Every generation has its protest moment. It was 1968 for the Boomers, with their student uprisings and civil-rights protests. It was the 1980s for Gen X, with their anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear movements. In the early 2010s, millennials rose up with Occupy and the Arab Spring. And in 2025, Gen Z took to the streets.
Last week, youth-led protests in Madagascar forced out President Andry Rajoelina out of office. That followed the Gen-Z toppling of rulers in Nepal and Peru, and upheavals in Indonesia, the Philippines, Kenya, Morocco, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
On city streets across Asia, Africa and South America, the “One Piece” pirate flag has become the unofficial symbol of young resistance. “The TikTok generation” is “demanding” political change, said the Financial Times, “and, in some cases”, they’re getting it.
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“What connects these youth-led protests is a shared sense that traditional political systems aren’t responsive to their generation’s concerns – whether that’s corruption, climate change or economic inequality,” Sam Nadel, director of Social Change Lab, told The Independent. “Protest then becomes the logical outlet.”
The “immediate trigger” may vary from country to country, said Katrin Bennhold in The New York Times but there are commonalities in the cause. Take Nepal and Madagascar: both have a population with a median age under 30; both have high youth unemployment, and both are countries where “patronage” is “endemic”.
Central to the spread and co-ordination of protests are social media platforms that “defy physical distance and turbocharge a shared language and culture”. Discord, widely used by gamers but largely overlooked by older generations, has been central to circumventing government communications bans.
There’s a “growing cross-border dimension to Gen Z activism”, said the Institute for Economics and Peace. Movements in one country learn and draw inspiration from movements in another. “Shared strategies include decentralised leadership, the rapid circulation of digital content, and the use of cultural symbols.”
Perhaps what’s “most interesting” about the countries “seized by Gen Z protest” is “what they are not”, said Christian Caryl on Foreign Policy. They are not autocracies but democracies – albeit often “illiberal, corrupt or grossly unequal” ones. And most of the young demonstrators want to see their grievances addressed “through a renewal of those democratic institutions, rather than a wholesale rejection of them”. It seems they have “an underlying faith in the possibility of reform”.
What next?
The protestors’ lack of “obvious leaders” is a “strength, making them hydra-headed and harder to suppress”, said the Financial Times. But it’s also a weakness: “without the means to convert legitimate anger into coherent policies”, they are “susceptible to charismatic strongmen offering instant solutions”.
In Nepal and Madagascar, “what drove them, and what has happened since the surprise revolutions unseated two governments” speak to that paradox, said the NYT’s Bennhold. The military has now seized power in Madagascar and, in Nepal, the interim prime minister has “frozen out” the youth-protest voice.
“The young Gen Z revolutionaries have real power. But they don’t have the power to control what they’ve begun, or to ensure that the movements they started actually improve their lives.”
