Gen Z movements around the world have captured global attention, and many movements share similar characteristics in terms of tactics and forms of participation. Yet the driving forces behind these movements cannot be treated as a monolith. The protests in, for example, Bangladesh, Nepal, or Morocco, emerge from complex local contexts. At the same time, structurally similar forces exert pressures on youth and society more broadly, and the Gen Z protests represent an unfinished struggle against injustice, inequality, and inadequate governance.
A Generation Shaped by Permanent Crisis
Generation Z, comprising those born roughly between 1997 and 2012, grew up witnessing what feels like a permanent crisis. Their formative years have been shaped by climate breakdown, widening inequality, the normalisation of violence and war through images on social media and the news, and growing dissonance between democratic ideals and authoritarian political realities. In many places, they have watched older elites consolidate wealth and power while public services deteriorate and futures narrow. In this context, it is unsurprising that Gen Z has emerged as a central political actor in a global wave of mobilisation, demanding accountability, an end to corruption, and the opportunity to live with dignity.
This essay introduces the Gen Z: Voices of a Global Generation dossier on youth-led democratic engagement by offering an analytical framing of ‘Gen Z protests’ as globally visible interventions into a dominant neoliberal order, while also insisting that these movements cannot be understood through universal templates. The Gen Z: Voices of a Global Generation dossier foregrounds youth as agents reclaiming democratic space, formulating visions for their future, and building momentum for political participation. At the same time, it explicitly examines the role of digital tools, strategies of mobilisation (including under authoritarianism), and the political function of art and culture in driving agendas for change.
We take these questions as the point of departure, but we also warn against media formulations of protest movements as if they were interchangeable, inevitable, or politically equivalent. Gen Z mobilisations have continuities with earlier movements. Like Millennials, Gen Z activists organise through mobile phones and online networks, yet their platforms are more consolidated, more algorithmic (Sombatpoonsiri 2025), and more saturated with cultural symbols like memes. They have refined spontaneous protest and are often conspicuously leaderless, bypassing political parties and formal civil society routes sometimes as an explicit refusal, sometimes as a pragmatic strategy when institutions are co-opted, illegitimate, or dangerous. Such horizontality can be a strength (harder to decapitate, easier to scale), but it also generates strategic dilemmas under repression, such as message discipline, negotiation, and post-protest institutionalisation.
At the same time, Gen Z is also a transnational generation. Many Zoomers have learned to read the world ‘in one scroll’, make connections with a swipe, and locate local injustice within global patterns. Protests increasingly draw inspiration from each other through viral images, slogans, music, and memes. One emblem repeatedly noted in media coverage has been the Straw Hat Pirates’ Jolly Roger flag from the Japanese manga One Piece, a story about collective rebellion against an autocratic world government (Mitamura, Yoshimoto, and Kondo 2025). Such symbols are not simply youth culture. Rather, they function as political technologies. They are shared visual languages that enable recognition across borders, producing resonance without requiring identical contexts.
This essay advances two claims. First, Gen Z protests should be read as historically situated movements shaped by local political economies and state strategies, not as generational anomalies. Second, their global resonance matters: even where demands diverge, Gen Z activists repeatedly articulate an unfinished struggle against corruption, impunity, extraction, racism, and patriarchy, often through creative practices that reanimate political imagination. We illustrate these claims through the Gen Z activism in Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions. The point of these claims is not to render Gen Z responsible for solving the world’s crises, but to understand what they are doing, why it resonates, and what forms of intergenerational solidarity might follow.
1 Beyond ‘Springs’: Why History and Context Matter
Since roughly 2020 and sharply since 2024, youth-led protests have been widely described as a global ‘Gen Z wave’. Some reporting frames this as originating with a ‘South Asian Spring,’ following the successful regime transitions in Bangladesh and Nepal in 2024 and 2025, respectively (Gabel 2025; Hutt 2025; Wong 2025). Yet naming is never neutral. The ‘spring’ metaphor implies seasonality, inevitability, and a familiar story arc: awakening, uprising, liberation. But movements do not unfold on seasonal scripts. Rather, they are built on concrete histories of state violence, class stratification, gendered coercion, and unequal access to resources and public space, with great human effort and material costs.
