[News] Seven Theses on the Gen Z Uprisings in the Global South

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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Seven Theses on the Gen Z Uprisings in the Global South: The Forty-Third 
Newsletter (2025)

Gen Z-led uprisings across the Global South point to long-term 
socioeconomic and environmental crises caused by neoliberalism. Yet they 
have often been coopted by entrenched social classes. Can their energy 
be channelled towards progressive ends?


Guillermo Grebe (Chile), /Muro sagrado de la dignidad/ (Sacred Wall of 
Dignity), 2021.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
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The walls of Santiago, Chile – the city where I live – are marked with 
faded graffiti from the /estallido social/ (social uprising) of 2019. 
Years later, these slogans continue to spill onto the sidewalks, from 
/Nos quitaron tanto que nos quitaron hasta el miedo/ (they took so much 
from us that they even took away our fear) to /No son 30 pesos, son 30 
años/ (it’s not 30 pesos; it’s 30 years). Both slogans refer to the 30 
years of neoliberal austerity imposed on the Chilean people, including a 
30-peso hike on the price of metro tickets and deep cuts to the 
country’s social wage system. The uprising was led by high school 
students born between 2001 (age 18) and 2005 (age 14), who are part of 
Generation Z or ‘Gen Z’. However, this term, forced on the world by 
mainstream media, often erases the social complexity and national 
specificity of such uprisings. Nonetheless, this term, and the concept 
of a ‘generation’, are worth exploring.

The protests in Chile – which eventually drew in all age groups and 
delegitimised the right-wing government of Sebastián Piñera – were not 
singular. Young people born in this era led protests across the world, 
including mass mobilisations against a gang rape in Delhi, India (2012); 
the March for Our Lives campaign against gun violence in the United 
States (2018); and the Fridays for Future campaign against the climate 
crisis (2018), which was initiated by the Swedish activist Greta 
Thunberg (born in 2003 and recently tortured by the Israeli government). 
The Chilean uprising was followed by the national strike in Colombia in 
2021, the /Aragalaya/ (struggle) in Sri Lanka in 2022, and the upsurge 
in Nepal earlier this year that resulted in the resignation of the 
centre-right government. In each of these cases, what began as moral 
outrage over a singular issue snowballed into a critique of a system 
that has proven incapable of reproducing life for young people.

Joseph Mbatia Bertiers (Kenya), /A Week before the Elections/, 2007.

The concept of the generation was developed a century ago by the German 
scholar Karl Mannheim in his essay 
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‘The Sociological Problem of Generations’ (1928). For Mannheim, a 
generation was not defined by the era in which a cohort was born but by 
their ‘social location’ (/soziale/ /Lagerung/). In political terms, a 
generation is produced when it experiences rapid and disruptive changes 
that make it re-encounter tradition through new ‘cultural carriers’ 
(/Kulturträger/) – individuals and institutions that transmit culture 
–**and becomes an active force for social change, a far cry from the way 
in which generations became a marketing typology after World War II 
(Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y, etc.). Mannheim saw 
generations as forces for social change, while neoliberal culture turned 
them into ‘segments’ in their brand strategies.

The term Gen Z has been used in descriptions of protests taking place 
from the Andes to South Asia, where young people – frustrated with 
limited possibilities for social advancement – took to the streets to 
reject a failing system. Some elements of Mannheim’s theory 
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are at work here. It is true that imperialist forces often intervene to 
instigate and shape these protests, but it would be inaccurate to view 
these protests as merely the product of outside intervention. There are 
important internal sociological factors that require analysis in order 
to understand these ‘Gen Z protests’. Many of them are driven by a range 
of overlapping processes that emerge from the national context while 
being conditioned by the international conjuncture. In this newsletter, 
we propose seven theses to begin to understand these developments and 
perhaps channel them in a progressive direction.

Muvindu Binoy (Sri Lanka), /Protest in Colour IV/, 2022.

*Thesis one.* There is a youth bulge across the Global South, where the 
median age is 25 years, and people in these young societies find 
themselves victims of harsh debt-austerity policies, climate 
catastrophes, and permanent wars. In Africa, the median age is 19 
– lower than any other continent. In Niger, the median age is 15.3; in 
Mali, 15.5; in both Uganda and Angola, 16.5, and in Zambia, 17.5.

*Thesis two.* Youth in the Global South are frustrated with 
unemployment. Neoliberalism has weakened state capacity, leaving very 
few tools to address this issue (leading to demands such as opening up 
state employment opportunities, in the case of the Quota Reform movement 
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in Bangladesh). Educated youth with middle-class aspirations are unable 
to find suitable work, leading to structural unemployment or a skills 
mismatch. There are various colloquialisms for the kinds of precarious 
jobs on offer: in Algeria, there is a term for the unemployed that 
borrows from Arabic and French: those who ‘lean against the wall’ to 
hold it up (/hittiste/ from the Arabic /hayt/, meaning life). In the 
1990s, the university system was expanded and privatised 
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meaning that doors were opened – for a fee – to large sections of what 
would become Gen Z. These are children of the middle and lower-middle 
classes, but also of the working class and smallholder farmers who were 
able to climb their way up the social ladder. Gen Z is the most educated 
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generation in history, yet it is also the most indebted 
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and underemployed. This contradiction between aspiration and precarity 
produces great resentment.

