Year 12 Hillcrest High School student Nisha Novell won the United Nations Speech Competition last week for the Waikato Region.
The topic of the speech - human security in diverse community - would not be your usual area of interest for a teenager but Nisha quickly became engrossed in the subject.
"It's basically a synonym for human safety, and that might be difficult in diverse communities," she said.
Nisha's research led her to a number of surprising discoveries.
"I looked at a study they had done at RAND [an American non-profit global policy think tank], which investigated the effect of American armed forces. They did a study over 40 years of terrorism. They studied 650 terrorist groups and one of the really interesting points was that eight per cent of terrorist groups ceased because of military opposition, but they also said 10 per cent ceased because they had actually achieved their objectives.