The Gentle Revolt of Gen Z: Disobeying to Remain Human

A new generation rejects war, injustice, and precarious living. From Nepal to Bangladesh, from American campuses to European squares, young people of Gen Z, in different contexts, are redefining forms of protest with horizontal organization, shared languages, and an internationalist commitment. The pro-Palestinian movement is at the forefront.

The Art of Disobedience. This is the title we chose for this new issue of Left, capturing the image of a new generation that refuses war, inhumanity, and injustice, a generation that has taken to the streets against the genocide in Gaza and that is demonstrating in many countries to demand social justice and rights. The protagonists are activists of Gen Z.

For years, teenagers were described as “fragile,” “locked inside their smartphones,” incapable of reacting after the pandemic isolation. The dominant narrative portrayed them as an archipelago of loneliness, devoted more to scrolling than to political participation. But this was a violent denial.

They were the first to protest — for peace, against climate change, against inequalities, against every form of violence wherever it is perpetrated, especially violence against women — and were labeled naive, manipulated, unaware. In the case of mobilizations for Palestine, they were even branded as “antisemitic,” “pro-terrorist,” and “enemies of the West.” Instead, as often happens in history, reality moved in a stubborn and opposite -dir-ection.

In 2024, and even more so in 2025, youth movements revealed something unexpected: a global awakening of a generation that refuses to merely survive in precarity, and that rejects a precarious future. And it does so with political clarity that disproved all stereotypes.

In this issue of Left we tell this story through many international contributions and field testimonies. Beginning with the account of the youth revolt in Nepal, which forced the corrupt government to resign. Now a new governor, the jurist and former minister Sushila Karki, is the first woman to hold this position.

The Nepalese wave moved forward waving the flag of the manga One Piece, which we placed on our cover. The Jolly Roger of the “Straw Hat Pirates” has become a generational symbol of rebellion against corruption, censorship, nepotism, and privileges of political elites. In Nepal (as in other Asian countries), anime and manga are very popular among Gen Z, and therefore using an icon from One Piece serves to speak a “common language” and create a movement identity that is easily recognizable.

And their language of protest echoes what has risen in various forms from Iranian universities to the streets of Antananarivo in Madagascar, from U.S. campuses to European squares, and all the way to Latin American metropolitan areas. Similar everywhere is their horizontal, fluid, network-based organizational method, a model inspired by the web, emulating what was once the youth protest movement in Hong Kong, where the motto was: “Be water, my friend.”

Unfortunately, in Hong Kong, the movement was silenced by Chinese repression through the imposition of the National Security Law. And many years earlier, in 2001, the new global movement in Italy was violently repressed by the police. The Arab Spring of 2011 had a similar fate, especially the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt. But the fire of nonviolent rebellion continues to smolder beneath the ashes, as shown in Luce Lacquaniti’s report from Cairo, describing how youth protest movements are using tools such as comics to carry forward their demands while trying to bypass censorship.

Since the protests of 2011, many things have changed. And Gen Z, born into digital culture — from Nepal to Indonesia, from Morocco (where the movement is called Gen Z 212, citing the country prefix) to Mexico and beyond — is developing new decentralized forms of struggle, without identifiable leaders, challenging intelligence services.

This is a new fact that we are trying to read and interpret, also with the help of scholars of youth political movements such as Donatella Della Porta, professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore.

In many parts of the world and within very different contexts, the professor explains, young people are peacefully challenging authoritarian regimes, brutal repression, digital surveillance, and carefully crafted smear campaigns. Gaza is the emotional and symbolic heart of this nonviolent revolt crossing the five continents. Everywhere emerges a similar demand that goes beyond the legitimate call for material needs required for a dignified life. Today, young people are asking for more.

The question now is how these demands can find political representation. In Nepal, as mentioned, this occurred with Karki as prime minister, but also in Bangladesh where economist Muhammad Yunus was called to lead the country, upon the proposal of the demonstrators. Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2006, created through his Grameen Bank a model of bottom-up economic and social development, helping reduce poverty through financial support for marginalized people, especially women, thus promoting women’s emancipation. In these two Asian countries, youth and student movements recognized themselves in institutional figures aligned with their concerns.

In Italy, the pro-Palestinian movement, which took to the streets alongside grassroots -union-s and radical left parties, is seeking forms of aggregation ahead of the 2027 elections. The experience of the Indignados, from which Spain’s Podemos emerged, shows that it takes time before movements enter the political arena. What matters is to support them, including by denouncing the forms of repression they suffer from right-wing governments and the establishment.


Simona Maggiorelli
Editor-in-chief of Left. I have worked for newspapers of different orientations, from Liberazione to La Nazione, writing about literature and art. In the newsroom of Avvenimenti since 2002 and, since 2006, at Left, dealing with culture and science, first as section editor and later as managing editor.

ٍSource:
https://left.it/2025/12/04/la-rivolta-gentile-della-gen-z-disobbe-dir-e-per-restare-umani/

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