Every time I open my “For You” feed on Instagram, I’m ushered into a parallel classroom: informal, intimate, and oddly generous. Young girls and boys who look my age and live inside the same algorithmic present lean into their cameras, handing me bite-sized context to systemic injustices, climate disasters, and political upheavals.
One tells me why women stay in abusive relationships long after the myth of “choice” collapses, unpacking trauma bonds and survival instincts with the precision of a psychology lecture delivered from a bedroom floor. Another explains the systematic oppression of women in Afghanistan and how bans on their work, movement, and education have collapsed into sanctioned violence, compressing years of repression into three lucid minutes of a GRWM (get ready with me) reel.
I first learned the language of geopolitics and settler colonialism here as a lived, continuous process instead of an abstract academic concept. Someone casually recommended ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’ by Eve Tuck — a paper that entirely reorganised how I understand land, justice, and the limits of liberal empathy. These, for lack of a better word, ‘Gen Z influencers’ speak as interlocutors, inviting me into analysis rather than performing it at me.
As they translate dense theory, buried histories, and ongoing atrocities into language that is undiluted and travels far, they prove that authority no longer rests with legacy media outlets but in the ability to bridge the personal and the political.
While history has often only recognised generations after they have altered the course of things, 2025 hints at a time when recognition and impact arrived simultaneously.
This year, across continents, youth-led movements shared neither language nor ideology, yet converged in one unmistakable way: acts of resistance. Gen Z presented itself as a digital subculture, and more importantly, a political force willing to rupture the present to reclaim a future systematically denied to it.
Collapse of patience
In Nepal, the draconian ban on 26 social media platforms was the final miscalculation of a ruling government that underestimated the power of a digitally mobilised generation. Officially framed as a tax-enforcement measure, the ban was understood as an attempt to suffocate dissent, particularly a viral, youth-led “nepo-kid” campaign that exposed the extravagant lives of politicians’ children against the material hardships confronting most young Nepalese: unemployment and forced migration.
Protests soon engulfed Kathmandu, and the parliament building was set ablaze. It was a symbolic indictment of a political class that had insulated itself from accountability. The prime minister’s resignation and the formation of an interim government followed, signalling a generational rupture with the long-held belief that political power in Nepal was beyond challenge.
Madagascar followed a parallel arc. What began as frustration over chronic water and electricity outages quickly became an uprising against corruption and state failure. Organised largely through social media, young protesters mobilised without traditional party leadership. Tensions were further inflamed by President Andry Rajoelina’s attempt to use large-scale urban infrastructure projects as a means of consolidating power.
The movement met with curfews, clashes, and repression, yet it succeeded in toppling the government. Madagascar’s Gen Z proved that networked protest can transform survival grievances into a systemic critique, capable of reshaping the very contours of national politics.
Digital mobilisation
What distinguished 2025 from earlier cycles of unrest was infrastructure: Gen Z repurposed social media as a powerful political tool. In Morocco, a wave of youth-led contestation emerged under the banner of “Gen Z 212” (named after the country’s international dialling code). Sparked by public outrage following a series of maternal deaths in Agadir on September 14, the movement quickly scaled into a nationwide challenge to long-standing structural grievances, demanding quality public healthcare and education, an end to corruption, and a dignified life.
The movement was coordinated through Discord, transforming what is typically a gaming platform into a decentralised command centre. Members shared protest routes, synchronised demonstrations, and documented arrests in real time while evading state surveillance. The Moroccan state, accustomed to tracking dissent through conventional channels, found itself reacting to a form of politics that moved faster than repression. In doing so, Gen Z 212 epitomised a mode of political agency rooted in generational values and enabled by digital infrastructures beyond traditional hierarchies.
This pattern repeated elsewhere. In Indonesia, online dissent spilt onto the streets, sparked clashes with police, and tragically, even led to deaths. Nationwide protests under the “Dark Indonesia” (#IndonesiaGelap) movement initially erupted in response to government budget cuts that threatened to raise tuition fees and eliminate scholarships. These demonstrations expanded to broader demands, including the removal of military officials from civilian bureaucratic positions and opposition to revisions of the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) bill, which many feared could herald a return of authoritarianism. A parallel digital movement, #KaburAjaDulu (“Just Flee First”), captured young Indonesians’ anxiety about their future, encouraging migration for work and study.
The protests reached a tragic tipping point when 21-year-old driver Affan Kurniawan was killed by a police vehicle in Jakarta, catalysing demonstrations across major cities. Young activists leveraged social media to amplify Affan’s story, galvanise street protests, and exert pressure on authorities, yielding tangible outcomes such as the suspension of lawmakers’ controversial housing allowances. The movement revealed a generation unwilling to accept economic inequality, low wages, and a politically disconnected government.
Without a leader, with a direction
The movements of 2025 were largely leaderless, reflecting a profound scepticism toward traditional political parties and older generations in power perceived as corrupt or out of touch with youth anxieties. A defining feature of these uprisings was their deliberate refusal to elevate singular leaders. To older political commentators, this absence was framed as a weakness. When, in fact, it was actually a calculated strategy, guiding a new kind of political action.
