Historically, students have played an outsized role in politics. They were key to overthrowing regimes in places like South Korea in the 1960s, Ghana in the 1970s, and Serbia in 2000. And even in the recent past, we’ve seen students oust a regime in Bangladesh.
But things seem to be changing. Since the overthrow of Sheikh Hasina’s government in Bangladesh a year and a half ago, we’ve seen strongly youth infused protest movements, which have overthrown governments in Nepal, Madagascar, and Bulgaria, and caused significant problems in Serbia, Morocco, Georgia, and of course Iran. Yet, with the exception of Serbia, which is quite clearly a student protest, the rest of these have been called Gen Z protests.
What’s going on here? Why Gen Z? What happened to good old fashioned student protests? Is it that as massification has played itself out, students are no longer considered vanguards? Does it have more to do with the kinds of communications technologies the populations use to mobilize themselves? Or is it something else entirely?
Today my guest is Donatella della Porta. She’s a professor of political science at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy, and she’s a world expert on youth and student protest. We had a chance to range far and wide over this topic. We talked about why the social base for protest is broadening, why Serbia is different, and why I have too North American a view on student protests about Gaza. Guilty.
Altogether, it made for a great episode, and so without further ado, let’s hear from Donatella.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.21 | Generation Z and the New Politics of Protest
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Hi Donatella. Thanks for joining us. To start us off, can we have a broad discussion about youth and student protests over the last few years? Globally, what have they been about? We’ve seen very big uprisings in Nepal, in Madagascar, to a certain extent Morocco and Bulgaria. In Serbia, groups of students have been out on strike for over, I don’t know, 15 months now. It’s been a very long time. What do these recent movements tend to have in common?
Donatella della Porta (DdP): They are rooted in specific circumstances. First of all, thank you for inviting me, I’m looking forward to our conversation.
To address your question, as a starting point for reflecting on this type of protest, I think we have to consider that each of them has its own specific circumstances, specific events from which they developed. In Serbia, for example, there was also a big tragedy that affected especially young people.
But they have in common some characteristics of Generation Z, which has been living through several crises. As sociologists, we talk about a period of “polycrisis,” and this generation has lived through all of them: the climate crisis, the financial crisis, the crisis related to war and genocide — crises that affect youth in particular because they affect their future and make it more uncertain.
While other generations expected an improvement compared to their parents’ generation, Generation Z knows that it lives in a moment of big challenges. In Europe or in the West, even the perspective of peaceful development over the course of one’s life is considered at risk.
So this is a generation reacting to multiple crises, especially reacting to injustice and to inequalities that affect young people in an intersectional way — inequalities that are particularly characteristic of this generation.
AU: I’m surprised you didn’t mention corruption, because that’s an aspect that seems to me to have been fairly prominent in some of these movements. And taking your point, they may not expect a lot of economic growth, but maybe they expect more fairness in society. Corruption is one of those things that undermines a sense of solidarity, I guess.
DdP: It’s different what they expect and what they look for. They certainly want a fairer society and are reacting against authoritarian power, which is very often connected with corruption. So they frequently react against old leaders who have been in power for a long time, representing corrupt interactions between political elites and global capitalism.
But they are also afraid that what they hope for will not be easy to achieve. This is a generation that is moving not in a climate of hope, like the generation of the 1960s, when development was expected to move in the direction of more progress.
What we know now is that progress is not linear — it is challenged. Corruption is one of the elements, but it’s not just the unfairness of corruption in abstract terms. It’s the way corruption intersects with everyday experiences of difficulty in getting fair treatment.
With the Epstein files, for example, what is emerging is that what used to be considered pathologies affecting only the Global South or developing countries now appears to have permeated and corrupted democracies as well. So it is not just protest in authoritarian regimes. What emerges is the proof that democracies have also been corrupted from within.
AU: I see a lot of people talking not about youth protests, but about Gen Z protests — not youth in general, but a specific cohort. What actually distinguishes Generation Z in terms of activism? Are they different from previous generations, or is it just another wave of youth, with young people approaching these things differently?
DdP: In sociology, we distinguish between a cohort and a generation. A cohort is more of a statistical description, while a generation refers to cohorts that have lived through especially intense moments of mobilization. So we talk about the ’68 generation, and we now talk about Generation Z as a generation that has been living through a similar type of challenge.
As I mentioned at the beginning, they have been especially active on issues such as climate change, war, genocide, militarization, the authoritarian turn, and authoritarian backlash, and so on. They are rooted in their specific national circumstances, but they also participate in a global culture.
What has been noted about Generation Z is that certain types of language, cultural symbols, uses of media, and references to specific figures tend to travel across countries. In terms of mobilization, what characterizes this generation is the capacity to mobilize very quickly and in innovative forms of protest — for example, through artistic performances that are bridged with forms of direct action.
They are mainly peaceful protesters, but they often face harsh repression. So they try to navigate these challenges through innovative repertoires that spread from one country to the next, also thanks to very intense communication made possible by social media.
AU: One of the things that really intrigues me about this latest wave of protests is that they’re described as youth protests rather than student protests. There was a previous generation — 1968 in Europe, to some extent Tahrir Square, the anti-apartheid movements, or the overthrow of the government in Korea in the 1960s.
Those were cases where governments were destabilized or overthrown specifically by students, not youth more generally. And I’m surprised because those were times when students made up a much smaller percentage of youth overall. Why is it that as student numbers get bigger, universities seem to be less powerful as centers of protest?
