How Gen Z movements around the globe shared tactics and challenges

This article How Gen Z movements around the globe shared tactics and challenges was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Indonesia. Madagascar. The Philippines. Morocco. Nepal. Tanzania. Peru. Paraguay. Timor-leste. Maldives. Kenya.

Countries with little shared history or political context, yet all were engulfed at different moments this year by the same force: street protests led overwhelmingly by Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012. 

Youth uprisings are not new, but the speed and spread of this year’s movements — ricocheting across the Global South with almost no warning — mark a distinct shift. 

From water and power shortages in Madagascar to pension reforms in Peru and nepotism and corruption in Nepal, the root causes of the protests differed, but the essence was shared — Gen Z is protesting poor governance that does not speak for them. Despite vastly different contexts, each of these countries has a majority population of young people aged 19 to 30 who are increasingly impatient for change and are taking their anger to the streets. 

“When you’re talking about people who are 16 or 26, there’s a sense of possibility, urgency and potential that is hard to recreate outside of that,” said David S. Meyer, a professor of sociology and political science at the University of California, Irvine. “Young people are more willing to take risks and are potentially more able to see injustice as something that can be remedied.” 

The 2025 protests dominoed across borders, as demonstrations in one country sparked fresh mobilization in another. According to Meyer, there is always “the possibility of contagion” in social movements, even when the underlying conditions differ sharply. The widespread use of social media may be specific to this generation, but in major protest movements of the past 15 years, language, imagery and momentum have spread around the globe. 

For instance, activists who launched Occupy Wall Street were inspired by Egypt’s Tahrir Square (the epicenter of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising), despite facing a fundamentally different political reality, Meyer said. The powerful visuals of mass mobilization fueled a sense of possibility among young people. A similar dynamic emerged after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, when protests surged rapidly across the United States and echoed internationally, propelled by shared imagery and the belief that collective action could be replicated anywhere.

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While Indonesia saw the first major Gen Z-led protests last year — fueled by soaring living costs, welfare cuts and political corruption — in 2024 Asia had already witnessed a consequential youth uprising in Bangladesh. “The July Revolution,” as it came to be called, began with high school and college students upset that many civil service jobs were reserved for descendants of the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence, instead of a more merit-based system. As online dissent moved to the streets, the protests broadened into a nationwide movement against then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s increasingly authoritarian rule. Even as people of all ages joined in, student leaders remained the central organizers and negotiators. Hasina was forced to resign and fled to India in August 2024. 

Almost simultaneously in Kenya, online frustrations over a tax hike proposal called the Finance Bill 2024 boiled over to protests on the streets of Nairobi in June 2024. They gained further momentum after government officials made comments discrediting the movement, according to Nelson Amenya. A Kenyan who lives in Paris, Amenya advocated for the protests online and organized Kenyan students in Paris against the bill. He said Kenyan youth met on X Spaces — the platform’s tool for live audio conversations — to take inspiration from other movements. From the youth-led protests in Bangladesh, they learned the approach of sustained protesting without breaks, and from the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests, they learned the philosophy of adaptability. They also studied other historic movements like the French and American Revolutions. “It was like being in a lecture room,” he said. 

The tools and tactics on display in Bangladesh and Kenya in 2024 — online agitation, decentralized organizing and rapid turnout — became the hallmarks of Gen Z protests across the world in 2025. 

A fire that spread over social media

Gen Z is known to be chronically online. They put that expertise to use to organize and rally people to these protests, all of which started with dissent on social media platforms like X, TikTok, Instagram and Discord (a communication platform popular with gamers). 

Conversations on social media networks in Indonesia in August about rising living costs, glaring inequality and controversial parliamentary housing allowances helped spread calls for protest. The demonstrations turned violent after a 21-year-old delivery driver, Affan Kurniawan, was killed by the police. President Prabowo Subianto cut lawmakers’ perks — including the controversial housing allowance — and ordered an investigation into the officers linked to the murder.  

In the Philippines, anger had been piling up online about allegations of corruption and government mismanagement, particularly tied to graft in flood control programs in a country inundated by tropical cyclones every year. In a Reddit community of Filipino activists called lifestylecheckPH, people posted about the glamorous lives of the rich and powerful. In September, the outrage sent thousands to the streets. 

On Nepali TikTok, that “lifestyle check” trend inspired the “nepo baby” trend, in which Nepali youth posted about the lavish lifestyles of politicians’ children. Soon after Filipino Gen Z took its frustrations to the streets, so did Nepali Gen Z. Protesters organized over Instagram and TikTok to launch the protests against corruption that would topple a government, then held a vote on Discord servers to elect the country’s first female prime minister, Sushila Karki, to lead the interim government. 

