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.
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