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For decades ‘youth bulge’ theory has dominated understandings of youth in mainstream International Relations. Youth bulge theory has also become part of some public media analyses, mainstream political rhetoric, and even officially enshrined in the foreign policy of some states. Through the ‘youth bulge’ lens, youth—especially males—have been presented as current or future perpetrators of violence. However, this article argues that the youth bulge thesis postulated in mainstream IR is based on flawed theoretical assumptions. In particular, supporters of youth bulge theory fail to engage with existing research by feminist IR scholars and thus take on a biological essentialist approach. This has led to theoretical and practical misunderstandings of the roles youth play in relation to conflict, peace and security. These partial and biased understandings have also resulted in less effective policy-making. In critically reflecting on the ‘youth bulge’ thesis, this article argues that applying gender analysis is crucial to understanding the involvement of young people in general—and young men in particular—in conflict. Doing so will contribute to advancing more accurate analysis in scholarship and policy-making.

This article reports on a discourse analysis of high circulation news media sources in the United Kingdom, around six key events relating to migration in 2015–2016. This article argues that the dominant discourse in UK media constructed the increase in movements of people and applications for asylum as a ‘crisis of borders’. In this context, Europe’s borders were deemed problematically porous in enabling large numbers of people to enter. This porosity was painted as leading to an ongoing crisis for people in Europe, with the assumption being that allowing more people to enter would threaten European borders, security forces, people, and identity. These discursive constructions serve to marginalise considerations of insecurity and dangers that asylum seekers and refugees face in conflicts, and instead paint them not as experiencing violence, but rather as perpetrators of crisis themselves.