Celia Fernández: We often refer to recent youth-led movements as “Generation Z protests”, even though they have spanned different countries and political systems. To what extent is this a helpful or accurate label, and what common threads, if any, run through these movements? 

Paolo Gerbaudo: We use this label because of the strong participation of Gen Z protesters. In a way, some people see them as the equivalent of what the “movements of the squares” of 2011 and after were for millennials. The names and popular fame that protest movements get are a bit of a force for simplification of their internal complexity. But indeed, there are some shared elements despite the evident differences in context and some of the issues and objectives present in Gen Z protests.  

Many of these movements were against government corruption and authoritarianism and focused on criticising governments for their wrongdoings. At the same time, they all relied on the use of digital media, and in particular on platforms popular among Gen Z, such as Discord. 

This was a very notable element in protests in Nepal and in Morocco, to the point that they were sometimes called “Discord protests”. They also shared some imaginaries, such as the One Piece manga flag. Moreover, Gen Z protests are movements that try to learn from one another and build solidarity online by referencing each other.  

Was some ideal of democracy part of the picture?  

Gen Z protests are much more about anti – authority and anti-corruption sentiments than about democracy. The 2011 movements – the Indignados in Spain, the Aganaktismeni in Greece, the Arab Spring protests in North Africa and the Middle East – and the demonstrations in Turkey in 2013 were very much pro-democracy movements. There was a sense of the need to reclaim citizens’ direct participation in decision-making and to pursue assemblies in public squares. This is mostly lacking in Gen Z movements. They are much more focused on the contestation of power and the immediate demand to address governmental corruption and intractable social issues such as unemployment, online censorship, and freedom of expression. That said, democratic practices have emerged in some of these protests. For example, in the case of Nepal, the proposed alternative prime minister was voted for on Discord. It was like a referendum to gain legitimacy for substituting the outgoing prime minister. So there is a sense that these movements also want to be democratic, but that democracy is pursued much more online. It is more of an online plebiscitary democracy than a typical democracy, and it is more short lived and perhaps less ideological.  

Gen Z movements are more about destroying the public system than projecting a utopian alternative onto it.  

In your 2017 book, The Mask and the Flag, you argued that protest movements from the 2010s (the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Indignados, among others) carry the imprint of what you call “citizenism”, as opposed to “populism”. To what extent do today’s Gen Z protests resemble that earlier wave, and in what ways do they depart from it?  

I described citizenism or anarcho-populism as an ideology of social movements and protesting, which is populist in the sense of appealing to the totality of the people against corrupt leaders and elites. But it differs from institutional or global populism in that it is not leaderistic. Citizenism is instead based on a horizontal or supposedly horizontal organisational structure where squares are thought to be enough as a reference point for people to gather. In the 2011 protests, the entire point was to create an alternative democratic process that was supposed to be very open ended and horizontal. More recent movements are still citizenist in the sense that they are very people-driven and don’t have thick ideologies – they are not Marxist or liberal, for example. They have some libertarian elements, and at the same time, they are very focused on the collective redressing of issues. However, the practice of assembly democracy in the squares is absent from most of them – even though they gather in an online space – and they are much more concentrated on pushing out contested powers. These movements are more negative in the sense that they are more about destroying the public system than projecting a utopian alternative onto it.  

American journalist Vincent Bevins has interpreted the 2010s as a decade of mass protests that largely failed to morph into revolutions and often achieved the opposite of what they initially aimed for. Have more recent protest movements learned from those missed revolutions?  

I am a bit more optimistic than Bevins about what the movements of 2011 achieved. You cannot expect too much from protest movements – they are effective at creating a political climate, a sense of possibility, and changing the conversation; in that, they were very successful. At the time, you couldn’t have imagined eight years of radical left government in Spain. Of course, they did not fulfil the high ambitions of their utopian ideals, but that kind of ideal future was never going to be fully realised in practice. Contemporary movements are perhaps more aware of the limits of utopian approaches and the need to both stamp out the problems and define what will substitute them. Especially in authoritarian contexts, what matters at the outset is bringing as many people as possible onto the squares. There should be less focus on alternative democratic procedures, which risk becoming navel-gazing, turning overly preferential, and not really speaking to broad popular concerns.  

You mentioned the One Piece flag as a symbol used across different protest movements. What role does this kind of shared language play in terms of expression and building solidarity?  

The imagery of the One Piece flag is not so different from the [V for] Vendetta mask used in the 2011 protests. This one may be more joyful and tied to today’s anime and gaming subcultures, but ideologically, it remains a populist form of symbolism: the idea that government is unfair, blocks genuine self-organisation, and must be challenged by popular energy. In both cases, the movements lack a strong internal identity, defining themselves mainly in opposition to existing power. This is a highly performative, event-based, and temporary framework.  

This anarcho-populist refusal of representation and suspicion towards institutions carries a fundamental risk. 

It is typical of many youth movements to use cultural symbols as a code. Protesters try to recognise a shared experience through symbology. Not everyone will know what a symbol means, and so it has a double effect of provoking the curiosity of people who are outside the movement but coming close to it, while internally it ties protesters together through shared reference. It becomes a marker of common social and cultural experience – a sort of badge of membership and complicity for those who get it.  