That same month, when Gen Z organizers in Antananarivo, Madagascar, were planning their protest online — which started as opposition to water and power cuts and expanded into demands for systemic political change — they learned from Nepal’s strategies for organizing on social media. “We were quite inspired by Nepal,” said Elliot Randriamandrato, the spokesperson for the organizing group, Gen Z Madagascar. 

Gen Z Madagascar also borrowed from Nepal what has become a symbol of these protests worldwide — a pirate flag from the Japanese anime “One Piece” — and modified it with a pink-and-green Malagasy hat called the satroka. The flag — whose name alludes to the mysterious treasure sought by the show’s protagonists, the Straw Hat Pirates, while they battle rivals and the authoritarian World Government — was first seen in the protests in Indonesia and then widely in Nepal last year. 

Later that month, Gen Z protesters in Peru marched in the capital, Lima, over a reform measure that requires young people to pay into a private pension fund. They were joined by bus and taxi drivers angry about the government’s lack of action against gang extortions. Widespread frustrations over corruption and economic insecurity helped widen the movement beyond Gen Z. But it all started with TikToks, memes and Instagram Reels.

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“It was this same massive trend on social media of saying, ‘Enough is enough, we can’t take it anymore,’” Leandro Ronak Mikail Pacheco Taipe said in Spanish. Taipe, an 18-year-old, is one of the early organizers of the Gen Z protests in Peru and a founding member of Generation Z Collective, a coalition of youth organizations and collectives, many of which formed during the protests. “Videos, trends and news circulated all over TikTok, Instagram and other platforms,” he said. “It was almost impossible to imagine that nothing would happen. [It] prompted young people who wouldn’t have entered the world of activism or social protests without some encouragement to start participating.”

‘There’s nothing that you can do to stop us’

Organizers and protesters shared more than symbols and social media tactics; they also braced for a harsh state response, having watched crackdowns unfold in other countries. In each of these movements, most of which were initially nonviolent in nature, demonstrators were met with violence by security forces, resulting in hundreds of deaths and injuries, and, in some cases, forced disappearances.

The 2024 uprising in Bangladesh saw brutal repression from Hasina’s government, which disappeared hundreds and left as many as 1,400 dead. Last month, Hasina was sentenced to death in absentia by the International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh for ordering and inciting the use of lethal force against protesters.

Repression was a topic of great discussion in the Kenyan “lecture rooms” on X Spaces this summer when protests reignited on the one-year anniversary of the 2024 actions, Amenya said. Police had used live ammunition against demonstrators — especially during the storming of Parliament in June 2024 — resulting in deaths and hundreds of injuries. Amnesty International documented over 100 deaths, 83 enforced disappearances, and 3,000 arrests between June 2024 and July 2025. Many protesters were charged with serious crimes such as terrorism and arson. Police intimidation and online surveillance were also used to stifle protests. 

“We did anticipate this, because it’s not a new thing — it’s something that the government has done many, many times,” Amenya said. Some Kenyan Gen Z protesters even wrote their eulogies and last wishes on social media. “The message that it was sending was, ‘We are ready. There’s nothing that you can do to stop us.’”

In Nepal, the government’s initial response to the protests was marked by violent confrontation: Police and armed units deployed tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition against demonstrators, which killed over 70 people and injured hundreds, many of them students. 

The protests had started with youth gathering peacefully and singing songs, but on the second day, government buildings were vandalized and set on fire across the capital, Kathmandu. 

Organizer Aakriti Ghimire, like many Nepali Gen Z protesters, believes that the protest was hijacked by infiltrators visibly older than Gen Z and with vested political motives. Ghimire said the violence and destruction they witnessed were against the peaceful, creative and digitized spirit of Gen Z. 

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“This is not how we wanted all of this to unfold,” said Ghimire, an admin of the Instagram page @howtodeshbikas, which makes sociopolitical content for the youth of Nepal and which disseminated information and rallying calls during the protests. “We never wanted the destruction of our public properties. We never wanted this way of toppling the government. In fact, we were planning three months of very creative ways of protesting. We were thinking of how we could take this ahead in a more organized [way] because, of course, we understood this as a long fight.”

In Morocco, authorities met this September’s GenZ 212 protests (named after the country’s dialing code) with water cannons, tear gas and other crowd control measures. Protesters had risen up to oppose government spending on the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations and 2030 World Cup while public services like health care and education suffered. Many protesters who were detained have faced prosecution and lengthy sentences amid due process concerns, and credible allegations of beatings, torture, harassment and denial of legal representation have emerged from detention centers. 

