Gen Z protests

The Gen Z protests are a series of student and youth-led riots that have occurred in several countries 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, and the Maldives, as well as in other parts of the world. The protests (later riots) began in Asia, in what has been described as the Asian Spring, but in 2025, the protests spread to Africa and other places. 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 2019 protests.

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. Social media has been a common tool for activism and coordination. Some protests, like in July uprising and Nepal, have resulted in the overthrow of national governments and many deaths. In Bangladesh in particular, it saw the emergence of the world's first Gen Z political party, National Citizen Party, whose candidates became the world's first Gen Z leaders elected as Members of Parliament of a government.