Gen Z Against the State: Democracy in Crisis in Madagascar

HBS | Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung contributes with “Gen Z: Voices of a Global Generation,” accessible at https://www.boell.de/en/gen-z-voices-global-generation, a series of analytical papers that look at contemporary youth political agency across diverse political and geographic contexts. Taken together, these contributions move beyond descriptive accounts of youth protest to interrogate how Gen Z–driven mobilisation is reshaping repertoires of resistance, democratic claims-making, and state–society relations, particularly in contexts marked by institutional fragility, shrinking civic space, and contested legitimacy.

Across the selected papers, youth political engagement emerges not as episodic or symbolic participation, but as a structurally embedded form of political action shaped by digital infrastructures, intergenerational solidarities, and lived experiences of exclusion and precarity. At the same time, the papers collectively highlight a persistent tension between the intensity of mobilisation and the durability of political transformation, raising questions about how far digitally enabled, decentralised movements can translate visibility and disruption into sustained institutional reform.

Human rights advocate and scholar Lakshita Kanhiya’s paper, “Gen Z Against the State: Democracy in Crisis in Madagascar Youth Resistance Amid Institutional and Regional Failures” analyses Madagascar’s 2025 youth-led uprising as a response to compounded governance failure, infrastructural collapse and existential precarity. It underscores how protest becomes both necessity and political expression in fragile contexts, while also revealing the limits of disruption in the absence of institutional accountability, civilian oversight, and coherent post-uprising transitions.