My way of evaluating whether a conference I have attended was good is relatively simple: if on my flight home, I would rather replay and rethink the sessions I attended and the conversations I had, instead of binge-watching my favourite TV shows. Well, on my 14-hour journey from Johannesburg to Jakarta after the 2025 OTT Conference, I barely touched the in-flight entertainment. Instead, I found myself in deep reflection on questions and insights I encountered throughout the conference. Be it within the formal agenda sessions or the chit-chats I had over the coffee break table. That was when I knew: this conference was not just good, but rather deeply necessary.
As expected, I obviously walked away from the Conference with more questions than answers. And to me, that’s always a good thing. After all, I came not just as the President of STEAR, the world’s first youth think tank focused on Europe-Asia relations, but also as an anthropologist-in-training. I came thinking we had a clear trajectory. I thought about how many of our brilliant accomplishments—such as the annual youth forum in Brussels, summer schools in Southeast Asia, a global virtual cultural village, and over 160 articles published —have already engaged over 550 young people across a variety of our programs. I came thinking we had it figured, at least somewhat. I left, realising we’re still deeply in the middle of becoming.
And becoming is messy.
As an anthropologist, one of the things I have been constantly trained to do is look closely at systems. How they define, exclude, and authorise. And I have also been taught that it is rather a good thing to sit with ambiguity, to question the categories we use continuously. “Think tank” is definitely one of those categories I have personally always struggled with, especially when it falls within the youth-led space. What does it mean, really, for an organisation like us, STEAR, which is composed of students and young emerging professionals scattered across over 30 countries, to call itself a think tank? Who can give or validate that label, and why does it matter so much to keep it? Who decides whether we still stand by that label, and what measurements one may use to assess it?
Indeed, that is the very positionality crisis I have been figuring out, silently. At the OTT Conference this year, it surely moved to the front, loudly.
I must say that I felt the crisis was echoed most loudly during Mavis Owusu-Gyamfi’s keynote session on coalition building. And again, in nearly every conversation that followed, especially the ones that kept circling around how think tanks should co-think, co-create, and ultimately co-influence. Mavis shared a very good example of how African think tanks are moving beyond siloed expertise towards more collaborative ecosystems, which are dynamic, political, and grounded in solidarity. That idea unsettled me in the best way. It provoked something that I had sensed but never quite been able to articulate. How youth-led think tanks like STEAR are still, at least from my very personal experience, so often positioned at the margins, as symbolic participants. We are primarily brought in for the sake of generational inclusion, rather than as legitimate epistemic actors. Do not get me wrong. I am not saying this with resentment. I would rather say it with clarity. We are often invited to echo rather than originate. To consult, not to contest. And often, which I find very frustrating, to be fresh but not foundational. That very keynote of Mavis forced me to ask myself: What if what we at STEAR are building is not just preparatory? What if our model—transnational, virtual, decentralized—is not something to outgrow, but rather a model that that allows us to offer a different logic of knowledge production altogether? What if we’re not “still becoming” because we’re incomplete, but because we are actively experimenting with a different future of what a think tank could be?
At that very moment, I realised the discomfort I’d been carrying wasn’t a sign of failure—it was a sign that we’re sitting at the edge of something. And maybe that edge is where a youth-led organisation like STEAR are meant to be.
But to be clear, being on the edge is surely not easy. It is unstable ground, where validation is often scarce, where expectations are unclear, and the path ahead is rather more speculative than strategic. We often discuss a concept called “liminality” in anthropology. It describes the in-betweenness, a space where categories and boundaries are blurred. A space where transformation is possible, and often is sought, but not guaranteed. That is where I feel STEAR sits today, and it has been sitting there since the very beginning it was established: not fully recognised within the mainstream policy world, but we are also not entirely outside it either. STEAR, as a youth-led think tank, constantly navigates the paradox of being both visible and peripheral. We are frequently applauded for our fresh and innovative ideas, but rarely entrusted with influence. And that very liminal edge we are in is not just institutional, it is also deeply personal, especially among my board members and line managers. As a leader, I often feel caught between managing expectations of professionalism while simultaneously preserving the raw, the so-called “experimental spirit of our youth-ness” which makes STEAR meaningful in the first place.
