Youth gathered without borders, together in Korea
On 11–12 October 2025, young people of Korean nationality and multinational backgrounds residing in Korea gathered at the MBC Training Centre in Gyeonggi-do to hold the IFWY (International Forum: We, the Youth) ‘Korean Dialogue without Borders’.
Jointly hosted by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), MBC, Hanyang University, and Eunpyeong-gu, with Debate Korea participating as a partner, this dialogue held significant originality. It transformed Korea's regional and social issues into a “global youth common agenda”, involving not only Korean youth but also numerous international youths residing in Korea from countries including Russia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Uganda, and Ethiopia. The Korean regional dialogue was not merely an event for domestic youth; it served as an experimental platform where the perspectives of young people worldwide converged, using Korea as a hub.
The sole platform interpreting Korean societal issues from a global perspective
One of the greatest strengths of Korean Dialogue without Borders lies in jointly analysing specific Korean societal issues through the perspectives of multinational youth. By combining international standards, case studies from other countries, and multicultural viewpoints, the youth reinterpreted the challenges facing Korean society. This yielded multifaceted and practical approaches to core issues: the structural causes of low birth rates (community breakdown, employment instability, lack of care infrastructure); inequalities in education, welfare, and housing; the legal status of migrant and refugee children; digital safety; AI-based crime; the need for international responses to information distortion; and insufficient environmental and climate awareness coupled with inadequate laws and systems.
Throughout this process, the youth demonstrated their capacity to become active agents of dialogue. They transformed differing perspectives into assets to devise innovative solutions, independently highlighting the originality of their own discussions by comparing them with those from other regions.
A Vision for an ‘Inclusive Korea’ Co-Created by Multicultural Youth
The core message derived from the dialogue, ‘Inclusion is the foundation for Korea's sustainable prosperity and future growth,’ formed the very clear backbone of the discussion and served as the pivotal function in presenting a youth-led vision.
The representative proposals put forward were as follows, and all these proposals are highly original in that they were jointly and actively developed by “young people viewing Korean society from an external perspective".
• Establishing regional growth hubs to resolve inter-regional inequality
• Strengthening institutional protection and legal stability for refugee and migrant youth
• Generational integration curricula, student-led discussions, and empathy-based learning in education
• A “Green Wave” campaign in the climate and environmental sectors, leveraging Korea's soft power, such as K-pop
• Building a voice platform to ensure the youth's substantive policy participation
Key Priorities Identified by Youth in the Korean Dialogue without Borders
Throughout the dialogue, participants successfully identified the following priorities by jointly examining Korean societal challenges through inclusive, multicultural, and global perspectives:
• Addressing structural demographic challenges by tackling employment insecurity, community fragmentation, and insufficient care infrastructure
• Advancing social inclusion through stronger legal protection and institutional stability for migrant and refugee youth
• Reducing inequality in education, housing, and welfare through empathy-based, participatory, and intergenerational learning systems
• Strengthening digital and information safety, including responses to AI-enabled crime and cross-border misinformation
• Promoting climate and environmental awareness through youth-led initiatives and soft-power-based engagement, including culture-driven campaigns
The event clearly demonstrates two values. It served as a successful demonstration of an arena for international youth policy experimentation. Firstly, cases where young people of diverse nationalities jointly explore a single social context and propose policies are indeed rare. Korea's regional dialogue has been established as a hub for new policy proposals through global youth collaborations.
Moreover, this dialogue served as a platform demonstrating that youth participation creates more powerful innovation when integrated across diverse angles and dimensions for an agenda, transcending nationality. The structure of discussing issues within Korean society alongside diverse foreign youth residing in Korea for academic and career purposes sparked new imagination, problem-solving abilities, and creativity. Korea's Dialogue without Borders established itself as a new policy dialogue model that breaks down the boundaries of youth, borders, and identity, acting as a bridge to the IFWY Final Conference.