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The Philippines is facing perhaps the biggest plunder in its history that has intensified political instability and the crisis of legitimacy. The paper examines how social organizations are playing a part to hold the corrupt to account and the factors that enable and hinder them to be effective.

Paper long abstract

The Philippines is facing perhaps the biggest plunder in its history hat has intensified political instability and the crisis of legitimacy. Billions of dollars have been lost to flood control projects that were supposed to address climate change. Broad civil society and social movements have been activated under the same call of accountability and justice. The paper examines how social organizations are playing a part to hold the corrupt to account and the factors that enable and hinder them. It will examine three national organizations that are all taking part in the actions against the flood control plunder: Government Watch, a civic group that monitors government programs; Student Council Alliance of the Philippines, a student and youth coalition; and Samahan ng Nagkakaisang Pamilyang Pantawid (SNPP), a national association of beneficiaries of Conditional Cash Transfer. What were the actions taken by the groups in response to the flood control plunder? What were the differences and similarities in their actions and perspectives? What enabled and hinder their effectiveness? Whether and how they are making most of the 'anti-corruption momentum' to advance key relevant reform agenda? The paper will also present the broad picture of the flood control plunder and the emerging broader anti-corruption movement to situate the three organizations' efforts and to provide recommendations on how social organizations can better be enabled to respond to opportunities presented by crises situations such as the flood control plunder. To gather data, the researchers will conduct documents review, key informant interviews and focus group discussions.

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Focusing on Shaheen Bagh (India) alongwith feminist protests across the Global South,the paper explores how women reframe democratic participation through care, rights claims & nonviolent occupation, while states counter through law, surveillance & criminalisation, exposing contested accountability.

Paper long abstract

Feminist movements across the Global South have increasingly emerged as critical sites of democratic contestation, articulating demands that extend beyond gender equality to encompass citizenship, economic justice & state accountability. In India, the Shaheen Bagh movement (2019–2020) marked a pivotal moment in feminist political mobilisation, where Muslim women from working-class backgrounds reclaimed public space to challenge exclusionary citizenship regimes and assert constitutional belonging. This paper situates Shaheen Bagh within a broader comparative analysis of feminist movements across the Global South, including women-led protests in Sri Lanka during the 2022 economic crisis and feminist labour organising in Bangladesh’s garment sector. The paper argues that these movements exemplify a form of intersectional feminist politics in which gender-based claims are inseparable from questions of class, religion, caste, labour, and democratic participation. At Shaheen Bagh, feminist mobilisation reconfigured protest politics through practices of care, constitutional performance, and sustained non-violent occupation. Similar forms of feminist resistance appear across the Global South, where women confront economic precarity, state violence, and authoritarian governance in contexts marked by limited institutional responsiveness. The analysis foregrounds how states respond to such mobilisation through legal regulation, deploying public order laws, emergency powers, surveillance, and criminal sanctions to contain and delegitimise women’s collective action. Yet feminist movements have simultaneously invoked constitutional guarantees, human rights norms, and transnational feminist solidarities to claim legitimacy and visibility. It concludes that feminist movements illuminate alternative democratic imaginaries in the Global South, challenging narrow conceptions of participation and reasserting accountability from the margins of formal politics.

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Despite maintaining steady economic growth in the last decade, the July 2024 uprising toppled the Hasina regime. Based on literature surveys, interviews, and content analysis, this study examines the causes and impact of the uprising, as well as the subsequent political reforms that followed.

Paper long abstract

Bangladesh's polity has faced numerous setbacks in its efforts to build democratic institutions. Compared to other major democracies, Bangladesh has experimented with diverse political systems ranging from parliamentary to military dictatorship over the last five decades. The political leadership in Bangladesh received limited exposure to democratic institution-building. The perplexing moves during the post-independent era were contributed to by the legacies of the country's pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial heritage. In most cases, post-independent governments attempted to maintain single-party dominance, thereby undermining the role of leading opposition parties. The recent Monsoon Revolution, or the July uprising that toppled the Awami League regime, is the result of oppression, murders, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings over the last 15 years. Anger over these issues, combined with the 36-day student movement. The protests that led to Hasina’s downfall had quickly escalated from student demonstrations on campuses to a nationwide mass revolution, with hundreds of thousands calling for her removal and the return of democracy. Hasina’s government responded with an onslaught of violence and bullets, leaving hundreds dead and thousands injured. Ahead of the downfall of the regime in August 2024. The people of Bangladesh have ousted that regime with the hope of restoring true democracy. The present study analyses the background of the July Revolution, its political and socio-cultural impact and the subsequent political reforms. By employing qualitative approaches, including ethnographic and historical methods, the investigation will be grounded in a literature survey, interviews, and content analysis from a political history perspective.

