What’s Behind the Global Gen Z Revolution?

Robert A. Manning

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The rise of youth-led political movements in the Global South point to structural inequalities in the global system.

The Red Cell series is published in collaboration with the Stimson Center. Drawing upon the legacy of the CIA’s Red Cell—established following the September 11 attacks to avoid similar analytic failures in the future—the project works to challenge assumptions, misperceptions, and groupthink with a view to encouraging alternative approaches to America’s foreign and national security policy challenges. For more information about the Stimson Center’s Red Cell Project, see here.

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Gen Z, stifled by internet censors, corrupt governments, and a deficit of job opportunities, is wreaking havoc on governments across Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. One after another, youth-led protests have spread across Bangladesh, Kenya, Nepal, Indonesia, Morocco, and Madagascar, becoming a major political force. Demonstrations of this type have toppled governments in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Madagascar, and led other states like Kenya and Morocco to reverse unpopular policies.

In South and Southeast Asia, roughly one-third of the population is under 25. In Africa, some 890 million are in the youth cohort, with a median age of 19.3. In sum, Gen Z in Asia and Africa totals around 1.8 billion. Youth-centric demographics are a double-edged sword. They can enable nations in the Global South to climb the development ladder with the right mix of education, economic policies, and adequate governance, or they can be a source of instability and internal conflict. For better or worse, Gen Z is driving political change, and the outcome of this process will ripple through the global economic and political order.

The era of “polycrises”—a cascade of multiple interacting crises—adds another layer to the challenge that governments in these youthful nations face. Many of these states are trying to navigate their demographic challenges amid the entropy of an uncertain world order, coercive great powers, deep debt, shrinking aid and investment, and climate change. The World Bank lists 39 “fragile and conflict-affected states.” Less-developed countries have become the “losers” in a fragmenting world of growing North-South, South-South, and middle-income-versus-poorer divides.