It was during the OTT Conference that I learned the language and gained the courage to name this very discomfort. Throughout the two days, I saw others grappling with similar tensions. Between evidence and influence. Between foresight and relevance. Between being taken seriously and staying true to one’s mission. I learned that many of us, not just youth-led think tanks, are standing at our very own edges. The primary difference is that for youth-led initiatives like STEAR, we are somehow expected to leap with far fewer nets. And yet, what I took home with me is that there is power in this position.
Maybe the edge is not a limitation. Perhaps, we should start embracing it as a vantage point. A space from which we can see the system clearly enough to reconfigure it.
That very realisation later came into sharper focus when I participated in one of the conference’s workshops, Transforming Evidence for Policy. As I listened to facilitators and to lessons learned by my groupwork members, I felt a quiet affirmation stir in me. One that is rooted not just in my role as the President of STEAR, but in my training as an anthropologist. In my discipline, I am taught to always interrogate how knowledge is constructed, whose voices get included and whose are excluded, and what gets left out when “objectivity” is defined too narrowly. And yet, despite that awareness, I saw myself in the examples being critiqued: the polished articles and policy blogs we produce, the very carefully footnoted reports, the calibrated tone we use to sound like we belong.
At STEAR, I must admit that we have often chased credibility in all the “conventional” ways. In a way, I think we have internalised a model that dictates that our professionalism must look a certain way, speak a certain way, and cite certain sources. However, this workshop provided me with a space to pause and ask: What if our credibility doesn’t lie in mirroring dominant norms? What if it actually lies in our ability to hold tension, to embrace ambiguity, to centre lived experience without having to translate it into technocratic language?
Perhaps our value lies not in being able to “speak policy,” but rather in reframe the policy conversation—from the periphery, with questions that unsettle more than they resolve.
And that very reframing brought me straight back to the question I have been circling since the plane ride home: as STEAR enters its fifth year, what are we actually trying to be?
The edge, after all, is not just a site of creativity, but it is also a site of tension. And nowhere was that clearer than during the Think Tanks as Training Grounds for Cultivating Policy Leaders. I saw STEAR mirrored in every example discussed—our mentorships, alumni networks, leadership pipelines, and the countless young minds STEAR helped provide space to grow. However, I also saw a trap: the unspoken assumption that youth-led think tanks exist primarily to prepare the next generation to fit into systems that we ourselves quietly critique. Are we inadvertently grooming our peers to replicate hierarchies we hope to dismantle? Are we equipping them to navigate exclusionary policy architectures, or to challenge the foundations on which those architectures rest?
That, for me, is the anthropological tension that keeps returning. Questioning whether we are reinforcing dominant policy cultures or pluralising them. Are we simply adapting, or are we imagining something more radically inclusive? For sure, these questions are not in anyway can be answered easily. However, what is more important to note is that they do insist we slow down and pay attention to what we are becoming.
I left Johannesburg not with certainty, but with clarity of intention. I shifted my focus away from asking how youth-led think tanks like STEAR can be “more relevant” or “more impactful.” Instead, I am now asking: Who are we in the knowledge production ecosystem? What kinds of knowledge do we privilege? Whose voices are amplified when we try to sound professional—and whose get erased?
So no, I do not believe think tanks should become fortunetellers—predicting and reacting to every policy trend. However, I do think we should become future-makers—staying grounded in the present while having the courage to prototype new models of belonging, collaboration, and thought.
For STEAR, turning five is not a victory lap. It’s a mirror. A moment to look inward before we look ahead. It’s a chance to realign—not just with where the world is going, but with who we are when no one’s watching. To step back into the messy middle, not with insecurity, but with intention.
Because we’re not done becoming. And that’s okay.
In a world addicted to acceleration, maybe the most radical thing we can do is slow down long enough to ask:
What kind of think tank do we want to be—and who gets to decide?