Treating Gen Z protests as ahistorical and interchangeable risks three distortions. First, it erases political differences. Youth mobilisations in Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, Morocco, Kenya, and Egypt do not share identical targets, horizons, or risks. Even within a single country, youth politics is heterogeneous across class, gender, rural–urban divides, and ideological orientations. Second, it misrecognises agency by turning young people into symbols. Media narratives often oscillate between portraying Gen Z as reckless children and as heroic revolutionaries. Both frames flatten politics. Gen Z activists are neither naïve nor magically transformative; they are strategic actors navigating constraints often at high personal risk. Third, it obscures outcomes and afterlives. Even where protests produce headline victories – government collapse, policy reversal – ‘success’ can be partial, fragile, or appropriated by entrenched power.
A more useful approach is to treat Gen Z mobilisations as political diagnostics: they reveal where legitimacy has broken, where social contracts have collapsed, and where future-making has become structurally blocked. The question becomes not ‘Why is Gen Z so angry?’ but ‘What political economies are producing this anger, and what forms of collective imagination are emerging in response?’
Southeast Asia: Oligarchy, Austerity, and the Politics of Exposure
The empirical experience of entrenched inequality and elite impunity resonates strongly among youth across Asia. Bangladesh and Nepal in South Asia drew global attention because protests there appeared to accelerate political rupture (Gabel 2025; Pundir 2025; Wong 2025) and have since been the dominant depiction of youth movements in the continent. To underscore how context shapes protest – and to resist homogenisation – we turn to Southeast Asia, specifically Indonesia and the Philippines, where youth mobilisation is best read as an intervention into oligarchic democracy and the corruption of public goods.
Since the fall of dictatorships in the late 20th century, Indonesia and the Philippines have been celebrated as major electoral democracies in Southeast Asia. However, both are also widely characterised by democratic backsliding (the return to authoritarian state practices) and elite capture (the corrupt rule of elites), elections that coexist with political dynasties, economic oligarchies, and expanding security logics. In such contexts, Gen Z activism often targets not only ‘corruption’ in the abstract but also the everyday infrastructures through which inequality is reproduced: budgets, public services, policing, and climate vulnerability.
In Indonesia, youth anger intensified in February 2025 around fiscal choices and state violence. When austerity measures and public service cuts collided with proposals perceived as rewarding political and security elites, young people framed the issue as theft, with taxes funding corruption, militarisation, and police impunity. Protests reached a crescendo in August 2025 as students and youth networks – often decentralised and campus-based rather than party-led – mobilised across multiple cities. The state response combined repression and selective concession, employing dispersals, intimidation, and tactical retreats on particularly unpopular proposals. This pattern matters: youth movements are frequently forced into a strategic dance with states that concede just enough to defuse momentum while preserving underlying structures.
In the Philippines, youth mobilisation has been shaped by the convergence of climate exposure and political corruption. In one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries (World Risk Report 2025), flooding and extreme weather amplify everyday precarity, and infrastructure becomes a political battlefield. An estimated two million US dollars have been lost to flood control corruption yearly since 2023 (Beech 2025). As trillion-peso flood-control budgets allotted for infrastructure were awarded to ghost projects (Gera 2025) implicating those tasked with providing state oversight (see Calimbahin 2025 for more details), the state is accountable for the death toll from ‘natural disasters’ because of its failures and neglect. When large-scale corruption around public works becomes visible – through televised inquiries, leaks, or investigative reporting – Gen Z activism often shifts into a politics of exposure that names, monitors, archives, and refuses the normalisation of impunity.
In Indonesia and the Philippines, digital mobilisation is not only about bringing people to the streets; it is also about building a distributed public record against denial and forgetting. In Indonesia, the hashtags #Reformasidikorupsi (Reform corrupted) and #Demokrasidikorupsi (Democracy corrupted) revisit the promise of democracy in the 1998 Reformasi movement (Jakarta Post 2019). Meanwhile, in the Philippines, the coordinated urban mobilisations across various ideological and political lines in 2025 were scheduled on the anniversaries of the declaration of Martial Law on September 21 and the birth of the Filipino anti-colonial revolutionary Andres Bonifacio on November 30. These dates poetically link contemporary rejection of the flood control projects to the long history of struggle against tyranny and exploitation.
MENA: Youth Politics in Morocco and Egypt Tackling Gender and the Environment
Recent youth mobilisations in Morocco, often grouped under the shorthand of ‘Gen Z protests’ are best understood through a politics of dignity. The Moroccan term hogra captures a moral economy of humiliation, where citizens are treated as disposable by institutions that should protect and serve them. In an environment characterised by hogra, Gen Z anger is not only economic but also political and affective. It is a refusal to be governed with neglect and contempt and to be offered unequal life chances.
