Youth Movements and the Power of the Collective: Rethinking Resistance Across Generations

Raefa Hussain is a first‑year Politics and International Relations undergraduate at the University of Bath. Her academic interests include international relations, reactionary politics in Britain, and British foreign policy. She has previously published an article in the Bath Journal of Social Sciences and is an active member of SolidariTee. She also writes policy reflections, as well as pieces on philosophy, culture, and linguistics, on her Substack. This article marks her first contribution to the SolidariTee blog. She is currently preparing for a French summer school before solo travelling across Europe.

This article examines the political aftermath of youth‑led uprisings across generations and contexts, arguing that while student movements possess the capacity to destabilise authoritarian or oligarchic regimes, they are frequently constrained in their ability to shape the long‑term narrative and institutional memory of their own struggles. Through a comparative analysis of historical cases such as the 1979 Iranian Revolution and Indonesia’s 1998 Reformasi, alongside contemporary digitally mediated mobilisations in Bangladesh (2024) and Nepal (2025), the article demonstrates how states deploy distinct strategies of retrospective revisionism, ranging from epistemic reordering and narrative dilution to partisan digital curation and algorithmic amnesia. Drawing on Trouillot’s theorisation of the “materiality of martyrdom” and “fact assembly,” it contends that the struggle over memory constitutes a critical, yet often overlooked, dimension of revolutionary politics. Ultimately, the article argues that the endurance of youth movements depends not only on their capacity to overthrow oppressive regimes but also on their ability to institutionalise memory, safeguard digital archives, and resist the domestication of their histories by political elites.

A list of key-words can be found at the bottom of the page.

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Introduction

Across the past half‑century, youth movements have repeatedly exposed the fragility of political orders that present themselves as permanent. From Tehran to Jakarta, student protests have not merely articulated dissent, they have highlighted deep structural crises that authoritarian regimes could no longer contain. However, the significance of a revolutionary rupture is ultimately defined not solely in the moment of mobilization but in its aftermath. For example: through efforts to remember, institutionalise, or strategically erase it. This process often involves the documented phenomenon of retrospective revisionism, whereby political elites attempt to rewrite the movement’s history to suit their own political survival. Examining the historical cases of student liberatory movements in Iran and Indonesia alongside contemporary Gen Z movements in Bangladesh and Nepal reveals a recurring pattern that while the youth possess the capacity to destabilize entrenched authoritarian regimes, they often lack the institutional power to protect the retrospective significance of their own contributions (Momo, 2025).

The Historical Examples - Iran and Indonesia

The 1979 Iranian Revolution and the 1998 Indonesian Reformasi are defining cases of the uncompromising youth (student) movement. In both contexts, the university operated as a “bastion of freedom” (Mojab, 2004) within a broader landscape of state surveillance and repression.

Iran

By the 1970s, Iran was governed by the Pahlavi monarchy, a dynasty that pursued rapid top‑down modernisation and Westernisation while concentrating political power in an increasingly authoritarian state. Backed militarily and financially by the United States and Britain, the Shah’s programme deepened economic inequality, repressed political parties, and marginalised clerical and bazaar networks, fuelling widespread frustration across society. Within this landscape, students emerged as central historical agents. By reframing the Shah as a proxy of foreign imperialism, they shifted national politics from gradualist constitutional reform toward a more confrontational, populist rejection of Pahlavi rule, thereby pushing back against the Shah’s regime  (Skocpol, 1982). This marked a transition from protest to vanguardism - the idea that students were not simply protesting but positioning themselves as the leading force capable of directing the revolution. Their campuses became de facto “war rooms”, informal hubs where strategy was coordinated, leaflets were printed, and nationwide demonstrations were planned. These student networks provided much of  the organisational infrastructure that increasingly contributed to the collapse of the monarchy. (ibid). 

However, the subsequent Islamic Cultural Revolution (1980 - 1983) constituted a project of epistemic reordering. In other words, the new regime sought to redefine acceptable ideas, rewrite the intellectual landscape, and control which voices could belong in universities. This case serves as a primary, well-documented example of state-led retrospective revisionism. Through the militarised occupation of campuses and the purging of “unruly subjects,” the new theocracy, the Islamic Republic led by Ayatollah Khomeini and dominated by the Islamic Republican Party (IRP), resolved the post‑revolutionary “dual power” struggle by force, erasing the secular and leftist currents that had been indispensable to the uprising (Mojab, 2004).

