The Helsinki Notebooks

In September 2025, in Kathmandu, Nepal, thousands of Gen Zs cast votes on a Discord server to select an interim Prime Minister while calling for their current government to resign. Sushila Karki, a former Supreme Court Chief Justice, who was not on any party’s ballot, emerged as the winner. She was chosen because the Gen Zs in Nepal who chose her had just watched their national security forces open live ammunition at a crowd of Gen Z protesters, effectively killing twenty-three.¹ The youth had stormed the streets because of a ban on 26 social media platforms including Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube. Within forty-eight hours of the protests beginning, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli resigned.  

While the Gen Z protests in Nepal foreground a long tradition of defiance and resistance among youth and students, they are distinguished by the centrality and agency of an element largely absent from earlier episodes of youth mobilisation: social media. Social media platforms and the algorithms that structure their content become the conveyance vehicle of a new pseudo-digital transnationalism, characteristic of a systematic transfer of tactics, memes and symbols which amplify the Gen Z objective to achieve a systemic overhaul globally starting from their respective nations. Consequently, this essay is an attempt to briefly conduct a 100-year sweep of student protests, and to capture the salient character of transnationalism observed within the period. 

The essay then attempts to culminate that 100-year sweep in present-day Gen Z protests with the objective to capture and demonstrate the seemingly unconventional character of transnationalism they demonstrate across several nations. The overarching thesis of the essay is the notion that the Gen Zs of the 21^st century have demonstrated the capacity for the conveyance of a dominant form of transnationalism within a generation through social media algorithms and digital tools in ways that can result in the replication of leaderless forms of mass mobilizations across several nations in their pursuit of systemic change. 

The Roots Run Deep

Most histories of 20^th century student / youth protests in the West begin in the 1960s. However, their deeper roots are located in Black institutions where black students engaged in the fight for dignity inside systems that denied them. For this transnational essay, the story of resistance begins in 1925 in Nashville at Fisk University, a historically Black institution in the USA. In February 1925, students at the university launched a strike against the school’s president, Fayette Avery Mckenzie, whose rules they perceived had become autocratic and dictatorial. They broke curfews, occupied buildings, refused to attend class for over two months and threatened to transfer universities en masse as a form of economic leverage against the institution.² By April 1925, McKenzie resigned, suspended students were reinstated, and Black alumni were appointed to the board of trustees of the University for the first time.³

Next was the Greensboro sit-in of 1960, during which the act of resistance by four students who refused to leave a lunch counter, was replicated across fifty-five cities in thirteen states within three months from which the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee emerged.⁴ Critical observers would later identify this tactic spreading through networks of trust in the May 1968 protests in Paris, when students occupying the Sorbonne found themselves at the center of a movement that engaged twenty-two percent of the French population. The 1968 protests in Paris have been described as the mutation of France from an older country to a younger country.⁵ This replication of networks of trust as a strategy of resistance would also be observed as thousands of students initially mobilized themselves in protests that would eventually morph into the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in Prague during which keys were jingled until a communist government began to fall.⁶

South Africa: Identity as Insurgency 

South Africa would produce the most philosophical, albeit devastating, chapter in this tactic of amalgamating networks and trust in student organizations, when Steve Biko and colleagues founded the South African Students Organization (SASO) at the University of the North (Turfloop) in 1968. Biko’s diagnosis went slightly beyond tactics, towards a problematization of what happens inside a person who has been colonized at the level of identity. His famous quote “The greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” captured his diagnosis effectively: political liberation required psychological liberation first. The apartheid state in South Africa understood the threat clearly enough to ban SASO and other Black Consciousness organizations in 1977. This came shortly after the arrest of Biko and his death in police custody on 12 September 1977 at the age of 30.⁷