Two domains have been especially galvanising for Gen Z. First, in public services, everyday crises become a referendum on legitimacy. When hospitals fail, when schooling is degraded, when corruption appears not as an abstract problem but as understaffed wards and unsafe infrastructure, the state’s authority is experienced as a moral failure. Second, environmental crises, especially water insecurity and climate stress, increasingly shape everyday life and intensify social inequality. Climate vulnerability becomes political not merely as a global narrative but as a local experience of rationing, price increases, agricultural precarity, and uneven protections. Where state responses appear unequal and protect investors and urban elites while rural and working-class communities absorb risk, environmental crises can lead to a governance crisis.
Gender politics intersects with both. When women’s lives are lost due to medical negligence, reproductive healthcare collapses, or women’s suffering is dismissed as an unfortunate anomaly, governance failure becomes explicitly gendered. Youth outrage in this regard is a critique of a political economy that normalises preventable death and calls it misfortune. Importantly, Moroccan youth activism often combines online amplification with dispersed street mobilisations. Digital platforms allow rapid circulation of scandal, testimony, and images. They enable both coordination and moral pressure while keeping leadership diffuse. Symbolism through music, humour, and visual icons does political work in movements by translating grief and anger into shareable language that can travel across cities and classes.
Egypt presents a different problem: not the absence of youth politics, but the severe restriction of public expressions of contention. Gen Z in Egypt grew up after 2011, under the shadow of counter-revolution and criminalised protest. The street is not easily available as a democratic arena. However, this does not mean youth are depoliticised. Rather, it means politics is often displaced into digital space, cultural production, professional networks, and issue-based engagement that can remain politically navigable. Gender activism has been among the most visible arenas of Gen Z intervention. The Egyptian #MeToo wave in 2020 illustrated how young women and allies used digital platforms to create a feminist public sphere by collecting testimonies, naming perpetrators, challenging norms that silence survivors, and pressuring institutions to respond.
The Egyptian #MeToo movement that started in 2020 demonstrated several features of Gen Z politics in high-repression contexts. Gen Z uses networked testimony as collective action, rendering individual experiences political through aggregation, verification, and circulation. Exposure becomes a form of leverage where formal justice is inaccessible, and public accountability becomes a tactic. Young feminists apply institutional pressure without institutional trust, with activists pushing for reforms while remaining sceptical of state intentions and uneven enforcement. At the same time, these feminist publics operate under threat. Authoritarian regimes can selectively respond to avoid reputational damage while also policing digital morality and disciplining women’s visibility. This reveals a central tension whereby states may claim to protect women while targeting the very women who speak.
Environmental and climate politics in Egypt likewise operate under constraint. Official sustainability narratives and international climate branding can coexist with tight restrictions on grassroots organising. Youth climate engagement often takes the form of community initiatives, professionalised NGO work, or carefully framed advocacy because overt protest can trigger repression. Yet the politics remain real. Young people are acutely aware that the ecological crisis is not only natural but political, shaped by extractive development, uneven exposure, and global injustice.
Morocco and Egypt, therefore, show that Gen Z politics in the MENA cannot be reduced to a single template. It can be explosive in some cases and dispersed in others; it can be street-centred or digitally displaced. Regardless, youth politics repeatedly converges on two truths: women’s safety, dignity, and bodily autonomy are measures of political legitimacy; and ecological harm is inseparable from corruption, inequality, and the distribution of risk. This is why ‘youth, gender, and environment’ are not separate themes but are interconnected diagnostics of how power reproduces itself.
If Southeast Asia illustrates Gen Z protest pushing back against oligarchic dynasties and democratic backsliding, Morocco and Egypt illustrate how youth politics unfold under different configurations of managed pluralism, authoritarian consolidation, and constrained civic space. In all cases, Gen Z’s political engagement cannot be reduced to spectacular street uprisings. Instead, youth activism often works through issue-based mobilisation, creative expression, and everyday forms of resistance; this is especially true for gender justice and environmental crises, where the failures of governance become visceral.
