2025 was the year of the Gen Z uprising

“Gen Z protest” has become one of the year’s most overused political phrases. Over the past 12 months, young people around the world have taken to the streets – and in some cases succeeded in toppling their governments. From Kenya and Indonesia to Mexico, Peru, Bulgaria, Nepal and Morocco, these movements often echoed one another, borrowing tactics, slogans and even imagery. Many rallied around a shared visual language – including a pirate flag lifted from the manga One Piece – and many of the groups involved have explicitly identified themselves as “Gen Z.” But what does that label actually mean? And as the year draws to a close, how much have these uprisings really achieved?

Talking about these protests in generational terms isn’t wrong – it’s just redundant. “For at least 200 years, street mobilisations have been led to a large extent, but not exclusively, by young people,” Vincent Bevins, the author of If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, tells Dazed. It’s equally unsurprising that protesters have used the internet to organise, even if international media often treats this as a striking new development. But when everyone uses the internet for everything, it’s so obvious it’s barely worth pointing out: it would be much more remarkable if young people were organising via sandwich board or carrier pigeon.

In at least one case, this fixation on digital tools produced reporting that was actively misleading. In October, headlines circulated claiming that young Nepalis had used Discord to choose a new prime minister. What really happened, according to Bevins, was quite different: “An NGO that was well established in the country passed a name to the military, and they approved the appointment of someone who already came from the country’s political elite.” Discord may have featured in the process, but this was never the tech-utopian fantasy of digital democracy imagined by breathless Western commentators. As with many uprisings since the Arab Spring, the military ultimately had the final say.

The “Gen Z protest” label doesn’t tell us anything about what these movements have in common. That said, some of them did share a pattern, Bevins notes: a relatively small protest meets a brutal crackdown, sparking a larger mobilisation, which is met with even harsher repression. Most of the countries where these protests took place have features in common – a high youth population, for example – and protesters voiced overlapping grievances, such as corruption, unemployment, poverty and underfunded public services. But these conditions are so widespread that they explain almost nothing about why protests erupted in these specific places, at this specific moment. “If you’re saying these people believe that their government does not represent them and that they deserve a better life than the one they have, I think both statements are true for about 99 per cent of humanity right now,” says Bevins.

If you’re saying these people believe that their government does not represent them and that they deserve a better life than the one they have, I think both statements are true for about 99 per cent of humanity right now

That “Gen Z” is not a monolith can be seen very clearly in the aftermath of Nepal’s uprising. The country is now in an uneasy limbo, governed by an interim administration until elections next spring. With protests ongoing, an ideological rift has emerged between one Gen Z faction, which is demanding the immediate overthrow of the government, and another, including Gen Z Front, The Gen Z Movement Alliance and the Council of Gen Z, which wants to wait until the elections. These disagreements can’t be explained by age alone. “Youth is not a political orientation, and especially when we’re talking about countries as different as Indonesia, Madagascar, and Morocco,” says Bevins.

In Nepal, at least 76 people were killed, around half shot dead by police. In Morocco, where protests continue, authorities have been accused of torturing activists in prison and denying them fair trials. In Kenya, at least 65 people were killed in police crackdowns, and the government has been accused of orchestrating a campaign of digital censorship and harassment to crush the movement. Indonesian police beat protesters and fired tear gas to disperse them; in the Philippines, security forces have been accused of torture and excessive force.

It is still too early to say whether their efforts will pay off. While protesters in Nepal toppled the government, protest leaders have since said they have been frozen out of decision-making. The Madagascar uprising culminated in a takeover by an elite military unit; after it appointed a new leader who was involved in the previous government, Gen Z protest leaders have warned of renewed mobilisation. The history of the 2010s, and beyond, shows there is a pattern of youth-led mobilisations creating power vacuums which are filled by even more repressive forces. “In the majority of those cases, protesters were less than happy with the final outcome,” says Bevins.

On the other hand, several of the governments targeted this year – clearly feeling nervous – have already started making concessions. Madagascar’s new president has promised to address the water and power outages, which initially sparked the protests. In Morocco, the government has recently announced a new jobs programme with a $15 billion increase in spending on healthcare and education, in an effort to address some of the protesters’ key demands. But the activist group GenZ 212 (named for the country’s area code) is sceptical: “These measures must be accompanied by firm measures against corruption and conflicts of interest”, the group said in a statement. The Kenyan government has withdrawn a controversial tax bill, but still hasn’t responded to the broader demands made by young protesters. Without real change, it’s likely that many of these countries will continue to experience unrest. 

There are lessons to be learned from the history of youth-led protests in the 2010s. When Bevins was interviewing activists who were involved in these movements, one thing which came up repeatedly was the importance of having strong organisations, which is the most effective way of articulating demands and exerting pressure on elites after the initial explosion subsides. “It also allows for one generation to pass down lessons to the next, who are taking risks and putting their lives on the line to try to transform their countries into something better,” he says. “I think that’s what we’re seeing now.”

It’s not a coincidence that all of these protests have erupted in the same year. There is an element of contagion at play, with each of these movements inspiring the next, and the conditions which sparked them are affecting young people almost everywhere. The One Piece pirate flag may not explain these protests politically, but it captures something real: a shared sense that the system is rigged – and that refusing it, loudly and publicly, still matters. However we choose to describe the Gen Z protests, we haven’t seen the last of them.

Published by Hachette, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and The Missing Revolution is out now in paperback