Every year, Western donors deploy vast sums of development assistance to dampen the appeal, among the world’s youth, of militias, pirates and terrorists. But guided by little in the way of empirical evidence, it is an enterprise plagued by unclear payoffs and unintended consequences. The new Mercy Corps report, Youth & Consequences: Unemployment, Injustice and Violence, tackles some of the most persistent assumptions driving youth programming in fragile states. Drawing on interviews and surveys with youth in Afghanistan, Colombia and Somalia, we find the principal drivers of political violence are rooted not in poverty, but in experiences of injustice: discrimination, corruption and abuse by security forces.