker converged on the same point: the reason young people are absent from formal political institutions is not that they are disengaged. It is that the architecture of those institutions was not built with them in mind, and has not been substantially rebuilt since.
The conference was designed to break the familiar pattern of circling without moving — by putting researchers and practitioners in the same room and seeing what emerges when lived political experience meets comparative political science.
"Democratic renewal depends not merely on youth representation, but on the structural transformation required to make young citizens genuine architects of democratic futures."
— Sudhanshu Kaushik, Centre for Youth Policy
Barriers are financial, institutional, and procedural — not motivational. Reform effort should go toward redesigning the architecture of democratic institutions, not changing attitudes.
The conditions for converting movement energy into durable representation are knowable: electoral system design, organisational infrastructure, coalition strategy, and the timing of institutionalisation.
Vulnerabilities — suppression, manipulation, AI bias favouring the Global North — are democratic governance issues. Linguistic sovereignty is a prerequisite for meaningful digital participation.
Barriers to candidacy at the municipal level are lower, issues are more proximate to lived experience, and skills from local office are exactly those national political careers are built on.
The isolation young MPs described — informal marginalisation, absent peer networks — is a systemic problem requiring sustained connections across borders, party lines, and levels of government.
The conference was an argument for a method that should become a permanent operating principle — genuine dialogue produces knowledge that neither group produces alone.
They were present, they were formally equal, and they were reliably marginalised by the informal operating systems of institutions that had never been designed to include them.— Young Parliamentarians Panel · Tsenguun Saruulsaikhan (Mongolia) · Abdoulie Njai (Gambia) · Eve Borges (Malta)