This article is taken from the summer 2026 issue of Dazed. Buy a copy of the magazine here.

In 2003, 1.5 million people took to the streets of central London to protest the Iraq war. Organised by the Stop the War Coalition, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Muslim Association of Britain, alongside other social justice groups, it was the largest political demonstration in British history. Among the sea of people that turned out for the event was 30-year-old Northern Irish photographer Gareth McConnell, who took portraits of young protesters filled with rage towards their government and its march towards war. 

Twenty three years on, McConnell found himself at another protest against western intervention in the Middle East – the US and Israel’s illegal war against Iran. In an exclusive project for Dazed, he documented the young people who were at the protest, which took place in London on March 21. Replete with their Stop the War badges and banners, keffiyehs and Palestinian flags, they exhibited the same righteous anger as their 2003 counterparts. The main difference between the two protests? “Scale and demographic,” says McConnell. “It was a much smaller protest with an older crowd, but the energy was good. There was a slightly more suspicious attitude towards my presence as a photographer. There is more awareness of surveillance, consequences of protest, agent provocateurs and ill intent – all rightly so.”

Young people are often tasked with the impossible job of saving the world, while rarely being given the tools or support to do so. Their low turnout at the 2026 Stop the War protest did not surprise McConnell, who believes that older people have a responsibility to fight against what he describes as a “war on children”. “[Children’s] lives are systematically devalued by personal, political, military and economic power,” the photographer says. “Their vulnerability, their inability to resist, to be heard or to hold power accountable renders them targets. As adults, and especially as parents, you’re not just thinking about your own future, but about the kind of world being shaped for the next generation.”

The 2003 protest did not stop the UK from taking part in the Iraq war, nor has this protest prevented our complicity in the current war against Iran. (The UK government has agreed to let the US use its military bases for “defensive” purposes.) But each has shown a refusal to accept the state’s normalisation of death and violence. “In these historic and ongoing situations of profound destruction – whether it’s war, exploitation or systemic violence – hope becomes a kind of moral resistance,” McConnell says. “It could be viewed as an antidote to the numbness, cynicism and complicity that we are all vulnerable to. I am trying to be on the side of hope. The youth are the future.”