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Guest Essay
Sept. 19, 2025, 1:00 a.m. ET
By Meena Kandasamy
Ms. Kandasamy is an Indian writer, poet and activist. She wrote from Chennai, India.
A new visual grammar of resistance is being written across a vast arc of South and Southeast Asia, live-streamed in real time to a global audience.
The abiding images are not of professional revolutionaries, but of ordinary young people pushed to the brink. They are of protesters lying on the canopied bed of a fleeing president in Sri Lanka, of gleeful crowds looting the Bangladeshi prime minister’s residence, of a Parliament building torched in Nepal. It is a visceral language of uprising for members of Generation Z who have nothing left to lose.
In Bangladesh last year, Sri Lanka in 2022 and in just the last few weeks in Indonesia and Nepal, disaffected young Asians have overthrown or shaken the powers that be. It’s no coincidence that this is happening so widely. These are the consequences of the global decline of organized leftist and progressive movements.
In each of these countries, social contracts have been shattered by some combination of massive youth unemployment, corrupt and oppressive elites, economic crises and the widening chasm between rich and poor. Yet across Asia and beyond, progressive movements that traditionally would have championed these causes are fragmented, incoherent or decimated, incapable of positioning themselves with Gen Z as credible alternatives.
Into the breach rush angry young people who have nowhere to turn except their smartphones. Social media is powerful enough to coordinate street protests, but there is no leadership capable of articulating an ideology and channeling fury into a post-revolution vision. It is the Arab Spring rebooted, this time in Asia.
The Rajapaksa clan’s rule of Sri Lanka imploded after inflation soared and the country defaulted on its international debt, leaving millions unable to afford food, fuel and medicine. In Bangladesh, high youth unemployment and a job quota system seen as favoring supporters of the ruling Awami League contributed to its overthrow. In Indonesia, inflation, inequality and jobs legislation that was criticized as eroding labor rights and environmental safeguards lit a slow-burning fuse that exploded in violence last month. In Nepal this month, a similarly toxic cocktail incited deadly clashes between protesters and police that led to the prime minister’s resignation and a continuing power vacuum.
When anger erupts, it is directed squarely at the symbols of those whom protesters blame for hollowing out their futures: parliament buildings, presidential palaces and politicians’ homes.
These movements have coalesced through digital solidarity. Social media is not only the realm of far-right echo chambers and endless polarization. A substantial portion of Gen-Zers are also drawn to legitimate anti-establishment, anti-corruption sentiments that find voice online. It’s just that the tattered state of liberal politics, especially in this part of the world, means these young people have no unifying force.
The left was liquidated in Indonesia under President Suharto’s 1967-98 regime and has never really recovered. In Nepal, former Maoist rebels who fought a civil war against the country’s now-disbanded monarchy entered politics only to engage in the same corruption and exploitation they had vowed to destroy. The left was consumed by ethnic chauvinism in Sri Lanka and had largely waned into irrelevance in Bangladesh.
Twitter fueled the Arab Spring more than a decade ago. In Asia today, it is Instagram and TikTok.
Gen Z is often disparaged as fragile and risk-averse, its worldview and attention span stunted by a diet of 60-second Instagram reels. The uprisings across South and Southeast Asia prove the opposite. This generation is not impervious to the real world, nor has social media kept it from engaging politically. On the contrary, it has become their most potent weapon.
People did not come into the streets of Asian capitals and immediately start torching monuments. Protests turned violent largely as a reaction to state brutality, which provoked greater mobilization and radicalization on the internet and on the street. This was a political lesson learned for young people, who were forced to expand their scrutiny of the system of oppression beyond the initial demands for economic relief or political reform to seeking accountability for state violence.
In Nepal, there was an initial naïveté among young people on the street. A friend in Kathmandu told me that peaceful protesters intended to clean up after their demonstrations last week and even discussed setting up food stalls to feed their comrades. This festive innocence only turned violent when police shot protesters who tried to enter Parliament.
State violence also provided the tipping point in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. And Indonesia’s demonstrations metastasized across the country after the young delivery driver Affan Kurniawan — who found himself in the middle of a police crackdown on demonstrators — was run over and killed by an armored vehicle in Jakarta. Similarly, it was the self-immolation of the 26-year-old Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in 2010 — after his wares were confiscated by authorities — that set in motion a wave that engulfed the Arab world.
Internet censorship, intended to stop unrest, only makes things worse. After hashtags like #nepobaby — which called out elite nepotism and corruption — went viral in Nepal, the regime saw online criticism as an existential threat. But when it shut down social media platforms, bottling up the public’s ability to blow off steam, this pushed young people onto the barricades. The state’s impulse to seize narrative control and blame enemies or the invisible “foreign hand” didn’t stop young Arab people before, and it won’t work in Asia today.
The Arab Spring’s ultimate trajectory from hope to rubble offers a sobering preview of where this could go. The conditions fueling the Asian revolts persist. Without credible leftist or progressive alternatives to channel the anger, an arc of chaos looms — rage, military coups, sectarian violence.
But something feels different this time. Asia’s Generation Z treats digital organizing not as a supplement to politics but as politics itself. Having watched older movements fail, they’re building something from scratch: decentralized, fluid and devastatingly effective.
They are finding their voice. Those in power ignore it at their peril.
Meena Kandasamy is a writer based in Chennai, India. She is the author of the poetry collection “Ms. Militancy” and the forthcoming novel “Fieldwork As a Sex Object,” about incels, influencers and the far right in online spaces.
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