- Convenors:
-
David Jackman
(University of Oxford)
Oliver Walton (University of Bath)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Gendered, generational & social justice
Short Abstract
What is behind this wave of Gen-Z protests and revolutions? This panel invites papers examining this across the Global South and beyond. We will explore the underlying grievances, diverse trajectories and possible futures of these movements.
Description
Youth protests appear to be escalating across the world under the banner of “Gen-Z”. The most striking cases can be seen in South Asia, where youth led movements have brought regime change in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. Many see these as political revolutions, and together they have been dubbed a ‘South Asian Spring’. Such protests are spreading and have recently brought change in Madagascar and serious unrest elsewhere. This panel invites presentations offering new perspectives on these movements. Core themes to be examined will be grievances, trajectories and futures. Many core grievances appear to be common, including anger around political corruption and joblessness. But where do they diverge and why? Protest trajectories also appear to differ. Questions can be raised around the marginalisation of women and minority groups, the actual role of youth within such movements, and the extent to which these movements can bring structural change rather than just regime change. And finally, what lies on the horizon for these movements? In a world where AI promises to radically disrupt the labour market, what are the prospects for political stability and how can public policy begin to address challenges of this scale?
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Bangladesh's 2024 revolution was one of the largest in history, yet in many ways doesn't seem to have changed much. Why is this?
Paper long abstract
The student movement that became a mass movement and toppled Bangladesh’s longstanding and authoritarian Awami League government, has become known as a ‘mass uprising’, a ‘Monsoon Revolution’ or ‘July Revolution’. Quickly after events of August 2024, students called for a New Republic and spoke of ‘Bangladesh 2.0’. What has become clear however is that while the face of the old regime has crumbled, the state machinery behind it, and criminal politics on the street, both largely continue. This was one of the largest political revolutions in history but doesn’t really seem to have changed much. Why is this? This paper will offer three explanations. First, the basic structure of Bangladesh’s political economy, organised as syndicates, is a deeply entrenched form of organisation that reflects the country’s decentralised forms of political authority. The revolution will likely reaffirm rather than undermine this. Second, despite the discourse of a ‘Bangladesh 2.0’ the imaginations of a possible state and politics are largely better versions of what already exists. The intellectual horizon about possible futures is (very understandably) limited, and there seem few plausible and significant routes to engineering positive change within that, at least in the short term. Third, the wider structural conditions that drove this revolution (such as youth unemployment) are colossal challenges requiring huge change to address. And yet without huge change, more uprisings or revolutions are a very real possibility.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya protests of 2022 from the perspective of the queer community. It highlights how these protests served as a contested site of dissent, highlighting opportunities for transformational change as well as persistent constraints.
Paper long abstract
The 2022 Aragalaya protests marked a watershed in Sri Lanka’s political trajectory, forcing the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and paving the way for the National People’s Power (NPP) to win the 2024 elections. This paper examines the dynamics and consequences of this movement, arguing that while the protests were youth-driven, they were not youth-led. Structural marginalisation—manifested in high youth unemployment, limited political representation, and systemic corruption—shaped the language and strategies of protest, including calls for “system change” and participatory democracy.
While most analysis of the Aragalaya has focused on how the movement contributed to processes of democratic change, we explore how the movement’s wider calls for system change intersected with marginalised groups’ calls for intersectional justice. Queer groups leveraged the moment to claim visibility—through initiatives such as the first public Pride march —yet faced persistent constraints. Patriarchal norms, heteronormative protest sites, and a lack of resonance with communities North and East limited the inclusivity of the movement. We explore how queer activists navigated layered challenges of exclusion and repression. While some inclusive spaces like the Equality Shelter emerged, activists faced internal divisions between NGO-linked and grassroots actors, and across ethnic and class lines, raising questions about whose queer aspirations were prioritised. These fractures were compounded by state surveillance, intimidation, and arrests. This paper therefore helps us to understand both the transformative potential and the structural limits of such movements, while highlighting how the Aragalaya protests served as a contested site of dissent.
Paper short abstract
Comparing Nepal and India’s borderlands, this paper revisits the “South Asian Spring,” showing how Gen-Z mobilisation diverges: centripetal anti-corruption protest in Nepal versus decentralised, autonomy-seeking movements in Assam and Ladakh shaped by precarity, ecology, and digital repertoires.