Biko’s death may have represented the boiling point of student defiance in Apartheid South Africa as it was preceded by a tragic event that happened on 16 June 1976, during which nearly twenty thousand students marched through Soweto against the Afrikaans Medium Decree which required Black children to be taught in the language of the apartheid administration. High school students and primary school learners (including 12-year-old learners in Grade 7) mobilized in protests against the language policy, following which they were met with live ammunition. Twelve-year-old Hector Pieterson was one of the victims and Sam Nzima’s photograph of his body being carried through the streets circled the world within hours and did not stop circulating for decades. Around three hundred people died and over 2000 were injured during the protests.⁸

One interesting global consequence of the Soweto uprising is that it gave the American campus divestment movement the moral clarity it had previously lacked, sparking a broader organizational countermovement against apartheid in South Africa. What began as HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) campaigns against South African investment in 1964 eventually produced the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986.⁹ This sequence might represent evidence that protest traditions not only accumulate over time, but that each new generation inherits and builds upon them.

Again, this inheritance became visible in the fallist movements of 2015 and 2016, the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements, during which students arrived at the lawns of formerly white universities demanding decolonized knowledge and free education.¹⁰ Nonetheless, far from invoking 1976 as mere metaphor, both #Fallist movements represented its direct continuation.  

The New Wave: From Nairobi to Antananarivo 

Then came the Gen Zs of Kenya in June 2024, who stormed their parliament over a Finance Bill that proposed taxing cooking oil, bread, diapers and some other basic items used especially by the common Kenyan. They embarked on civic education campaigns on social media platforms such as TikTok and X, aiming to raise awareness among their peers about the implications of the impending bill.

These campaigns also involved documenting confrontations in real time to serve as deterrence against security forces, making every act of police violence an act of mobilization for whoever watches it and giving some agency to social media algorithms for mobilization on the streets.¹¹ They would later organize themselves in leaderless ad hoc publics and networks, which translated into leaderless forms of mass mobilization on the streets of Kenya. They were again met with live bullets like in Soweto as 60 were killed and 65 were abducted and disappeared.¹²

The Gen Zs in Madagascar would draw lessons from the Kenyans and would directly follow the timing and objective of the Nepali Gen Zs in 2025, which was to force the president’s resignation. This objective was further amplified by the fact that during preparations for the 2025 Gen Z protests in both Nepal and Madagascar, Malagasy activists joined Nepali Discord servers soliciting tactical advice.¹³

Although the protests in Madagascar began with outrage against water and electricity cuts, they soon morphed into demonstrations underpinned by widespread discontent with the government of President Andry Rajoelina. Following heated clashes with Malagasy security forces and the Gen Zs anticipating an impending collapse of the government in Madagascar, they would deploy OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) tools such as FlightRadar24 to track a helicopter carrying their president as he fled Madagascar and later transported by a French Military plane to La Réunion.¹⁴ The Malagasy Gen Zs in their use of OSINT tools would complement their Nepali counterparts in demonstrating that their generation’s variant of transnationalism could transcend well beyond the use of social media alone, but also encompassing a wide array of unconventional digital tools.

Another perspective that aids understanding of the generational character of their transnationalism is established following the fact across Gen Z protests in Indonesia, Nepal, Philippines and Madagascar, the same flag appeared. This flag, generally described as the Jolly Roger from the Japanese anime series One Piece, features a skull wearing a straw hat. In Madagascar, protesters replaced the straw hat with a Betsileo ‘satroka’ bucket hat. The satroka hat comes from the Betsileo ethnic group in the central highlands of Madagascar. Thus, the localization of Jolly Roger in Madagascar was not political nor ideological, neither was it borrowed from any existing protest tradition. It came from a shared digital-algorithmic diet. It is the first genuinely transnational protest symbol of the Gen Z protests and it emerged from a generation that grew up on the internet and refused to perceive geography as a limit on solidarity.  

Conclusion 

The history examined here demonstrates that the transnational character of youth and student protest is not new. The refusal at Fisk in 1925 is the same refusal observed among Gen Zs. The difference lies in the conditions under which this refusal travels — the speed at which tactics cross borders has complicated the capacity of states to contain political mobilisation through control of physical spaces alone.

