Anna Fett

Whereas the international peacebuilding community generally applauds the growing international focus on youth participation in development and security policies through the United Nations YPS Agenda, Anna is a part of a group of critical scholars who deconstruct Western assumptions about how "normal" children and youth (should) develop into responsible adulthood. Her research helps to contextualize the current enthusiasm for the proposed bipartisan 2020 U.S. YPS Act, reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in August of 2021, which plans to increase the participation of youth in peacebuilding, development, and security measures through the implementation of a "whole-of-government" strategy. Advocates of this legislation like to declare that this is the first time the U.S. government has seriously considered a government-wide interagency strategy for targeting and working with youth. However, Anna's research reveals that this argumentation elides a much longer, more complicated history of U.S. governmental attempts to identify, target, and influence a category of persons called "youth" for the sake of promoting national security and development abroad since the Second World War.  

Anna combines historical archival research with theoretical approaches from Peace Studies and Critical Youth Studies. Her dissertation, "Peace Education for the World: People-to-People Programs, American Youth, & U.S. Power, 1939-1961,"  examined why U.S. policymakers came to believe that interventions to foster close personal contact between foreign "youth" targets and a variety of American "parental" influencers, through experimental (non)governmental international exchange programs, was an effective strategy to advance U.S. overseas development objectives during the Cold War. She has published in the journals of Diplomatic History and Peace & Change. She is also contributing a chapter on the history of U.S. Cold War-era "youth bulge" rhetoric—a logic which continues to frame the allegedly rapidly growing demographic of "youth" as a development problem to be solved by the U.S. government—for an edited volume on the state of the field of Youth, Peace, and Security Studies forthcoming fall 2023 with Manchester University Press.

During her time at Dickey, Anna is revising part of her dissertation research into a book project tentatively titled Experts in Intergroup Relations: The Transnational Mission of The National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1938-1958. This project traces the transnational history of The National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ). First established in 1927 to ease interreligious strife and nativism among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, the NCCJ grew into one of the dominant U.S. nongovernmental organizations promoting social scientific research and education into healthy "democratic," i.e., non-prejudiced, hearts and minds by the Second World War. This book tells the story of how a cadre of NCCJ leaders set out to aid in the psychological redevelopment of a war-torn world–casting their eyes first on Western Europe, especially the U.S. occupied zone of Germany, before widening their reach for "world brotherhood" in the early Cold War period. While U.S. religious historians have already examined how interfaith dialogue came to be seen in the twentieth century as one ideal manifestation of the American Judeo-Christian "democratic" way of life—even as the boundaries of this practice were closely monitored and contested—this project demonstrates that the content and habits of interfaith dialogue were not just settled around religious community roundtables in small-town America. Rather, this practice was also deeply implicated in projections of U.S. power abroad: approaching interfaith dialogue only as a voluntary, private style of intergroup dialogue masks the role of U.S. governmental actors hoping to wield this technique, and other intergroup education methods, to reshape purportedly democratically-minded communities abroad.