Paper long abstract
Recent debates on youth politics in South Asia have increasingly treated large-scale protests as evidence of a region-wide generational rupture. This paper challenges that reading by asking why similar Gen-Z grievances of economic precarity, corruption, and political exclusion generate sharply different forms of mobilisation across contexts. It revisits the “South Asian Spring” thesis through a comparative analysis of youth mobilisation in Nepal, where protests consolidated into a nationally coordinated anti-corruption movement, and in India’s political peripheries, where mobilisation has taken decentralised and autonomy-oriented forms, including youth assertions in Bodoland and Karbi Anglong in Assam and the climate and statehood movement in Ladakh.
The study draws on multi-sited ethnography and digital analysis of protest communication, combining interviews with movement leaders and activists with vernacular social media material. The analysis identifies a clear divergence in protest trajectories. In Nepal, mobilisation has been predominantly centripetal, oriented toward influencing or reforming the state centre. In contrast, mobilisation in India’s border regions is largely centrifugal, oriented toward autonomy from central authority.
The paper argues that this divergence is shaped less by the intensity of grievances than by differences in state incorporation capacity and centre–periphery relations. In peripheral settings, young actors rework longstanding claims for political recognition through a contemporary grammar of economic precarity, ecological stress, and unequal access to employment. Political stability in South Asia will hinge on the capacity of states to respond to enduring claims for dignity, livelihoods, and political recognition articulated through Gen-Z mobilisation beyond metropolitan centres.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyzes the role of digital mobilization in the glocal precursors of the South Asian Spring. Digital activism reconfigures the Habermasian public sphere into a heterogenous protest-public where youth-led participation enables developmental politics.
Paper long abstract
The social-media discourse that surrounded the 2014 Jadavpur University student protest against on-campus sexual violence constituted a nodal point in the emergence of a new model of digitally mediated political agitation. The #hokkolorob campaign mobilized nearly 100,000 people to march in solidarity with the student protestors, as reported by the Telegraph, demonstrating the efficacy of digital mobilization.
This phenomenon subsequently recurred in movements like the #justiceforRGKar agitations and the Nepalese GenZ protests, each of which achieved varying degrees of mobilizational success through digital activism.
This paper argues that digital activism is an indispensable part of contemporary organized agitation. Social media equips the youth to undertake a constant decolonization of institutional and political spaces. It enables engagement in newer forms of resource mobilization which leads to the creation of a digitally bolstered transnational space of collective action where political mobilization of the youth reaches a multiplicity of intersectional demographics, giving rise to heterogenous ‘protest-publics’.
The paper moves beyond the structural functionalist reading of movements and critically analyzes how youth-led digital agitations revise the Habermasian public sphere through practices aligned with Nancy Fraser’s conception of counter-publics. By examining the glocal precursors of what may be understood as a South Asian Spring, the paper highlights how social media reconfigures protest-space into a site of political experimentation, where youth's political agency facilitates the reimagination of developmental politics in protest spaces.
Paper short abstract
Why do Nigerian youth movements mobilise hundreds of thousands yet fail to achieve change? Comparing #EndSARS (2020) and #EndBadGovernance (2024) reveals how class, regional, and demand fragmentation prevent the formation of durable coalitions to force state concessions.
Paper long abstract
Why do Nigerian youth movements mobilise hundreds of thousands yet fail to achieve policy reforms or regime change? This paper examines #EndSARS (2020) and #EndBadGovernance (2024) to understand why neither protest wave produced meaningful political transformation, in contrast to regime-changing youth movements in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.
Drawing on Nigerian scholarship on civil society mobilisation, youth politics, and digital activism, I argue that three interconnected fragmentations prevent these movements from building the national coalitions necessary to force state concessions. Class fragmentation separates middle-class digital activists from working-class street protesters. Regional fragmentation reflects deep north-south divisions, with each movement achieving different geographic reach but neither sustaining cross-regional infrastructure. Demand fragmentation intensifies as coalitions broaden—creating a paradox where more inclusive movements produce vaguer demands, making success harder to achieve.
These fragmentations are mutually reinforcing: class position shapes who participates digitally versus physically, which determines regional visibility, which influences demand articulation. Critically, fragmentation weakens movements' capacity to sustain pressure—cross-class coalitions dissolve after initial repression, regional divisions enable the state to isolate protests geographically, and vague demands allow governments to claim partial reforms without meaningful concessions.
