From Screens to Streets: A New Wave of Youth-Led Protests

From Asia to Africa to Latin America, over the past two years a new wave of online mobilisation has hit irresponsive governments. Social media has played an important role in inspiring and consolidating tactics, generating outrage, and mobilising protesters to swiftly take to the streets, even when living under highly repressive regimes. Protest movements organised via various social media platforms across Asia, Africa, and Latin America demonstrate economic disillusionment and a crisis of political representation. The recent youth-led protests have been leaderless, spontaneous, decentralised, and horizontal, resonating with the ways in which such dissent manifested and evolved during the Arab Spring and Occupy movements of the 2010s as well as subsequently in East and Southeast Asia (particularly Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Thailand) in the 2020s to date. Such tactics are part of avoiding co-option by authorities and a response to a lack of effective political representation, with more traditional, hierarchical organisations often being perceived as anti-democratic. In terms of organising dissent and getting youth out onto the streets, recent horizontal protest movements have enjoyed notable success. When measuring the extent of the latter per original demands, however, outcomes are mixed. In Madagascar, Nepal, and Peru, corrupt governments have stepped down; uncertainty has continued to prevail in all three, though, as predatory elites seek to re-establish themselves amid a power vacuum.