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WHEN BELONGING BECOMES A BATTLEGROUND: YOUTH IDENTITY AND COEXISTENCE IN MODERN EUROPE

In recent years, the question of who belongs — and who doesn’t — has moved to the centre of European politics. From debates over migration to disputes about cultural identity and national values, young people find themselves navigating an increasingly polarized social landscape. The consequences are real: rising hate speech in schools, online harassment targeting minority youth, and a growing sense among many young people that their communities are not safe spaces for outsiders.

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) has documented this trend extensively. Its 2025 Fundamental Rights Report highlights that vulnerable groups — including Roma youth, children of migrants, LGBTQ+ young people and religious minorities — continue to face disproportionate levels of discrimination across EU member states (FRA, 2025). The agency’s Being Black in the EU report (2023) found that nearly half of people of African descent surveyed had experienced racial discrimination in the previous five years — a figure that had risen since 2016, with 23% of parents reporting that their children had suffered racist bullying at school.

This is not an accident. Social intolerance is learned through family environments, peer groups, media consumption, and the political messages young people encounter daily. Research published in the European Journal of Social Psychology and the NIH has consistently shown that exposure to polarizing rhetoric, combined with limited intercultural contact, strengthens in-group preference and distrust of “the other” (Saarinen, 2022). But what is learned can also be unlearned, challenged, and transformed.

This is precisely where youth work plays a critical role. Youth workers, coaches, and community educators are often the adults most closely connected to young people’s social realities — closer, in many cases, than teachers or parents. When equipped with the right tools and methodologies, they are uniquely positioned to facilitate conversations that cross social divides, challenge prejudice, and build the interpersonal skills needed for genuine coexistence.

FRA’s own research underlines this: the quality of public discourse and the presence of supportive institutions make a measurable difference. As its LGBTI survey data shows, discrimination rises in contexts where public figures adopt hostile stances and laws are not enforced — and falls where communities are supported, and inclusion is actively promoted (FRA, 2023).

Yet across Europe, youth workers in the coexistence and peacebuilding space often lack adequate professional training, shared methodology, or cross-border support. The field remains fragmented, underfunded, and hard to access for many young practitioners. Addressing this gap is one of the core aims of the Youth for Coexistence (Y4C) project — a transnational Erasmus+ initiative bringing together organizations from Hungary, Estonia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Portugal, and Spain.

Through a coexistence curriculum, digital tools, and an international network, Y4C is working to professionalize youth peacebuilding and make it accessible to a new generation of practitioners across Europe. Because coexistence is not passive tolerance. It is active, skill-based, and learnable — and young people deserve to be taught it.

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