- Gaza and the Revival of Internationalism
- Mass Defiance of Israel’s Seizure of Sumud Flotilla
- Anti-Corruption Upsurge Still Spreading
- Communal Care in Oaxaca
- Die Linke Faces Bitter Realities
- Think Pieces on Multipolarity
- Europe Unrest
- Women in El Salvador Take On Bukele
- UK Greens: We’re the Left Party Prepared to Lead
- Cambodian and Thai Activists Demand Border Peace
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Gaza and the Revival of Internationalism
Soumya Sahin / Alternative Viewpoint
Internationalism is not an abstraction but a practice rooted in solidarity. Against the all-encompassing darkness of uniformity, they keep alive the essential link that joins Bhagat Singh and Ho Chi Minh, Kolkata and Gaza, miners’ strikes and freedom flotillas. Internationalism, far from being a nostalgic slogan, emerges again as the only realistic politics in a world organised around capital and coercion.
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Mass Defiance of Israel’s Seizure of Sumud Flotilla
Associated Press (New York)
Supporters of the Global Sumud Flotilla took to the streets in major cities — including Rome, Istanbul, Athens, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Ankara, Sophia, Rabat, Milan, and Buenos Aires — following news that Israeli forces had intercepted an international flotilla carrying activists seeking to break Israel’s blockade of the Palestinian territory.
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Anti-Corruption Upsurge Still Spreading
• Don’t Call It a Gen Z Rebellion Will Shoki / Africa is a Country (New York, via email)
Across continents, a familiar figure has returned to the streets. In Nepal, young protesters brought down the government after years of corruption and stagnation. In Morocco, the leaderless collective “Gen Z 212” filled city squares with chants against state extravagance and everyday neglect. In Madagascar, students and unemployed workers facing water shortages and rolling blackouts forced the president to dissolve his cabinet. The world’s media quickly offered a tidy headline: Gen Z is rising.
Yet this description, repeated from CNN to The New York Times, is both true and profoundly misleading. It is true that the protesters are young, and that digital tools—Discord servers, TikTok feeds, and Telegram channels—have accelerated their coordination. But to call these revolts “Gen Z protests” is to confuse the medium for the message. It transforms a structural crisis into a generational mood, reducing politics to demography. What disappears from view is the deeper reality: that these uprisings express the re-emergence of a global political subject long at the margins—youth as the conscience of a world system in decay.
This year’s uprisings belong to the same historical arc traced in our recent special issue, Revolution Deferred. That issue mapped a decade and a half of protest—from the Arab Spring to #FeesMustFall—when mass mobilizations erupted across the world but rarely transformed the structures they confronted. Those movements revealed the limits of neoliberal democracy but were ultimately contained by it. The deferred revolution was not extinguished; it was dispersed. The events of 2025 suggest that the energy of that cycle is returning, shaped by harsher economic conditions and stripped of earlier illusions about reform. If the 2010s were a decade of revolt without revolution—of uprisings that exposed the system’s failures without transcending them—then today’s unrest is a politics of necessity: not yet revolutionary, but born of the realization that mere survival now demands confrontation with the system itself.
The recurrence of youth revolt is not mysterious. Under capitalism, youth are always the first to experience the contradictions of accumulation. They inherit the costs of crises they did not cause, entering adulthood in economies that no longer need their labor and political systems that no longer solicit their consent. In Morocco, more than one-third of those under 24 are unemployed, even as the state builds stadiums for the 2030 World Cup. In Nepal, whole generations have been exported as migrant labor, sustaining a remittance economy that allows domestic elites to postpone any structural transformation. Across much of the Global South, a permanent surplus of the young has become a fixed feature of economic life—a demographic majority condemned to social redundancy.
To treat this as a generational drama—Gen Z against their elders—is to depoliticize it. The category “Gen Z” belongs to the marketing lexicon of late capitalism, not to the vocabulary of historical change. It suggests that what unites these young people is culture or attitude rather than material circumstance. But their shared predicament is not psychological. It is structural. The same debt-driven economies, privatized social services, and externally imposed austerity programs that defined the neoliberal era have now reached their political limit. The young stand at the frontier of this exhaustion, where every promise of development has collapsed into permanent precarity.
The form of protest has changed, but its logic has not. In Morocco, the Discord channel “Gen Z 212” grew to more than 130,000 members in a few days—a digital infrastructure filling the void once occupied by political parties and unions. In Madagascar, the online network “Gen Z Mada” coordinated with trade unions to call nationwide strikes. In Nepal, the movement that began against a social-media ban evolved into a mass rejection of the entire post-Maoist order, discredited by decades of liberalization and elite rotation. These are not just digital rebellions. They are class recompositions conducted through digital means, experiments in organization within the ruins of traditional vehicles of mass politics.
It’s worth noting that many of these movements consciously adopt the very label that the media uses to trivialize them. “Gen Z 212” in Morocco, “Gen Z Mada” in Madagascar, and “Gen Z Nepal” have embraced the tag not out of identification with a global marketing category, but as a way of naming their generational commonality within crisis. It functions as a tactical shorthand—an ironic self-branding in the language of the world that excludes them (one that coexists with a cottage industry of journalism and cultural analysis that treats “Gen Z” like a zoo exhibit, forever speculating on the species’ strange habits—its “dead-eyed stare,” its aversion to work, its fear of nightclubs—while often overlooking the social order that produces these conditions).