Gen Z has grown up watching movements co-opted, leaders jailed or assassinated, and revolutions reduced to photo-ops. Their distrust of hierarchy is not naïveté; it is historical learning. In Peru, at least 19 people were injured during protests against the government of Peruvian President Dina Boluarte and Congress. Hundreds of people marched toward government seats in central Lima under heavy police presence, with groups of young protesters throwing stones, petrol bombs, and fireworks, while law enforcement responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.
The online and offline dimensions of the protest together exemplify decentralised activism: participants acted autonomously yet in alignment with a common direction, responding to unfolding events while maintaining focus on systemic change.
This leaderlessness unnerved political establishments. Who do you negotiate with when the movement is a network? Who do you arrest when outrage is distributed?
Housing allowances for lawmakers in Indonesia, World Cup spending in Morocco, pension reforms in Peru, each symbolised the same insult: money exists, but not for you. For a generation facing precarious work, unaffordable housing, climate anxiety, and the slow erosion of social contracts, this was intolerable. Gen Z changemakers are not merely seeking to replace one elite with another; they are here to alter the terms of legitimacy itself.
One generation, many frontlines
In 2025, Greta Thunberg yet again exemplified why she remains one of the most influential voices of her generation. No longer confined to climate activism alone, she broadened her focus to global human rights and humanitarian crises. This year, she joined two Gaza aid flotillas — actions that resulted in her detention and deportation by Israeli authorities — speaking about the mistreatment of Palestinians and demanding concrete international intervention without an ounce of fear. She also accepted the Right Livelihood Award on behalf of Myanmar’s Justice for Myanmar (JFM), using the platform to challenge the junta’s funding networks and highlight the broader implications of oppression worldwide.
Greta’s evolution from climate campaigner to a vocal advocate for interconnected struggles illustrates a rare clarity of purpose: she sees climate, justice, and human rights as inseparable. At 22, she continues to defy expectations, using moral authority and global attention to shine a light on the world’s most pressing injustices. In doing so, she embodies the defining spirit of Gen Z activism: fearless, principled, and unafraid to confront power wherever it exists.
Greta’s politics do not exist in isolation. The same moral clarity, shaped by early confrontation with power, appeared in another corner of the world. In Hong Kong, it has taken the form of Joshua Wong.
At 28, Wong has spent more than half of his adult life on the frontlines of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, embodying a generation that refuses to bow to oppression. First rising to global prominence at 15 during the 2014 “Umbrella Movement”, Wong helped organise massive student strikes demanding democratic reforms, earning a spot on TIME’s Most Influential Teens list. His activism came at tremendous personal cost: multiple stints in prison, including four years and eight months under the national security law, and ongoing legal battles for allegedly seeking international support for Hong Kong’s democracy.
In 2025, he faced fresh charges for allegedly seeking international support for democracy (offences carrying potential life imprisonment), but his resolve remains unshaken.
Just as Thunberg addressed geopolitical violence and Wong resisted authoritarian erasure, a Pakistani changemaker challenged power closer to home.
Mahnoor Omer, a 25-year-old Gen Z lawyer with little patience for institutional silence, took Pakistan to court over menstruation. In a country where activism is often expected to be (and generally even is) male-led or safely abstract, Omer chose a far more confrontational route. By challenging the taxation of sanitary products, she reframed a “women’s issue” as a constitutional one, forcing the law to confront how equality and access are denied through negligent policies. She identified a pressure point where stigma, economics, and governance intersect. And pushed.
Unlike older models of activism that often relied on policy memos or closed-door advocacy, Gen Z’s interventions tend to emerge from frustration that translates into action. For Omer, that frustration crystallised around period poverty. “My friend Ahsan Jehangir Khan, also a lawyer, and I had a discussion about how helpless we feel and how the law can be used as a tool to bring about change,” she said.
They used the tools immediately available to them to expose how the state normalises gendered deprivation. In doing so, they punctured a stigma with confidence. This is Gen Z activism at its most effective: grounded in lived reality and willing to institutionalise dissent.
In a culture that routinely writes off young women’s anger as excess or conveniently blames it on “hormones” and treats their demands as nuisance, Omer refused to shrink herself. Similar to her global counterparts, she refused to dilute her politics to make them easier to swallow. The discomfort, after all, was the point.
Gen Z is hard to ignore, even harder to stop
What is most disarming about this generation is its refusal of escapism. The next time you’re scrolling your “For You” page and stumble upon a video dissecting how capitalism and pop-culture feminism make a spectacularly insufferable duo — say, via a critique of Katy Perry and other celebrity women popping off to space — know this: that analysis is intentional.
In an online ecosystem engineered to numb and distract, Gen Z keeps insisting on return: to the body, to the street, to the material world. If information overload is meant to paralyse, this cohort works against it; Gen Z annotates it, memes it, dismantles it, and sends it back sharpened.
While previous generations sought escape online, Gen Z seems determined to use the internet to come back to the world: more literate in power and more suspicious of optics.
This is not a generation that believes history will save it, or that time alone delivers justice. It is one that keeps asking: what is happening, who benefits, how does this connect to me, and what, exactly, am I going to do about it?
Header image: The image is created via generative AI.
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