Gen Z protests

The Gen Z protests are a series of youth-led protests and riots that have occurred in some parts of the world during the 2020s. The protests in Bangladesh in 2024 are widely cited as the first successful Gen Z revolution, inspiring other Gen Z-led protests, including Nepal, Indonesia, Philippines, Timor-Leste, Maldives, Mongolia, Madagascar, Morocco, Serbia, India, Albania, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan as well as in other parts of the world. The protests began in Asia, although by 2025 the protests had spread to other continents. To date, the earliest known use of the term was in an opinion piece by French market research company Ipsos published on 8 December 2019, referring to the Fridays for Future and Hong Kong 2019 protests, which have generally been considered the beginning of the movement. Although the causes of the protests are different in each country, they have generally been in response to inequality, declining standards of living, corruption, democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. As the first true digital-native generation, social media has been a common tool for activism and coordination and is widely believed by non-members of the generation to have caused these protests. An ML–generated study by Bloomberg Economics in late 2025, assessing 22 million data points on the dynamics surrounding Gen Z protests, found a correlation between social media penetration and a low average age, on the one hand, and increased social discontent over issues such as socio-economic inequality, unemployment, and corruption, on the other. Some protests, like Bangladesh's 2024 July Uprising and Nepal, have resulted in the overthrow of national governments. As a result, many deaths have occurred from the overthrows. In particular, it saw the emergence of the world's first Gen Z political party, National Citizen Party and Rastriya Swatantra Party, whose candidates became the world's first Gen Z...