Gen Zs therefore did not invent youth protests or its transnational dimensions, but inherited a century of it and adapted it to a digital environment unavailable to earlier generations. The significance of contemporary Gen Z protest lies precisely in this relationship between historical continuity and technological transformation: an older tradition of transnational youth resistance is being reorganised and intensifying through the communicative possibilities of social media.

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References:

1. The term ‘Gen Z’ generally refers to the demographic born between the years 1997 and 2012 around the globe. They share similar values, some of which include environmental-friendliness, transparency, accountability, orientation to family and community, fair trade and so on. Pandey, Ganesh. “Nepal Government Initiates Asset Investigation for Public Officials,” Ratopati English. 13 April 2026, https://english.ratopati.com/story/58838/questions-have-been-raised-not-only-about-the-old-but-also-about-the-new. ↩︎
2. Rubino, Stef. “Walkouts, Sit-Ins, and Merry Outlaws: A History of Student Protests, 1924-2024,” Autostraddle, 21 May 2024, https://www.autostraddle.com/a-history-of-student-protests-1924-to-2024/. ↩︎
3. Lamon, Lester, C. “The Black Community in Nashville and the Fisk University Student Strike of 1924-1925,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 40, no. 2, May 1974: 225–44, https://doi.org/10.2307/2206893. ↩︎
4. “Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/student-nonviolent-coordinating-committee-sncc. ↩︎
5. Poirier, Agnès. “May ’68: What Legacy?,” The Paris Review, 1 May 2018, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/01/may-68-what-legacy/. ↩︎
6. Rychetský, Lukáš et al. “Czechs Look Back on 1989, a Revolution Betrayed: A Reflection on the Mythology of the Velvet Revolution,” Class, Race and Corporate Power, vol. 2, no. 3, 2014, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48645532. ↩︎
7. Bernstein, Hilda. “IV — The Death of Steve Biko,” in No. 46 — Steve Biko (1978), archived at South African History Online, published 17 January 2012, https://sahistory.org.za/archive/iv-death-steve-biko. ↩︎
8. “The Youth Take Charge: The Soweto Uprising of June 1976,” South African History Archive, https://www.saha.org.za/the_youth_take_charge_the_soweto_uprising_of_june_1976.htm. ↩︎
9. Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, H.R. 4868, 99th Cong. (1986), https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/house-bill/4868.Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, H.R. 4868, 99th Cong., 1986, https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/house-bill/4868. ↩︎
10. Gukurume, Simbarashe & Maringira, Godfrey. “Confronting Legacies of Apartheid: The #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall Movements in South Africa,” Youth-Led Social Movements and Peacebuilding in Africa, 1st ed., Routledge, 2022, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003253532-12. ↩︎
11. Kwazema, Martins. “Gen Z and the Future of Democracy in Africa: Rethinking Young People’s Civic Power in a Digital Age,” Nordic Africa Institute, 21 November 2025, https://nai.uu.se/stories-and-events/news/2025-11-21-gen-z-and-the-future-of-democracy-in-africa-rethinking-young-peoples-civic-power-in-a-digital-age.html ↩︎
12. Khalidi, Muna. “Kenya: Deadly Repression at Anti-Finance Bill Protests,” Lethal in Disguise (International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations & Physicians for Human Rights), September 2024, https://lethalindisguise.org/case-studies/kenya-anti-finance-bill/. ↩︎
13. Shi, Xuefei. “Gen Z, Digital Activism, and Regime Change in Madagascar,” SWP Megatrends Spotlight 61 (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik), 29 October 2025), https://www.swp-berlin.org/en/publication/mta-spotlight-61-gen-z-digital-activism-and-regime-change-in-madagascar. ↩︎
14. Ibid. ↩︎

To cite this article:

Gen Z, Digital Transnationalism and the Inheritance of 100 Years of Youth Resistance © 2026 by Martins Kwazema is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Martins Kwazema, ‘Gen Z, Digital Transnationalism and the Inheritance of 100 Years of Youth Resistance,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 2, No. 20 (30 September 2026).