Photo credit: France 24
Will Shoki, editor of Africa is a Country, has argued that calling the social media crises erupting in some countries a Gen Z rebellion may be far from the truth.
In Nepal, young protesters brought down the government. In Morocco, the leaderless collective “Gen Z 212” filled city squares with chants against the state. In Madagascar, students and unemployed workers forced the president to dissolve his cabinet. The world’s media quickly offered a tidy headline: Gen Z is rising.
But this description is both true and misleading. While it is true that the protesters are young and that digital tools have accelerated their coordination, referring to these revolts as “Gen Z protests” is equal to confusing the medium for the message. It transforms a structural crisis into a generational mood, reducing politics to demography. What disappears from view is the deeper reality: that these uprisings express the re-emergence of a global political subject long at the margins-youth as the conscience of a world system in decay.
The recent uprisings belong to the same historical arc from the Arab Spring to #FeesMustFall mass mobilizations erupted across the world but rarely transformed the structures they confronted. Those movements revealed the limits of neo-liberal democracy but were ultimately contained by it. The deferred revolution was not extinguished; it was dispersed. The events of 2025 suggest that the energy of that cycle is returning, shaped by harsher economic conditions and stripped of earlier illusions about reform. If the 2010s were a decade of revolt without revolution -of uprisings that exposed the system’s failures without transcending them -then today’s unrest is a politics of necessity: not yet revolutionary, but born of the realization that mere survival now demands confrontation with the system itself.
Under capitalism, youth are always the first to experience the contradictions of accumulation. They inherit the costs of crises they did not cause, entering adulthood in economies that no longer need their labour and political systems that no longer solicit their consent. In Morocco, more than one-third of those under 24 are unemployed, even as the state builds stadiums for the 2030 World Cup. In Nepal, whose generations have been exported as migrant labour, sustaining a remittance economy that allows domestic elites to postpone any structural transformation. Across much of the Global South, a permanent surplus of the young has become a fixed fixture of economic life-a demographic majority condemned to social redundancy.
To treat this as a generational drama -Gen Z against their elders -is to depoliticize it. The category “Gen Z” belongs to the marketing lexicon of late capitalism, not to the vocabulary of historical change. It suggests that what unites these young people is culture or attitude rather than material circumstance. But their shared predicament is not psychological; it is structural. The same debt-driven economies, privatized social services, and externally imposed austerity programs that defined the neo-liberal era have now reached their political limit. The young stand at the frontier of this exhaustion, where every promise of development has collapsed into permanent precarity.
The form of protest has changed, but its underlying logic remains the same. These are not just digital rebellions. They are class recompositions conducted through digital means, experiments in organization within the ruins of traditional mass political vehicles. Many of these movements have adopted the label the media uses to trivialize them, not out of identification with a global marketing category, but as a means of naming their generational commonality within a crisis.
The ideological content of these movements is still forming. Many articulate their anger in moral terms-corruption, dignity, betrayal. However, beneath that vulnerability is a structural awareness: that national elites act as a mediation for a global system that has ceased to deliver.
When mainstream commentary refers to this wave of protests as a “Gen Z rebellion,” what it really means is: don’t take it seriously. The label domesticates what should be threatening. It turns political struggle into a lifestyle trend. But if we strip away that veneer, what comes into focus is a pattern that connects the present to a longer history of youth revolt under capitalism-from Paris in 1968 to Soweto in 1976 to the #EndSars and Fallist movements of the last decade In each case, the young were not a special interest group but the social layer through which history announced that an old order had run its course.
XXX The article was abridged