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The genocide perpetrated by Sheikh Hasina's government in the anti-discrimination movement led to the July Mass Uprising of 2024 in Bangladesh, by which Sheikh Hasina was overthrown. This paper examines the motives, nature, and anticipation of this mass uprising in Bangladesh.

Paper long abstract

The overthrown Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, was elected to the Office for the second time in 2009. However, since then, she established an authoritarian regime by disenfranchising the people and persecuting opposition political parties, and continued to power for consecutive four terms till she was overthrown by the July Mass Uprising in 2024. She transformed the history of the Great War of Liberation (People's War) of Bangladesh (1971) into her party's sole property, and she used the spirit of the Liberation War to establish her prolonged autocratic regime. She allowed her collaborators to smuggle millions of people's hard-earned money out of the country. To remain in power, she undermined the country's interests with his collaborators and eroded professionalism in the government by politicising all state institutions, including the judiciary. By giving quota privileges to thousands of fake freedom fighters and their children and grandchildren, her government deprived the ordinary people of government jobs. She rendered the entire administrative machinery almost incompetent through an unreasonable quota system for her own people in the name of the Freedom Fighters’ quota. However, the genocide perpetrated by Sheikh Hasina's government in the anti-discrimination and anti-quota movement led to an unprecedented mass uprising in July 2024. The victory was achieved at the expense of students' lives at universities, colleges, schools, madrasas, and other institutions nationwide. This paper examines the motives, nature, and anticipation of the July Mass Uprising in Bangladesh.

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This paper explores how digital journalism is practiced in Bangladesh amid political regime change. Drawing on in-depth interviews with journalists from two major news outlets, the study explores how political pressure, legal risk, and digital technologies intersect in everyday newsroom work.

Paper long abstract

The paper examines how digital journalism is practiced amid ongoing political regime change and intensifying state regulation within the broader socio-political and regulatory context of Bangladesh.

This paper draws on qualitative data generated through in-depth interviews with journalists, editors, and newsroom personnel from two major Bangladeshi news organizations: The Daily Prothom Alo and Channel 24. By foregrounding journalists’ narratives, the study captures how political regime change is understood and negotiated at the level of everyday journalistic practice.

The study is analytically informed by Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which conceptualizes digital journalism as a socio-technical practice produced through interactions between human actors and non-human elements such as digital platforms, algorithms, metrics, and legal frameworks.

Findings reveal that digital journalism practices in Bangladesh are profoundly shaped by political regime change and multidimensional state pressures. Interviewees described how legal instruments, particularly digital security and media regulations, influence what can be reported, how stories are framed, and how editorial risks are assessed. Legal action, surveillance, and the threat of harassment have become normalized aspects of journalistic work.

This thesis argues that digital journalism in Bangladesh should be understood as a negotiated and situated practice emerging at the intersection of political power, regulatory control, and digital transformation. By centering journalists’ voices during a period of political regime change, the study contributes to broader debates on digital journalism in the Global South and highlights how technological change is inseparable from questions of governance, power, and professional survival.

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In what ways do protest grievances and strategies vary by regime-type? This paper answers this question through a mixed-method study of a unique global protest event dataset of 96 countries and case-based protest dataset of three electoral autocracies: Pakistan, Nigeria, and Mozambique.

Paper long abstract

This article analyses variation in protests across regimes by focusing on two aspects of protests: grievances and strategies. In doing so, it builds on Tilly’s work on regimes and repertoires. It uses a multi-method design by using a unique global dataset that combines two existing global datasets with case-based analysis. The global dataset reveals that while the number of protests reduces as the regime-type becomes more autocratic, the order of distribution of protest grievances is the same across regimes: political failure, economic injustice, civil rights and global justice. This is followed by how macro-level analysis of variations in protest grievances across regime types by combining two global datasets on protest grievances and regime-types. It compliments this global analysis with an original qualitatively-rich protest event dataset from three electoral autocracies, Pakistan, Mozambique and Nigeria to offer qualitative insights on strategic choices made in the context of their regime.

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Does failed justice fuel new violence? This study quantifies how poor transitional justice (TJ) creates a culture of impunity, leading post-conflict states to violently repress nonviolent movements. I'll explain this using the FE Regression model, where my DV: state repression, and IV: TJ Quality.