Siman, an LGBT rights and political activist who requested to use a pseudonym name for concerns of safety, said protesters were “not shocked” at the Moroccan government’s crackdown. “We did not stop, not even for five minutes, from the first day to the days that young Moroccans were being tried in Moroccan courts,” Siman said in Arabic. 

In Madagascar, security forces’ clashes with protesters killed over 20 and injured several more. “Everything was designed to have a peaceful protest,” said Randriamandrato of Gen Z Madagascar. “And then the response was directly violent. We didn’t anticipate it to have that much depth, that many injuries, that many people who were disappeared.”

A repressive response “doesn’t mean that change is impossible,” said Meyer, the UC-Irvine professor. “It means that the process is complicated and takes longer.” 

‘Where everybody’s responsible, nobody’s responsible’

In none of these Gen Z movements was there a single person leading the rallying cry. 

Widespread anger on social media gradually coalesced into calls for action, shaped by conversations, informal networks and organizing, both online and off. By the time organizers circulated posters with a date, time and location, frustration had already reached a boiling point, and little else was needed to bring young people into the streets.

“The situation and conditions are so dire, the call for protest didn’t need a lot of persuasion,” Siman said. The protests in Morocco sparked by international sporting events were fueled by social inequality, weak public services such as education and health, and overarching political neglect. “People went out with legitimate reasons to demonstrate against policies of the Moroccan state, which do not serve the interests of the Moroccan people,” they said. “It was really representative of a generation that is not satisfied with everything traditional or classical in organizational forms.”

While protests in some countries developed central figures — like Sudan Gurung in Nepal, who acted as a key organizer and a lead negotiator during the transition to an interim government —  the protests were largely leaderless, either by design or by circumstance. Abdullah Al Soykot, a 24-year-old engineering student in Khulna, Bangladesh, who regularly participated in the protests, said that one of the movement’s strengths was that its organizing body had no political ties or political representatives. “People participated how they wanted to, without following any political norms,” he said in Bengali. 

Amenya said that in Kenya, too, the movement was leaderless “because we all knew leaders are always co-opted. … If you strike the head of the snake, you kill the snake. But if there are many heads, which head will you strike first to finish the movement?” 

Ghimire saw the leaderless nature of the protests in Nepal as both a strength and a vulnerability. “I truly think that is so beautiful about this generation, which is very, very contradictory to the previous generation, where everybody just wanted a [government] position,” Ghimire said. “The problem for us is that we were unable to show a united front,” allowing the movement to be hijacked by non-Gen Z actors. 

Meyer says that leaderless movements can be a double-edged sword: Even though the fears of people selling out are well-founded, leaderlessness also means nobody is in a position to strategize longer term. “It sounds great to have a leaderless movement where everybody’s responsible, but where everybody’s responsible, nobody’s responsible,” he said. 

Challenges and the way ahead

While the outcomes of these protests have differed — some achieving key demands and others falling short — they collectively pushed issues that might have been overlooked into the global spotlight. 

Despite experiencing repression in Morocco and not winning concrete government action, Siman still places hope in protest and activism. “We have hope in … women, the youth and the repressed. As long as there’s injustice, there’s going to be activism, and activism brings more activism.” 

The question now is how Gen Z intends to turn the visibility and momentum it has generated into lasting political and social influence. 

Where protests did see some degree of success, protesters’ ongoing relationship with governance is still emerging. In Bangladesh, Gen Z protesters joined a transitional government and formed a political party that is contesting for power; in Nepal, protesters elected a new leader and have been in conversation with her to chart a future for the country. In other countries, governments that remained in place have felt pressured and are considering concessions. 

Soykot, in Bangladesh, said that even though the protests helped put a people’s government in place, they can’t just replace the old bureaucracy with a “people’s bureaucracy.”

Randriamandrato, of Gen Z Madagascar, thinks that the answer lies in the youth and the future government coming together to discuss the future of a country. “How will they address the young people’s issues if they don’t talk to them?” he said, adding that for the youth, “the energy has to be now focused on the table and not on the streets anymore.”

Organizers said Gen Z isn’t, for the most part, interested in roles in the government but wants accountability and structures of accountability that work long after protests have died down. “You need governments to do that. The sort of mundanity of making an institution work is part of the story of promoting social change. And that’s not what a 20-year-old who’s turning out at a protest should be worried about,” Meyer said. 

Soykot agrees. “People can’t protest every day; the government and the bureaucracy need to do their work,” he said. 

This article How Gen Z movements around the globe shared tactics and challenges was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/01/how-gen-z-movements-shared-tactics-and-challenges/