Young Feminist and Peace Activists on Why Militarism and Masculinity Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
In Lebanon, the currency keeps losing value, but weapons money never runs short. In Senegal, families choose between a stalled economy and the wage an armed group offers their sons. At weddings across the Bekaa Valley, celebratory gunfire is so normal it barely registers. And online, a generation is being recruited into militarised ideas of strength before it ever holds a weapon.
These aren’t separate stories. They’re the same story, told from different vantage points, and they’re why, for International Youth Day, the Young WILPF Network and the MenEngage Alliance Youth Reference Group put two campaigns side by side. Move the Money is WILPF’s call to divest from militarism and reinvest in feminist peace, justice and care. Shifting the narrative is MenEngage’s work on militarised masculinities — the norms that make military spending feel not just necessary, but manly. One campaign asks where the money goes. The other asks why it’s so hard to move. Together, they argue the two questions are really one: military budgets survive on an idea that strength means domination, and that domination is what security looks like.
To bring these two campaigns into conversation, four young advocates — Silvia Race and Lasana Diakhate of the Young WILPF Network, and Chirine Basbous and Anas Nassabein of the MenEngage Alliance Youth Reference Group — sat with three shared questions. Here’s what they had to say.
If We Moved the Money, What Would We Fund Instead?
Chirine writes from Lebanon, where electricity, healthcare, education and the value of her own currency have all become harder to hold onto, while money for weapons never runs short: “That contrast says a lot about the choices we make about what, and who, we value.” What she wants funded isn’t a wish list so much as a correction — public healthcare, education that isn’t decided by a family’s income, and above all, direct, multi-year funding for youth-led and feminist organisations, instead of the project-by-project grants that force young people to re-justify their existence every year.
“What is often missing is not ideas or commitment, but the resources and trust to turn those ideas into lasting change.” — Chirine Basbous
Lasana puts one number behind it: feminist organisations doing the daily work of peacebuilding share just 0.4% of bilateral aid to fragile contexts, even as military budgets keep climbing. And he’s precise about where money already exists to be moved — Africa loses tens of billions a year to tax fraud and illicit financial flows, close to enough on its own to close the continent’s development financing gap. “Moving the money,” he points out, doesn’t always mean cutting a defence budget. Sometimes it means stopping a hemorrhage that’s already happening.
“This is not a budgetary accident. It is a hierarchy of values, upheld in silence — and no one should have to accept it in silence any longer.” — Lasana Diakhate
Anass, from the Bekaa Valley, complicates the idea that “military spending” is something that only happens far away.
“Unregulated weapons proliferation now fuels domestic instability, from escalating family disputes to sectarian tension sustained by household arms.” — Anass Nassabein
And Silvia cuts straight to the stakes: funding climate and human rights work isn’t optional.
“It’s a matter of survival — not the kind humanitarian aid alone can answer, but the survival of society as a whole.” — Silvia Race
Militarised Masculinity Is Everywhere Online. What Do We Build Instead?
Silvia locates the battleground first: “The new common spaces are not squares or streets but walls and feeds.” Her answer isn’t more content moderation, it’s real-life infrastructure. Masculinity, she argues, can only be taken apart somewhere safe: in person, in community, in a culture that otherwise rewards polarisation over dialogue.
Chirine refuses to let this become a lecture to young men about what they’re doing wrong. In a context of economic collapse, she points out, militarised spaces genuinely offer something people are searching for: belonging, identity, brotherhood. So the alternative isn’t correction. It’s room to be vulnerable without it reading as failure.
“A young man sharing care work at home because he sees it as his responsibility, not a favour; being able to say ‘I am scared’ without feeling he has failed as a man.” — Chirine Basbous
Lasana speaks from experience — he was the only man in WILPF’s youth delegation at the 2024 AWID Forum in Bangkok, and often the only man at the grassroots actions he organises. He’s unsparing about why masculinist content online works so well: it hands disoriented young people a clear identity. That’s exactly what makes it dangerous. Media literacy helps, but on its own it isn’t enough. What’s needed are visible counter-models, peers and mentors who make care and non-violence look like strength, not its absence.
Anass puts the same instinct simply: include, don’t exclude.
“Engaging men and boys directly, rather than excluding them from feminist dialogue, transforms defensiveness into accountability.” — Anass Nassabein
What Has to Change at the Top?
Lasana traces this through Senegal’s Casamance conflict, one of West Africa’s longest-running crises. For decades, the state met it with military force while development and reconciliation lagged behind. A budget choice that was also a story about gender: force read as virile; dialogue and care, mostly carried by women, read as secondary. For young men with few other paths to dignity, an armed group can offer what a stalled economy can’t — a wage, respect, a story of protecting your family.
“It is almost never only about defence. It is about identity.” — Lasana Diakhate
Chirine sees the same pattern in Lebanon, down to the gunfire at weddings, and leadership itself read as strength through the ability to “protect your people.” She’s honest about the trap this sets: young men expected to provide and protect, in an economy that makes decent work nearly impossible to find. Blame doesn’t move that. Understanding might.
Anass names the norm outright — “a ‘real man’ protects through force, not dialogue” — and describes boys mocked by their own peers for showing emotion or rejecting violence. What he wants from men in power is simple to state and hard to do: leadership measured by dialogue and accountability, and budgets that fund schools and mental health services instead of arms.
Silvia goes to the root of it: a politics of “an eye for an eye,” sustained by patriarchal ideas of what leadership even is. Her call isn’t just to spend differently, it’s to re-evaluate what good leadership looks like in the first place, so that empathy, dialogue and cooperation start to count as strength.
“This would allow boys to welcome diverse role models and be led by values that are not harmful to society and to themselves.” — Silvia Race
What Would It Take
Four lives. Four different struggles. One question underneath all of them: what are we calling strength, and who decided?
As long as the answer is domination, budgets will keep moving toward weapons instead of classrooms — and boys will keep being offered militarism as the clearest route to dignity anyone’s handed them. Silvia, Chirine, Lasana and Anass aren’t asking for one or the other. They’re asking for both at once, because they’ve watched what happens when only one moves: the money shifts and the norm holds, or the norm shifts and no one funds it.
This International Youth Day: move the money, and shift the norm it’s built on.
With thanks to Silvia Race, Chirine Basbous, Lasana Diakhate, and Anass Nassabein — Young WILPF Network x MenEngage Alliance Youth Reference Group.
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