Paper long abstract

Recently, countries like Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Morocco, Peru, the Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico, Bulgaria, Serbia, etc., experienced youth uprisings, often referred to as Generation Z (Gen-Z) protests. Some of these countries have experienced conflict in the past, some haven’t. The level of human rights abuses during these protests varies significantly; for instance, Bangladesh had 1,400 casualties, while Nepal had 76, and others reported very few or no casualties at all. Why do some states show such brutality? Doesn't the fear of accountability deter them?

I am interested in understanding whether a ‘culture of impunity’, which allows states to use violence against their own nonviolent citizens, has arisen from a failure to address past injustices, indicative of poor transitional justice. I hypothesize that post-conflict countries with lower "Transitional Justice Quality" scores will demonstrate significantly higher levels of violent repression against nonviolent protesters.

To investigate this, I will examine both violent and nonviolent post-conflict countries with transitional justice mechanisms in place. I will assess Transitional Justice Quality using the Transitional Justice Database (TJDB) and evaluate the level of repression or crackdowns using the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) dataset. Both datasets are publicly available and considered reliable. The time frame for my study will be from 1990 to 2025. I plan to use the Fixed Effects Regression (FE) method, controlling for the variables such as GDP per capita (from the World Bank data), level of democracy (Polity V data), and history of conflict (ACLED or UCDP data).

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Paper short abstract

The people’s movement in Sri Lanka (2022), Bangladesh (2024), and Nepal (2025) share a pattern of public discontent. This paper analyses the issues that triggered these uprisings and tries to explain whether these movements signal enduring governance reform or episodic expressions of disgruntlement.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, the youth-led uprisings across the South Asian region have illustrated a growing crisis of democratic governance and development, economic instability, institutional failure, declining political legitimacy, and demands for government reform. The Aragalaya movement in Sri Lanka (2022), the July Revolution in Bangladesh (2024), and the Gen-Z Movement in Nepal (2025) all share a similar pattern of public discontent, especially among younger generations. Along with the dissatisfaction of the regimes, these uprisings reflected the strong demand of citizens for accountability, structural governance reform, and responsive institutional framework. In addition, these movements also highlight the uncertainty regarding the future of democracy in the South Asian region.

This paper analyses the political, economic, and social issues that triggered the recent uprisings in South Asia by using a comparative qualitative analysis. Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) with youth activists, politicians, journalists, civil society actors, and academicians in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal contributed to understanding the trends and the emerging political outcomes following the uprisings. The analysis is guided by a theoretical framework that combines Bauman’s theory of late modernity and bureaucratic crisis, Tilly’s concept of contentious politics, and McAdam’s Political Process Theory. This approach will explain how these South Asian uprisings differ in their trajectories and consequences, despite their commonalities. By situating South Asian protests within broader debates on prefigurative politics and democratic renewal, the study contributes to understanding whether these movements signal enduring political transformation, sustainable governance reform or episodic expressions of disgruntlement.

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We present on issues of gender division and representation in Nepal’s latest Gen-Z movement, including the lack of socio-political accountability within the community regarding women in politics, by presenting results of interviews with women Gen-Z leaders and qualitative social media analysis.

Paper long abstract

We will present on issues of gender division and representation in Nepal’s latest Gen-Z movement, including the lack of socio-political accountability within the community regarding women in politics. On September 8, 2025, Nepal witnessed an uprising by “Gen-Z” on the streets, triggered by a social media ban where 72 people lost their lives, the government was toppled, leading to elect the new Prime Minister of Nepal. This protest was also in response to various social and political crises in Nepal, including ongoing corruption. Within this movement, various male leaders have emerged as the organizers and the taken major roles in the movement; however, we see less female representation, while there were many female voices who were actively organizing this movement (Dahal, R. D., 2024; Baniya, 2024). Siera Tamang (2009) argued that to understand women’s politics in Nepal, we need to understand political history and the depiction of women and their agency. Building upon this, we will present the results of our questions (a) how social movements continue to repeat the exclusionary practices in Nepal, and (b) how women and LGBTQIA+ voices during such movements get suppressed. To answer these questions, we chose two methodological approaches: narrative inquiry with women leaders and the participants of the Gen-Z movement (Ethics review pending), and (b) analysis of the social media comments on the posts made by various female leaders. We have invited one of the Gen-Z women leaders as the respondent of our panel.

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The study examines Sri Lanka's civic movement in 2022, which arose from economic and governance crises. Using interviews and literature, it finds that the government did not fulfil the demands of protestors, such as improved economic and political standards, reflecting failure in crisis management.