2 Deep Crises, Global Connections, Continuing Resistance
Global problems of governance failures, including neglect, corruption, and repression, have various and changing faces locally but can be as widely recognisable as Donald Trump and McDonalds. The political and military machinery of states, therefore, conceal violence in confusing forms (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018) such as performative populisms, co-optations, disinformation, the vilification of gender, and greenwashing. Some use sophisticated performances of ‘democracy’ to preserve and deepen authoritarian regimes (Morgenbesser 2020). Just as states and big businesses consolidate power to further exploit environmental, human, and moral resources, the challenge of dismantling abusive systems is gargantuan and requires progressives to coordinate, call these bluffs, and reimagine resistance.
Across the diverse contexts of Gen Z protests, ‘leaderlessness’ operates as both tactic and constraint. In Nepal, for example, the swift, leaderless uprising in September 2025 was an explicit break from previous social movements in the country. Decentralised networks enable rapid scaling, especially amid distrust of parties and thin alliances, but they can also produce fragility as representation, negotiation, and long-term institutional translation remain difficult. Yet it is precisely here that Gen Z has innovated through creative practices that hold attention, sustain solidarity, and widen participation, from meme circulation to cultural symbolism.
One striking feature of recent youth movements is not simply their use of social media for logistics but how digital space enables transnational resonance through symbols, as seen in the iterations of the One Piece pirate flag across multiple sites (Mitamura, Yoshimoto, and Kondo 2025). Gen Z movements increasingly communicate through shared repertoires of pop culture references, memes, and visual shorthand. Such tactics can lower barriers to entry, allowing participation without mastery of traditional activist language and creating affective glue through shared humour and shared outrage.
Symbolic practices also counter isolation. A young person in Casablanca can see a protest in Jakarta and recognise something familiar in the experience of disposability under corrupt governance. Filipino critique of ‘nepo babies’ and inherited privilege inspired Nepali memes about political dynasties. In real time, Indonesian and Filipino outrage over budget priorities bridged islands confronting parallel cuts and scandals. These resonances are not evidence of sameness; they are evidence of shared structural conditions – postcolonial elite rule embedded in neoliberal orders – translated into different local vocabularies. The comparative point is simple: shared conditions do not produce identical politics, but they do produce recognisably related struggles.
Still, digital tools are double-edged. Platforms amplify voices but can be easily repressed by internet blackouts. Viral hashtags can consolidate publics but also invite crackdown. Online visibility can protect movements through attention, but it can be short-lived, and also expose activists to repression, harassment, and disinformation. The power of Gen Z mobilisation is inseparable from the risks Gen Z bears.
Conclusion: Politics of Hope Without Burdening Youth
This essay frames Gen Z as a tech-savvy, justifiably anxious, no-nonsense generation calling out corruption and violence and rejecting the neglect and impunity that have characterised dominant political orders. Using Southeast Asia and MENA as comparative anchors, we have underscored the heterogeneity of youth politics. Context matters. Local histories of authoritarianism, oligarchy, militarisation, and neoliberal reform shape what youth can do, what they demand, and what risks they carry. Yet diversity does not preclude resonance. Gen Z activists repeatedly make connections across spaces and times, especially where shared histories of struggle against colonialism, imperialism, neoliberal capitalism, racism, and patriarchy produce comparable forms of injustice. Chandra Tapalde Mohanty’s account of solidarity through ‘common differences’ remains useful here. Political alliances between people of diverse histories and social locations create an imagined community of resistance, woven together by opposition to forms of domination that are not just pervasive but also systemic (Mohanty 1991). Gen Z’s transnational symbols and viral repertoires do not erase difference; they enable recognition across it.
Gen Z are protesting a future that feels condemned by an imminent ecological crisis. In such conditions, youth politics can be read as a form of natality, suggesting the courage and capacity to begin again, to imagine something more (Arendt 1998, 9). This is not naïve optimism. It is a political insistence that other futures must be possible. The point of this text is not to celebrate Gen Z as saviours or to offload responsibility onto them. Rather, it is an invitation to listen, talk, and walk with them, to learn from their analyses and creative practices, to protect civic space, and to build intergenerational strategies that do not treat youth as either children or icons.
If Gen Z has made anything clear, it is that the struggle for democracy, gender justice, and ecological survival is unfinished. Their movements remind us that politics is not only institutions; it is also the collective labour of refusing disposability and insisting on dignity. In that insistence expressed through street protest, digital feminist publics, and environmental community work, Gen Z is both reacting to crises and reanimating political imagination at a moment when imagination itself is under siege.
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