*Thesis three. *Young people do not want to have to migrate to have a 
dignified life. In Nepal, young protestors chanted against the 
compulsion towards economic migration: /We want jobs in Nepal. We don’t 
want to have to migrate for work/. This compulsion to migrate elicits 
shame about one’s own culture and a disconnection from the history of 
struggles that has shaped one’s society. There are almost 
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168 million migrant workers in the world – if they were a country, they 
would be the ninth largest in the world, after Bangladesh (169 million) 
and ahead of Russia (144 million). Among them are Nepali construction 
workers in the Gulf states and Andean and Moroccan agricultural workers 
in Spain. They send remittances that sustain household consumption in 
their countries; in many cases, total remittances (which amounted 
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to $857 billion in 2023) are greater than foreign direct investment (as 
with Mexico). Social dislocation, the international colour line of 
labour, and the mistreatment of migrants – including disregard for their 
educational credentials – make the allure of migration near zero.

Sabita Dangol (Nepal), /Protective Shelter/, 2020.

*Thesis four.* Large agribusinesses and mining companies have sharpened 
their assault on smallholder farmers and agricultural workers (the spur 
for the farmers’ revolt 
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in India). Youth from these classes, fed up with the rural distress and 
radicalised by the often-failed protests of their parents, move to the 
cities and then abroad for jobs. They bring their experience from the 
countryside to cities and are often the main phalanx of these protest 
movements.

*Thesis five.* For Gen Z, the issue of climate change 
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and environmental distress is not an abstraction but an impending cause 
of proletarianisation through displacement and price shocks. People in 
rural areas see that melting glaciers, droughts, and floods strike 
precisely where imperialist ‘green’ supply chains seek resources like 
lithium, cobalt, and hydropower. They understand that the climate 
catastrophe is directly linked to their inability to build a present, 
let alone a future.

*Thesis six.* Establishment politics are unable to address Gen Z’s 
frustrations. Constitutions do not reflect reality, and unaccountable 
judiciaries seem to live on another planet. This generation’s main 
interactions with the state are through tone-deaf bureaucrats and 
militarised police. Political parties are paralysed by Washington’s 
debt-austerity consensus, and non-governmental organisations narrowly 
fixate on individual issues rather than the entire system. The old 
national liberation parties have largely exhausted their agenda or had 
it destroyed by austerity and debt, leaving a political vacuum in the 
Global South. To ‘get rid of them all’ is a politics that ends with a 
turn to social media influencers (such as Kathmandu’s mayor, Balen Shah) 
who have not participated in party politics but who often use their 
platforms to preach a gospel of anti-politics and middle-class resentment.

*Thesis seven.* The rise of informal work has created a disorganised 
society, with no hope of fellowship among workers or membership in mass 
organisations like trade unions. The uberisation of working conditions 
has created an informality of life itself, where the worker is alienated 
from all forms of connection. The significance of social media rises 
with the increase in informality as the internet becomes the main medium 
for the transmission of ideas, supplanting the older modes of political 
organisation. It is tempting but inaccurate to suggest that social media 
itself is a driving force behind this wave of protests. Social media is 
a communication /tool/ which has enabled a diffusion of sentiments and 
tactics, but it is not the /condition/ for these sentiments. It is also 
important to note that the internet is a tool for surplus extraction – 
platform workers, or gig workers, are disciplined by algorithms that 
drive them to work harder and harder for less and less pay.

Camilo Egas (Ecuador), /Fiesta indígena/ (Indigenous Festival), 1926.

The seven theses above attempt to outline the conditions that have 
produced the Gen Z uprisings in the Global South. These uprisings have 
been largely urban, with little indication that they have drawn in the 
peasantry and rural workers. Moreover, the agendas of these protests 
rarely address the long-term structural crises in underdeveloped 
countries. To be blunt, the typical politics of the Gen Z uprisings lead 
into the abyss of middle-class resentment. These protests are often – as 
in Bangladesh and Nepal – coopted by entrenched social forces that 
ventriloquise the voices on the streets and develop an agenda that 
benefits Western financiers. Nonetheless, these uprisings cannot be 
discounted: their frequency will only increase due to the factors we 
have outlined. The challenge for socialist forces is to articulate Gen 
Z’s genuine grievances into a programme that demands a higher share of 
the social surplus and uses that surplus to enhance net-fixed investment 
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and transform social relations.

Warmly,

Vijay

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