From Screens to Streets: Decoding Bangladesh’s Gen Z July Uprising

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.

Anas Ansar’s (Assistant Professor of Political Science and Sociology at North South University in Bangladesh. Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Fellow at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute in Freiburg, Germany) paper, “From Screens to Streets: Decoding Bangladesh’s Gen Z July Uprising” situates Bangladesh’s 2024 uprising within broader global patterns of Gen Z resistance against authoritarianism, exclusion, and corruption. It highlights how creative, cultural, and digital practices - ranging from memes and satire to street art and performance - functioned as political infrastructures sustaining mobilisation under conditions of repression, while also raising questions about whether such “youthquakes” translate into durable democratic transformation.