Indonesia 

By the mid‑1990s, Indonesia was governed by President Suharto’s “New Order”, the name given to the authoritarian regime that had ruled since 1966 through military dominance, tight control of political parties, and the suppression of dissent. Although the regime projected an image of stability and economic growth, frustration was rising among students, opposition politicians, and urban middle‑class groups. A key turning point came with the 1996 PDI Office Raid, or ‘Kudatuli’, when security forces violently attacked the headquarters of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) after it backed Megawati Sukarnoputri, a rising opposition figure. The raid exposed the regime’s intolerance for even moderate political challenge and further fuelled student activists who saw it as evidence that peaceful reform was impossible. (See Amnesty International, 1996) 

In this context, Indonesia’s 1998 Reformasi demonstrates how a regime’s narrative of stability can collapse when the state inadvertently produces the materiality of martyrdom (Trouillot, 1995; Aspinall, 2005). Trouillot’s notion of “materiality” refers to the creation of hard, irreversible facts like deaths  that become symbols of resistance and catalysts for political change. In this sense, the state’s own violence generates the martyrs that ultimately undermine its authority. Suharto’s New Order sustained tight control over campuses by banning independent student organisations and portraying any form of student activism as inherently subversive (ibid). The 1997 Asian financial crisis ruptured this enforced silence. As the Rupiah, Indonesia’s currency, collapsed, the killing of four students by Indonesian security forces at Indonesia’s Trisakti University, who were participating in a protest alongside other students and faculty members, became a turning point. Students responded by taking on a vanguard position, occupying parliament and rejecting state‑managed dialogue (Aspinall, 2005). The elevation of the Trisakti victims into “martyrs” (Trouillot, 1995) provided the moral and emotional catalyst that emboldened students to escalate their actions, triggering days‑long demonstrations across cities and campuses nationwide and transforming local student protests into a broad, decentralised movement. Their refusal to compromise prevented the state from retrieving the narrative to preserve the status quo. In practice, this meant the regime could no longer control the narrative and reassert the illusion of order that had sustained Suharto’s rule. Suharto became historically obsolete even before his formal resignation. 

Yet, as in Iran, the immediate aftermath of victory initiated a struggle over the meaning of the revolution as to whether it represented democratic transformation or merely a reconfiguration of state power. Indeed, in Indonesia today, retrospective revisionism often takes the form of narrative dilution whereby the radical demands, actions and consequences of students are softened in official state commemorations (See Akbar,2025 ).

Digital Mobilisation -  Bangladesh and Nepal

If the youth revolutions of the 20th century relied on being organised through more traditional, hierarchical networks, the contemporary uprisings in Bangladesh (2024) and Nepal (2025) mark a shift toward digitally native, leaderless resistance. Whilst in many ways, youth mobilization has opportunities to become faster, more decentralized, and more adaptive as a result of modern technologies, they confront new challenges and experiences of rights violations under modern surveillance states capable of both physical repression and digital erasure.

Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, the 2024 “Monsoon Revolution” began as an online  protest against a discriminatory civil service quota system but rapidly escalated into a broader rejection of Sheikh Hasina’s fifteen‑years rule (Hossain & Tieri, 2024). The quota system reserved a large share of government jobs for specific groups, including descendants of 1971 freedom fighters, which many young people saw as unfair and politically manipulated. When the government initially offered only minor adjustments, protesters viewed these as non-substantive rather than meaningful reform. Defined by its refusal to accept these incremental reforms, the movement responded to the state’s escalating repression such as police beatings, arrests, and the use of live ammunition against demonstrators by expanding its demands from policy change to regime change. Its leaderless structure allowed it to withstand internet shutdowns and targeted repression, as decentralized networks continued to coordinate resistance across campuses and cities (ibid). When the internet was still available, students used social media like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, encrypted WhatsApp groups to share protest routes, legal advice, and evidence of police violence (See Monsoon Protest Archive; Abir et al,2025). After the nationwide internet shutdown, students organised through offline networks such as  BDIX‑linked LAN servers, Bluetooth mesh apps, and in‑person relays that carried information between campuses. Even without connectivity, protest routes, meeting points, and safety updates continued to circulate through handwritten notes, dormitory notice boards, and tightly coordinated word‑of‑mouth chains (Daily Star,2026). 

Crucially, I contend that the post-revolutionary challenge in Bangladesh now lies in the digital archive as while the interim government installed after Hasina’s August 2024 resignation seeks to document abuses of the fallen regime, the lack of a centralized student leadership makes the preservation of the protesters' own diverse, street-level perspectives vulnerable to partisan curation and ultimately retrospective revisionism. 