Paper long abstract

Sri Lanka is a country transitioning from ethno-religious tensions and a thirty-year protracted civil war. The COVID-19 outbreak, the Russian-Ukrainian war, declining incomes from tourism and foreign remittances, and the Government of Sri Lanka’s (GoSL) decision to ban chemical fertilisers in agriculture were disastrous for the Sri Lankan economy in 2022, resulting in food, fuel, and medicine shortages and blackouts. The people’s struggle, called “Aragalaya”, an organic, nonviolent civic movement led by the youth, emerged in March 2022 in Sri Lanka in response to the polycrisis. The “Aragalaya” movement later transformed into a platform of ethnic harmony, creativity, and political enlightenment. This movement culminated in the resignation of the government and the President. There is a controversy about whether the GoSL’s response to Aragalaya addressed the true objectives of the protestors. This qualitative study used primary and secondary data from fifty semi-structured interviews and the available literature to assess the GoSL’s response to Aragalaya protestors, grounded in the theoretical framework of Collaborative Crisis Management. The GoSL violently repressed peaceful protestors using force and draconian laws. This study found that most people still struggle to restore their living standards amid severe austerity measures. This study concludes that the protestors’ demands, such as improving the quality of life and inclusive governance, have not yet been achieved, even after a significant political change that transferred power to a pro-Marxist political party for the first time in the country’s history, which reflects the failure in developing a coherent participatory approach to crisis management.

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Paper short abstract

On Sept 8, 2025, Nepal’s Gen Z protests, sparked by social media restrictions and corruption, escalated from semi-private digital peer networks on TikTok and Discord to street demonstrations. Trust-based networks shaped collective identity, coordinated action, and enabled large-scale mobilization.

Paper long abstract

On September 8, 2025, nationwide Gen Z protests in Nepal, which resulted in fatalities among youth participants aged 16–29, marked a significant state–society confrontation following months of digitally coordinated mobilization. Initially triggered by social media restrictions and persistent political corruption, protest activity emerged from semi-private digital peer networks on platforms such as TikTok and Discord before expanding into large-scale street demonstrations. Existing scholarship on collective action tends to emphasize formal organizational structures, visible leadership, and in-person mobilization, often overlooking the role of intermediated and covert interpersonal solidarities within digital networks. Drawing on media reports, press releases, and interviews with Gen Z leaders, this study examines how digitally mediated peer relations enabled geographically dispersed youth to articulate personalized grievances, cultivate collective identity, and coordinate contentious action. The analysis shows that youth activists leveraged the state-led expansion of digital infrastructure—particularly internet access—to expose political corruption and contest restrictive policies, while trust-based semi-private networks functioned as pre-mobilization spaces where shared meanings and strategic coordination developed prior to public protest. These networks provided the organizational foundation that facilitated the rapid transition from online interaction to street-level mobilization. By foregrounding digitally mediated peer networks as sites of collective identity formation and coordination, this study extends political opportunity and network theories to contemporary youth movements, highlighting how informal digital solidarities can underpin large-scale political mobilization in semi-authoritarian contexts.

Keywords: interpersonal mediation, personalized peer networks, digitally mediated solidarity, Gen Z mobilization

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Do movements like the July uprising in Bangladesh especially in a political transitional period, enhance independent journalism? Or they instead constrain it? Following Chenoweth’s concept of smart repression, this study aimed at identifying the particular indicators used to constrain journalism.

Paper long abstract

The July Movement-2024 was widely seen as an opportunity for democratic renewal, particularly through the expansion of free speech, expression and a free journalism. It generated hope that journalism in Bangladesh would finally free from heavy censorship that was widespread during the previous political regime. Contrary to these expectations, journalism appears to have narrowed rather than expanded after the uprising. Thus, this contradiction raises a vital issue, do movements like the July uprising in Bangladesh especially in a political transitional period, enhance independent journalism? Or they instead constrain it? Following Chenoweth’s concept of smart repression that emphasizes control strategies that avoid direct violence rather an environment of suppression and fear within the news organizations, this study aimed at identifying the particular indicators used to constrain journalism. Using purposive snowball sampling, participants (n=25) were recruited from ten (n=10) different mainstream news organizations both from urban and rural area. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were followed focusing on the suppression model indicators. Both deductive and inductive approaches were followed as guided by the smart repression model, the analysis also followed themes emerged inductively from the data. The findings show that repression of journalism did not fade after the uprising rather, it continued in more strategic ways. During the interim regime, mob lynch, political labeling, pressure from multiple authorities expanded an atmosphere of fear that encouraged journalists to censor themselves.