Many Gen Z movements are characterised by a deep scepticism towards formal politics and representation, yet durable transformation still depends on electoral and institutional channels. Do you see pathways for translating this wave of protest into lasting political change, or does that distrust risk limiting its impact?  

There is a paradox in these movements. On the one hand, they are very distrustful of power – often for good reasons. In many of these [Global South] countries, parties are self-serving, elites are self-referential, and control over the state is reproduced with few democratic mechanisms for change. This also applies to Western countries. The 2011 movements already signalled a crisis of democracy, and despite attempts over the last 15 years to change that through new parties, something continues to be deeply rotten in democracy these days. At the same time, this anarcho-populist refusal of representation and suspicion towards institutions carries a fundamental risk. These movements are raising strong criticism of power, but when it comes to replacing it, they are still left with basically supporting existing parties and politicians. In Nepal’s case, ultimately, the solution was to identify existing politicians who had endorsed the protest movements because there was no real alternative within the movement itself. 

There remains a tension between rightly exercising the representative democracy system and the inability to build new institutions, which often leaves Gen Z movements to support whomever seems least bad among the elite.  

In the West, parts of the younger generation seem to be disengaging from politics or, particularly in the case of young men, shifting towards more conservative and even reactionary positions. At the same time, in countries like Bangladesh or Nepal, Gen Z has taken to the streets against corruption and inequality. Do these apparently diverging developments have anything in common? 

In a way, the idea of freedom of expression – self-expression and the popular voice vis-à-vis authorities – is a common term that explains both phenomena, despite the evident divergences in the themes they mobilise on. The protests in Nepal were sparked by a threat to shut down some digital platforms, which was seen as a violation of freedom of expression. In other movements too, the use of Discord was associated with the idea of free expression. There are some similarities with what is happening in Europe and the United States. Here, there is growing suspicion – pushed hard by the Right – towards so-called “woke” politics and identity issues and a perception that they have become part of institutional culture, imposed rather than embraced. 

Young Gen Z men, in particular, believe that the feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements have left them worse off. This ties into a broader resentment towards institutional liberalism, seen as hypocritical and censorious.  

Many of the countries that have witnessed mass protest movements in recent years are characterised by a low median age. In Europe, populations are ageing. What does an ageing population mean for the future of radical politics, which has historically been led by the young?  

Young people have always been a key resource for protest and dissent for a very simple reason: they find themselves in a life trajectory where their position is not yet settled, and therefore, they are a more mobile part of society. They tend to experience social contradictions and injustices more sharply: seeing narrow entry points into society, experiencing worsening conditions compared to their parents, and facing downward rather than upward social mobility. It is therefore only natural that young people are the most likely to engage in protest.  

This presents a challenge for protest movements, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to disappear as a result of demographic reversal. We are also seeing a partial revival of protest around issues such as Palestine, war, and climate change, and older cohorts have been strong participants in these protests. 

Digital platforms have been key to the politicisation of young people and the rapid mobilisation and coordination of protests, but they have also been used for surveillance and repression. Meanwhile, in Europe, there’s increasing talk of banning social media for young people. If you were to assess the role social media has played so far for radical and revolutionary movements, would it be more positive or negative?  

Social media always plays an ambiguous role. Platforms are private spaces transformed by movements into public ones, yet still controlled by large corporations whose – especially economic – interests often run counter to those of ordinary people. In order to attract users, digital platforms need to be seen as spaces for freedom of expression. Therefore, at times, they’re also spaces that lend themselves to circulating emancipatory content aligned with social movements. For example, during the war in Gaza, TikTok became a key conduit for political videos and helped radicalise many young people on this issue. [TikTok’s importance is widely recognised,] to the extent that, in the US, a group of entrepreneurs has mobilised to gain control over the platform’s operations in the country, simply because Trump and the Right were concerned about its political influence. 

So, on the one hand, there is no doubt that in many countries, especially those with little freedom of expression, social media has provided a venue for young people to air their views, organise, and mobilise. But also, increasingly in recent years, the ultimate antidemocratic instinct of social media platforms’ owners has had the upper hand.  

We are now witnessing the strengthening of what you have called the “Big Tech deep state” – an unholy alliance between privately owned technologies and the state’s military and surveillance apparatus, which aims to reassert its control over them. Do you think there’s still a chance for technology to play an emancipatory role for radical political movements in the age of AI and great-power competition?  

There is definitely a chance as long as it is possible to break free from the pervasive control of large corporations and US-based companies over our entire digital landscape. The level of concentration has become so comprehensive that the alternatives for users are drastically reduced. This gives the alliance of platform owners enormous leverage to control the public conversation and the political climate of any given country, with very little pushback being possible from users. 

In terms of alternatives, what matters most is not achieving 100 per cent digital sovereignty – which is unrealistic – but rather providing people with some escape and autonomous options that can reset the balance of power between users and platforms and reopen democratic possibilities online. This could include a mix of open-source and alternative services – such as Menéame in Spain – and more local platforms. It may also involve developments within the fediverse,¹ with more user-friendly tools like Mastodon and similar platforms, as well as Europe-based commercial platforms with a real mass user base. Together, these trends could help puncture the enormous concentration of power, which is largely held by a few companies dominating the public space and the political conversation.

1. An open-source network of independent social media platforms, websites, and apps that cooperate instead of competing, communicating via shared protocols.  ↩︎