Between these protests, the 2023 elections offered an alternative civic pathway that also failed, intensifying disillusionment. Analysing social media discourse, electoral data, and protest documents, I demonstrate how successive failures across both protest and electoral arenas have led to declining youth civic engagement. This Nigerian case challenges celebratory "Gen-Z spring" narratives, revealing structural barriers to building truly national youth movements in large, diverse, postcolonial states.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how Vietnamese Gen-Z pop culture, through tlinh’s music, articulates political agency and alternative futures. In a context where public dissent is constrained, care, vulnerability, and intimacy become soft yet consequential ways of reworking power.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how Gen-Z political imaginaries emerge in contexts where overt dissent is constrained, focusing on Vietnamese pop culture as a site where power and alternative futures are negotiated affectively. Taking tlinh’s music video nữ siêu anh hùng (superwoman) as a case study, the paper argues that care operates as a quiet but insurgent mode of political critique, challenging neoliberal and patriarchal norms that shape contemporary youth subjectivities.
The paper reframes Vietnamese Gen-Z politics as unfolding through cultural and creative practices that rework gendered ideals of strength, autonomy, and authority. Through close analysis of lyrics, visuals, and bodily gestures, it traces how vulnerability, interdependence, and tenderness unsettle two dominant figures of neoliberal power: the self-contained corporate woman and the hypermasculine male leader. These interventions do not confront power directly; instead, they move around it, disarming its affective foundations and opening space for alternative modes of agency.
Situating this analysis within feminist theories of care and cultural politics, the paper shows how pop culture functions as a space where political feelings are rehearsed and circulated, particularly for Gen-Z audiences navigating disillusionment with formal institutions. At the same time, it remains attentive to the limits of such interventions, recognising how care may be appropriated or reabsorbed within dominant hierarchies.
By foregrounding pop culture as a site of soft revolution, this paper contributes to debates on Gen-Z movements by expanding what counts as political action, highlighting how gendered, affective, and everyday practices shape the trajectories and futures of youth-led transformations.
Paper short abstract
Kenya witnessed sustained Gen Z protests spanning several weeks between June and August 2024. This paper examines how and when online momentum becomes offline action, the political and institutional factors that shape outcomes and the organisational tactics that keep youth movements alive.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the rise and evolution of Gen Z-led movements in Kenya, focusing on their strategies, outcomes, and post-mobilisation trajectories. Drawing on key informant interviews with youth across several regions in Kenya, the analysis is organised around three interlinked dimensions: (1) the mechanisms of mobilisation and coordination, including the role of hashtags, viral content, and influencer networks; (2) the political, institutional, and discursive factors that shaped the outcomes of these protests; and (3) the pathways of post-mobilisation engagement, whether through electoral participation, alliances with civil society and professional bodies, or sustained extra-institutional activism. Situated within broader debates on youth political attitudes and participation, the study asks: How do young people act and engage in an era of upheaval? Whose voices dominate digital spaces, and how do resource inequalities reproduce hierarchies within Gen Z-led movements? How do political factors shape protest outcomes? Findings reveal that while digital platforms enabled rapid mobilisation, resource disparities privileged urban youth and constrained marginalised groups. Protest outcomes were further shaped by state repression, elite co-optation, and competing narratives that alternately delegitimised youth activism. Despite these challenges, decentralised networks and hybrid online-offline strategies helped sustain activism beyond peak protest cycles. These insights contribute to understanding the opportunities and limitations of youth-driven mobilisation in Africa and its implications for democratic transformation.
Paper short abstract
A case study of Mozambique, a Gen Z country, showing how hardly credible behaviour by the IMF and the World Bank imposed austerity, an oligarch state, and a resource curse. Mozambique has been recolonised and impoverished. Local people are impoverised, and Gen Z is in the streets.
Paper long abstract
Mozambique saw major demonstrations from October 2024 to March 2025 in which police shot and killed 350 protesters; one social media broadcaster was killed live on air. Poverty, inequality and corruption are increasing; the 2023 and 2024 elections were manifestly fraudulent. Gas, rubies and graphite have not created prosperity, and instead turned Cabo Delgado province into a resource curse with a civil war that has been going on there since 2017.
Youth see no future for themselves at the same time that they see their leaders becoming ever wealthier, so they blame their own local elites. But these young people have been harshly affected by post-cold-war neoliberal and free market economic changes. Mozambique was pushed into its Gen Z crisis by the IMF and World Bank, donors, the G7 group of capitalist industrialised countries, and global corporations. They imposed the same "shock therapy" that was imposed on the USSR to force the political elite to use their power to corruptly take control of banks, mines and businesses. They are the "oligarchs" who became wealthy by making links with multinational companies, which exploited the markets and resources. It was not a greedy elite but external pressure that corrupted government, but that elite has grown and is the now the active partner of recolonisation.