The ideological content of these movements is still forming. Many articulate their anger in moral terms—corruption, dignity, betrayal. But beneath that vocabulary lies a structural awareness: that national elites act as mediators for a global system that has ceased to deliver. As one protester in Nairobi said during Kenya’s own uprisings last year, “We are ruled from the banks, not from Parliament.” From Antananarivo to Kathmandu, the accusation is the same. The state has been sold off; the future is foreclosed.
This consciousness is not yet a program, but it is more radical than it appears. It represents a re-emergence of world-systemic awareness from below—the sense that the injustices of daily life are linked to the architecture of global capitalism itself. In earlier moments of mass protest, the demand was inclusion: to be represented, recognized, and developed. The demand that animates today’s uprisings is more elemental: to survive a system that has exhausted the conditions of sustaining bare life. That is also why Palestine has become such a powerful moral and political touchstone. The ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the courage of those who continue to defy it—from student encampments to the Global Sumud Flotilla—have clarified for a generation that empire is not an abstraction (Several activists from the flotilla remain in Israeli custody under reported inhumane conditions, including AIAC contributor and South African writer Zukiswa Wanner, detained alongside hundreds of others who allege beatings, deprivation, and forced confinement.) It is the organizing logic of the system they confront. What binds the protests in Nairobi, Kathmandu, Lima, or Casablanca to those demanding a free Palestine is a shared refusal of a world ordered through dispossession and hierarchy.
The trajectory of twenty-two-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg captures this dynamic perfectly. Once the darling of liberal environmentalism—welcomed at Davos, embraced by Obama, and feted as proof that “Gen Z cared”—she was celebrated because her critique appeared moral rather than systemic. But the moment she connected climate justice to anti-imperialism, stood with Palestinians, and named Israel’s apartheid and ongoing war on Gaza as genocide, the invitations vanished (and Thunberg has not only focused on Palestine and climate justice, but has been consistent on a range of issues, including on Ukraine, Armenia, and Western Sahara). Western politicians who once applauded her suddenly discovered their limits of tolerance. What changed was not her age but her politics. The establishment can stomach youthful dissent only when it flatters its self-image; it recoils the instant that dissent names its foundations.
When mainstream commentary calls this wave of protests a “Gen Z rebellion,” what it really means is: don’t take it seriously. The label domesticates what should be threatening. It turns political struggle into a lifestyle trend. But if we strip away that veneer, what comes into focus is a pattern that connects the present to a longer history of youth revolt under capitalism—from Paris in 1968 to Soweto in 1976 to the #EndSARS and Fallist movements of the last decade. In each case, the young were not a special interest group but the social layer through which history announced that an old order had run its course.
That announcement is being made again. What we are witnessing from Kathmandu to Casablanca is not simply the impatience of a new generation, but the resurfacing of a global contradiction that no government, however repressive, can manage indefinitely. The deferred revolution has reappeared, stripped of illusions and mediated through screens, but recognizably the same in essence: an insistent demand for a world that can sustain life, dignity, and meaning beyond the market, and for the sake of people, not power or profit.
• Pakistan / NDTV World (New Delhi)
• Ecuador Gabriela Mena / teleSUR (Caracas)
• Madagascar / France 24 (Paris)
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Communal Care in Oaxaca
Madeleine Wattenbarger and Axel Hernández / Ojalá (Puebla)
The women of the Mazatecas for Freedom collective carried glowing torches along the seashore as they began their march to the federal courthouse in Boca del Río, Veracruz. On September 2, they set up a protest camp in the coastal city to demand an end to the judicial torture the Mexican state has subjected them to for over a decade.
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Die Linke Faces Bitter Realities
• Recognizing Israel’s Culpability Loren Balhorn / Jacobin (Brooklyn)
• Organizing Social Antifascism Lia Becker / Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Berlin)
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Think Pieces on Multipolarity
• Deglobalization, Towards the Right or Left? Walden Bello / Foreign Policy in Focus (Washington DC)
• Beyond Multipolarity Peiman Salehi / Africa is a Country
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Europe Unrest
• Greece Helena Smith / The Guardian (London)
• France Anaïs Fley / Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
• Catalonia Jordi Oriola Folch / The Canary (London)
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Women in El Salvador Take On Bukele
Suchit Chávez / Truthdig (Santa Monica)
Feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements have become the face of resistance in El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele — known as the “millennial president” and an unconditional ally of Donald Trump — has significantly weakened dissent through increased state surveillance, the persecution of critical voices and laws that benefit emerging elites.
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UK Greens: We’re the Left Party Prepared to Lead
Imran Mulla / Middle East Eye (London)
Zack Polanski recently won leadership of the UK’s Green Party, with over 80 percent of the vote. Twenty thousand new members have joined, and the party announced on Saturday that the total membership has surpassed the Lib Dems. Faaiz Hasan, co-election coordinator for the party: “I think the entire political spectrum has moved to the right. The threat from the right is so severe that we need allies.”
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Cambodian and Thai Activists Demand Border Peace
Global Voices (The Hague)
Between July and May 2025, tensions between Thailand and Cambodia over a border dispute devolved into violence. Amidst the turmoil, Cambodians and Thais have come together to launch a cross-border campaign aimed at combating hatred and promoting empathy and lasting peace.
