Across the Global South, a wired and wary generation turns anger into leaderless movements—shaking governments from Kathmandu to Antananarivo.

They were not supposed to be the ones to set the agenda. For years, policymakers and pundits looked past teenagers and twenty-somethings in the Global South, treating them as either a demographic bonus or a security risk. In 2024 and 2025, that calculus broke. From Indonesia and Nepal to the Philippines, Madagascar, Peru, Kenya and Morocco, Generation Z marched, coded, posted, and organized—often without leaders, parties or unions—to force national reckonings on corruption, inequality, failing public services, and the ballooning cost of living. What links these movements is not identical demands but a shared conviction: the system is indifferent to their futures, and that indifference is intolerable.

In Morocco, the spark was heartbreak: the deaths of eight women after C-sections in Agadir. Within hours, Discord servers and Instagram stories lit up with calls to mobilize under the banner “Gen Z 212.” By early October, protests spanned Agadir, Casablanca and beyond, elevating simple, searing priorities—“hospitals and schools, not stadiums.” The government signaled openness to dialogue, yet the streets filled with a generation unwilling to be dismissed as “parasites.” They are digitally fluent, suspicious of traditional parties, and brutally pragmatic about what dignity requires: reliable care, competent schools, and public money spent on people, not prestige projects.

A two-hour flight across the Mozambique Channel, Madagascar’s youth poured into Antananarivo’s streets after rolling power and water cuts became the last straw. The leaderless mobilization calling itself “Gen Z Madagascar” drew tens of thousands, prompting the president to dissolve his government even as security forces fired on crowds. The grievances are painfully familiar: wealth captured by an elite, threadbare services, and a perception that politics is a closed loop. Every young Malagasy knows friends who left school early, others who left the country outright. For those who stayed, the cable car project gliding over crumbling neighborhoods became a symbol of misordered priorities. Their answer is to keep marching and keep filming.

Nepal’s cascade began differently: an abrupt ban on major social platforms, folded into a wider anger at corruption and impunity. Videos of teenagers bleeding in school uniforms ricocheted through encrypted chats, then back into the public square. Curfews and troop deployments followed; the death toll rose. Within weeks, the shock had metastasized into a broader showdown over who controls public life—the parties that have traded power since the war, or a generation that grew up in their shadow. In the end, the government blinked, but not before the world learned a new geography of youth-led revolt—Ring Road checkpoints, campuses turned clinics, code-switching slogans in Nepali and English.

East of Kathmandu, Indonesia’s restless students and young workers revived a protest repertoire honed during earlier fights over the Job Creation Law. What changed in 2025 was not just the legal front—new challenges over environmental safeguards—but the tone. After years of seeing livelihoods pinned to permits and concessions, young Indonesians built an oppositional culture that blends legal clinics, mutual aid kitchens, and nimble flash protests that outpace the police. The core complaint is procedural erosion: decisions that shape futures being made far from affected communities, with participation engineered out.

In the Philippines, the youth-led pushback has been prosaic and profound at once. Students in Manila and across state universities lined up alongside jeepney drivers against a modernization scheme they said would erase livelihoods in the name of progress. The issue sounded technical—fleet consolidation, engine standards, financing terms—but demanded a generational question: Who pays for the transitions policymakers deem necessary? Under banners hand-painted between classes, students argued that the costs of “modernization” should not be offloaded onto the poor, and that sustainability without social justice is simply another word for displacement.

In Peru, young people—many of whom were children during the worst violence of the 1990s—reentered the streets this September against President Dina Boluarte and a deeply mistrusted Congress. The immediate trigger was a pension reform seen as mandatory enrollment with precarious paychecks; behind it lay unresolved grief from the deadly 2022–2023 crackdown. Demonstrations in Lima swelled, miners halted operations, and the state’s familiar choreography of tear gas and pellets returned. This generation’s iconography is transnational: memes, anime symbols, and chants migrated from Nairobi and Rabat to Plaza San Martín with startling speed.

And then there is Kenya—the movement that placed Gen Z on the global map in mid-2024. What began as technocratic rage against a finance bill metastasized into a rejection of a political economy that taxes survival and subsidizes spectacle. The tactics—no leaders, no permits, encrypted channels, legal aid hotlines, and a near-militant insistence on peaceful dignity—became a template. The government withdrew the bill; the movement did not withdraw its skepticism. By 2025, “Occupy Parliament” was less an event than a grammar for resistance that others could conjugate.

These uprisings are not carbon copies. In some places, the focus is the price of bread and bus fare; in others, the right to breathe clean air or to study without bribing a clerk. Yet across contexts, three threads stitch the resistance together. First, a unanimity about public goods: health, education, water, electricity, transport. Second, a procedural demand: meaningful participation instead of perfunctory consultations. Third, a refusal to be trapped in the old opposition script—charismatic leaders, party flags, backroom deals. The movements are deliberately horizontal because vertical politics has repeatedly failed them.

It is tempting to brand these mobilizations as pure “online movements.” That misses the point. Digital tools are the circulatory system; the heart is analog. In Morocco, organizers stitched together neighborhood committees that share first-aid kits and livestream protocols. In Madagascar, volunteers set up community kitchens and cleanup days to rebut accusations of chaos. In Nepal and Kenya, legal aid lines operate like ambulances for arrested protesters, and volunteers track missing persons across police stations. These are infrastructures of care—quiet, unglamorous, and essential.

Governments, for their part, have toggled between two reflexes: concession and crackdown. Some leaders dissolve cabinets or shelve bills; others deploy curfews, tear gas, and in tragic cases, live ammunition. Both responses misunderstand the scale of the grievance. Gen Z is not petitioning for a tweak to the tax code or a ministerial reshuffle. They are indicting an order that feels extractive at the top and threadbare at the bottom—where stadiums rise as clinics decay, and IMF arithmetic trumps everyday arithmetic.

Internationally, the instinct is to view these as domestic crises. But the syncopation is global. Diaspora networks amplify footage in real time; movement lawyers swap briefs across borders; slogans translate with a few keystrokes. The result is a shared playbook and, crucially, a shared imagination: if they backed down in Nairobi yesterday, why shouldn’t they in Lima tomorrow? This is the politics of precedent, traveling at broadband speed.

What comes next will be decided less by epic speeches than by administrative muscle. Can governments deliver clean water, steady power, and trustworthy classrooms? Can procurement be pried open to sunlight? Can police departments re-learn de-escalation instead of escalation? Can budgets tilt from prestige to people? The answer will depend in part on whether elites see these movements as an existential threat or an early-warning system they ignore at their peril.

There are reasons for caution. Horizontal movements can splinter; leaderlessness can become leader-hunting by states; and the grind of daily survival can erode the stamina of any generation. There is also the danger of performative politics—a politics of spectacle that both protesters and governments have learned to game. But if the past year proved anything, it is that the young are not waiting for permission. They are demanding competence, honesty, and a future worth staying for.

Back in Agadir, a protester summarized the ethos of this season: “We’re not asking to be saved; we’re asking to stop being sacrificed.” From Kathmandu to Antananarivo, Jakarta to Nairobi, Lima to Manila and Casablanca, Gen Z’s scream is less a cry of despair than a call to repair. It is the sound of a generation stepping into history not as an audience, but as authors.