DdP: It is not that those who participate are not students — or let’s put it this way: it is not that students do not participate. But the use of new technologies, and also the type of knowledge that is spread beyond universities, has provided a diffusion of resources for protest that in the past were mainly available to students.
Universities were considered a sort of safe space. Even within authoritarian regimes, they were often seen as a bit more liberal than other spaces. Now, at the same time, what we see is a challenge to freedom within universities. If we think about the United States, for example, Trump’s politics toward universities is an extreme form, but even in other countries — including Western European ones — universities have become much more commodified and commercialized, much more oriented toward creating so-called professional skills rather than fostering critical thinking.
So at the same time, we have a reduced impact of the kinds of resources that came from universities themselves — the networks that were spread within universities — and an increasing capacity for other groups to mobilize.
The movements we see today involve working-class youth, for instance, and young people who could not go to university but nevertheless have enough resources to mobilize — something that in the past was more difficult to achieve.
AU: If youth politics is increasingly happening outside formal student organizations or student movements, what does that imply for the role of universities as institutions? Are they losing influence over political socialization, or are they just playing a different role than they used to?
DdP: I think they tend to lose capacity to socialize when they assume a very narrow vision of themselves. The transformation of universities from the time of the ’68 protests to today is quite evident.
Fewer students participate in campus life, partly because many have to work at the same time. The image universities project is less that of producers of critical thinking and more that of providers of specific forms of professional training.
In many cases, universities have also become instruments of repression themselves. The type of protection students once experienced has weakened. Taking the most extreme example of American campuses, administrations have very often called the police onto campus and even denounced their own international students to the authorities. So universities are no longer perceived as spaces for the socialization of young people into public life.
I also have an anecdotal experience. I was invited to Germany to speak about these issues. Students invited me — but they asked me to speak outside the university, because they perceived their university as a censored space, not a free one.
AU: What’s the role of technology in all this? You mentioned earlier the ability of individual students to be creators, to do creative work online without needing to be physically present together on a campus. It’s hard to imagine someone like Guy Debord showing up now and being useful, because that notion of public spectacle doesn’t quite work the same way anymore — public space doesn’t function the same way. At the same time, students — or youth — can organize themselves remotely. It changes the distance between people. How do you think that changes protest, either for students or for youth?
DdP: It’s often a double process, something we saw very clearly during the pandemic, when people were isolated and forced to live much of their lives online, but at the same time were looking for occasions to meet physically.
Online and offline should not be considered two separate worlds. Very often, the connections built online and the capacity to use different types of technologies feed into what happens offline. We often talk about “social media” as if it were one homogeneous medium, but Facebook is different from Telegram, which is different from TikTok. They are also used differently by generations that grew up layering different means of communication rather than substituting one for another.
When we study the social effects of communication, we also have to consider journalism, television, radio, podcasts, and so on.
What is typical of social media use — something observed already during the Arab Spring — is the capacity for very quick and massive mobilizations without intermediaries or very strong leaders. This creates the potential for protests to spread rapidly, but it also creates a challenge in maintaining momentum, because more formal organizational structures are sometimes missing.
AU: Before we finish, I want to ask you about Gaza, which has been the subject of very large mobilizations. It strikes me that protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza have been more campus-centric than youth-centric. They seem to have occurred more on campuses than elsewhere — though I admit this may be a North American bias, and it may look different in other countries.
So I have two questions. First, why do you think students specifically — rather than youth more broadly — have been particularly engaged with issues happening on the other side of the world? And second, in the United States in particular, it’s striking how much more involved students have been in mobilizing around Gaza than around issues like the rise of authoritarianism at home. We’ve seen a lot of protests about Israel and Gaza over the last three or four years, but very little about ICE and border patrol, for example. Why do you think that is?
DdP: I think there is a bit of a North American bias in that perception. What we have seen in Europe is very large participation outside the universities as well. In Italy, for instance, there has been an intensification of protest against what activists define as genocide in Gaza, and this has included workers. Doctors have blocked arms shipments from being loaded onto ships, and there has been large participation by young workers with migrant backgrounds who connect their experiences of exploitation at work with experiences of discrimination based on religion, skin color, and so on.
This has also been the case in other European countries we are studying. Mobilization has been widespread outside universities. That said, there was a moment in the spring of 2024 when protests were indeed very visible on campuses, partly imitating or importing what was happening in the United States.
I think this sensitivity was related in part to international students, but also to the growing importance in sociology and history of reflections on colonialism, the colonial past, and intersectional inequalities. This created an alternative type of knowledge about what was happening.
As for the current situation, repression on campuses has been very heavy, as I mentioned earlier, often with the complicity of university elites. Campuses have become extremely dangerous places to develop protest.
At the same time, there is significant protest in the United States. Minneapolis, Chicago, New York City, and California have all seen mobilizations. These often take place in neighborhoods where migrants live, and students participate there as well, converging with organizations that resemble those of the Civil Rights Movement — including civil society and religious groups outside the university itself.
AU: Donatella della Porta, thanks so much for joining us today.
DdP: Thanks a lot. Thank you.
AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, our listeners and readers, for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about this episode, or ideas for future ones, please don’t hesitate to contact us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. We’re off next week, but join us in two weeks when we’ll be speaking with Georgi Stoytchev, head of the Open Society Institute in Sofia. He’ll be talking to us about recent developments in Bulgarian higher education and its very particular brand of university rankings. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
