ABI staff members Dina Wahba, Teresa Jopson and Anas Ansar have published in a dossier on Gen Z-led protests at the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
In their introduction to the dossier titled "Sharing the Gen Z Struggle, Dina Wahba and Teresa Jopson examine the youth movements in Southeast Asia and North Africa by comparing their shared conditions like corruption, repression and the erosion of dignity while also emphasizing that these conditions do not produce identical politics, but produce related struggles.
They show how Gen Z activists try to expose the unjust nature of the political landscapes and bring these into the public sphere refusing to normalize impunity. Holding institutions accountable for disposing instead of protecting citizens help to build a referendum on legitimacy. By building a public record against denial and forgetting, they lay the groundwork for a momentum towards change.
Although the Gen Z movements are inherently diverse and do not share the same privileges, they do increasingly communicate through shared repertoires of, for example, pop culture references. Those shared elements across international movements inspire and expand political imagination at a moment when imagination itself is under pressure.
In his report on Bangladesh’s 2024 July Uprisings titled "From Screens to Streets: Decoding Bangladesh’s Gen Z July Uprising", Anas Ansar focuses on the instinctive character of contemporary youth activism, comprising Gen Z’s creative and digital resistance and generational aspirations. By shedding light on just how the weeks-long protests in Bangladesh unfolded, for example through creative interventions that played a key role in sustaining the movement, he aims to show how young people experience, respond to, and live with a revolution. This way, he ultimately unravels the changes in politics introduced by Gen Z movements as well as their overarching impact on the policies and practices shaping democracy in Bangladesh and beyond.
The whole dossier including the introduction and the report is available on the Heinrich Böll Foundation website.