Nepal 

By 2025, Nepal was governed by a fragile coalition led by the Nepali Congress (NC) and the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN‑UML), two parties that had dominated politics since the end of the civil war in 2006. Despite formal democratic institutions, public frustration had been building over corruption, patronage networks, and the entrenchment of powerful political families whose children and relatives occupied key state positions. It was in this climate that students mobilised against what they saw as a corrupted political class protected from accountability  (BBC,2025). 

Thus, Nepal’s 2025 uprising followed a similar digital logic. Triggered by a social media ban under the Nepali Congress-CPN‑UML coalition government, the movement was led primarily by students and young urban professionals in Kathmandu, Lalitpur, and Pokhara. The movement relied on encrypted platforms and Discord channels, intentionally eschewing party banners and ideological manifestos (Karki, 2025). The viral #NepoBaby campaign, a term borrowed from global pop‑culture debates about nepotism, exposed how ministers, MPs, and senior bureaucrats had placed their children, cousins, and in‑laws in lucrative state posts (BBC,2025). What began as memes and satirical infographics quickly evolved into a coordinated critique of hereditary privilege, transforming diffuse anger into a shared political language.  This constituted a sophisticated “moment of fact assembly” (Trouillot, 1995) , a stage in which dispersed experiences are gathered and stabilised into politically legible facts.  Digital tools were used to translate street‑level anger into electoral power, culminating in the institutional gains of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) (Karki, 2025 ; South Asia Monitor, 2026). 

However, a paradox emerges as while the internet provides a permanent record of dissent that avoids traditional state censorship, the speed of algorithmic media risks a different kind of revisionism. In a landscape of rapid-fire content, the lived experience of the student can be quickly overwritten by sanitized, state-approved narratives or simply lost in the noise of the next digital cycle.

The Struggle Over Memory: Case of the Philippines 

The fragility of these victories becomes most visible in the Philippines. This context provides the most stark, documented evidence of how a successful revolution can be entirely inverted within two generations. As Rommel F. Momo (2025) argues, the “Spirit of 1986” is being eroded by a deliberate project of historical revisionism. Despite the central role of youth in toppling the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, the failure to institutionalize this memory in education and public discourse allowed authoritarian nostalgia to consolidate. In the absence of strong media literacy and a rigorous historical curriculum, the years of martial law have been reframed as a “golden age” (Momo, 2025).

This phase marks the endpoint of the revolutionary cycle, where a state that cannot defeat a movement in public space attempts to neutralize it through the politics of the archive. For the youth of Bangladesh and Nepal, the Philippines case serves as a powerful warning. Winning the streets is only half the struggle. Without a transition from protest to epistemic resistance by the active work of documenting, teaching, and archiving,  the uncompromising demands of youth movements risk being diluted or erased by time and disinformation.

Conclusion

Student activism is often remembered through its moments like strikes and the viral hashtag. Yet the enduring power of the collective lies in its longevity. The challenge is to convert short‑term disruption into long‑term structures of civic and historical consciousness. Youth movements have the capacity to reset political landscapes. However, I contend that  the issue of  retrospective revisionism and preservation of memory is relevant across all these contexts and should not be taken lightly because political elites and institutions inherently seek to domesticate the memory of its own near-collapse. By domesticating memory, the state attempts to strip a revolution of its radical potential, reframing a moment of fundamental threat as a manageable chapter of national evolution. In Iran, this was achieved through force, in Indonesia, through dilution and in the contemporary cases of Bangladesh and Nepal, it is likely to occur through partisan curation or digital amnesia. But to prevent the “silencing” (Trouillot, 1995) of the narrative around youth revolution, the next generation of activists must be as strategic about memory as they are about mobilization. A revolution does not end when a dictator falls; it begins again in the classroom, the archive, and the collective stories a society chooses to preserve.

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Key Words

Historical Agents- Individuals or groups in the past who took certain actions and shaped the course of history.

Populist- A political figure, party, or ideology that claims to represent the "common person" in opposition to a perceived "corrupt elite" or establishment.

Reformasi- Directly translates to "reformation" or "reform," derived from the desire for a better, more just society. Most famously, refers to the 1998 movement in Indonesia that toppled President Suharto’s authoritarian rule.

Retrospective revisionism- Active reinterpretation or rewriting of historical narratives to serve contemporary political agendas, legitimise current power structures, or reshape national identity.

Spirit of 1986- EDSA People Power Revolution in the Philippines, a peaceful, four-day uprising in February 1986 that ended the 20-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.

Theocracy - A form of government where a deity is recognized as the supreme ruling authority, with daily affairs managed by religious leaders or clergy who are believed to be divinely guided.