Electrifying Asia – where EVs are reshaping power demand and fuel use

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By Mark Buckton in Taipei July 28, 2026

Asia’s electric vehicle revolution is no longer simply a transport story. Across much of East and Southeast Asia it is now becoming a major electricity story, altering how power is generated, accelerating investment in renewable energy and, over time, reducing the existing demand for imported oil and LNG. The shift is uneven though.

China dominates in scale, as might be expected, while countries such as Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia are quickly emerging as manufacturing and policy hubs. Taiwan, meanwhile, has carved out its own distinctive niche through electric scooters and battery swapping technology.

The most immediate effect of EV adoption in recent years is largely straightforward. Every battery-powered car, bus or scooter replacing an internal combustion engine reduces petrol or diesel consumption. And what replaces those fuels depends on the electricity mix in any given country. Where coal still dominates, emissions savings are smaller – for obvious reasons. Where renewables are expanding rapidly, however, electrified transport increasingly runs on solar, wind or even hydropower.

China offers the clearest and by far the world’s best example. It is the world’s largest EV market by a wide margin and has simultaneously built the world’s largest solar and wind generation capacity. Beijing is increasingly shifting energy demand away from imported crude oil and towards domestically generated electricity, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Global EV Outlook 2026 and figures from China’s own National Energy Administration (NEA). That does not eliminate fossil fuels from the system. What it does though is change where they are consumed and in turn reduces the exposure to the ever volatile oil markets.

The interaction then between EVs and renewable electricity is becoming increasingly important. Vehicle charging typically occurs overnight when cars and scooters are not being used. This helps to absorb off-peak generation, while smart charging systems increasingly encourage motorists to recharge when renewable output is abundant – and in some cases when power being supplied to homes is cheaper. In the future it has been speculated that millions of vehicle batteries could even provide grid balancing services through vehicle-to-grid technology, although commercial deployment of such remains limited, the IEA says.

For LNG exporters, this matters – and hurts. Gas-fired generation has often been viewed as the natural partner for intermittent renewable energy because it can ramp output quickly. Yet rapid growth in battery storage in China and across Asia is beginning to challenge that assumption.

As battery costs fall – and they are, rapidly - utilities can increasingly pair solar farms with storage rather than relying solely on gas-fired peaking plants, according to BloombergNEF’s Energy Storage Market Outlook.

The IEA’s Southeast Asia Energy Outlook 2026 meanwhile, expects electricity to become the backbone of Southeast Asia’s energy system over the coming coming decades. EV sales in the region more than doubled during 2025 to about half a million vehicles, representing nearly 20% of all new vehicle sales. Electric two- and three-wheelers are expected to account for almost 60% of these sales figures by 2035.

And as electricity demand will continue rising rapidly, oil use in transport will grow much more slowly than vehicle ownership. One day it will start to drop.

Thailand has emerged as arguably Southeast Asia’s leading EV production centre. Generous incentives have attracted Chinese manufacturers including BYD, Great Wall Motor and Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC), alongside domestic investment in charging infrastructure. The country’s own expanding solar industry complements the transport transition, allowing an increasing share of vehicle charging to come from renewable electricity rather than imported oil, according to Thailand’s Board of Investment (BOI) and the IEA.

Vietnam is also following a similar path. Domestic manufacturer VinFast has driven rapid EV adoption across the country’s main cities of Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi and Da Nang, while the government continues expanding solar and wind capacity after one of the world’s fastest solar installation programmes. This combination is gradually shifting transport energy demand from imported fuels towards domestically generated electricity, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

Indonesia to the south and Southeast Asia’s most populous nation, presents a different model. Rich in nickel reserves, it has positioned itself as a battery manufacturing hub rather than simply an EV market.

As such, Chinese and South Korean companies have invested heavily in battery plants and vehicle assembly. At the same time, Indonesia continues adding geothermal, hydropower and solar capacity, although coal still dominates electricity generation for now. As the power mix gradually decarbonises, however, the climate benefits of EVs will increase correspondingly, Indonesia’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources states.

Neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore are pursuing complementary strategies. Singapore’s emphasis lies in charging infrastructure, smart grids and fleet electrification rather than vehicle manufacturing for which it simply does not have the space. Malaysia has focused on attracting investment into battery components and EV assembly as Kuala Lumpur expands solar generation through large-scale solar auctions, according to the Jakarta-based ASEAN Centre for Energy (ACE).

Taiwan, also limited in size, has taken a distinctive approach centred on two-wheel transport. Rather than prioritising electric cars, it has become synonymous with Gogoro’s battery-swapping ecosystem although there are others now trying to carve a niche for themselves. Millions of battery swaps occur every month across thousands of stations, allowing riders to exchange depleted batteries in seconds instead of waiting for charging. The model reduces range anxiety while providing a potentially valuable distributed energy asset, according to Gogoro’s annual sustainability and investor reports even if customers do complain of battery capacities, even when fully charged, gradually decreasing.

Similar battery-swapping concepts are now being explored elsewhere in Asia, including India, Indonesia and the Philippines, although none has yet matched Taiwan’s scale.

Electric scooters are particularly significant because two-wheelers dominate urban transport across much of Southeast Asia and into the South Asia region.

Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand collectively have well over 200mn motorcycles. Even Taiwan with a population of around 24mn has 14mn registered scooters on the road.

Electrifying even a fraction of that fleet produces immediate reductions in petrol demand while requiring relatively modest battery capacity compared with passenger cars. Gogoro has reportedly sought partnerships in Indonesia, India and other regional markets to export its battery-swapping model.

And with renewable energy infrastructure increasingly following EV deployment, China remains the clear leader, manufacturing most of the world’s solar panels, batteries and EVs while continuing massive investment in wind and solar generation.

But with Vietnam an important solar manufacturing base, while Thailand and Indonesia are expanding both renewable generation and battery supply chains, these countries too increasingly see transport electrification and renewable power as parts of a single industrial strategy rather than separate sectors.

That does not mean LNG demand disappears or will, overnight. In many Asian electricity systems, gas remains the preferred flexible generation source capable of balancing intermittent solar and wind output. The IEA’s Southeast Asia Energy Outlook 2026 expects natural gas to continue playing an important role in regional power systems, particularly where coal is displaced. However, stronger renewable deployment combined with battery storage could moderate long-term LNG demand growth compared with earlier expectations. And much sooner than expected.

Oil on the other hand faces a more direct challenge. Every additional EV permanently removes future demand for petrol or diesel. While aviation, shipping and heavy industry will continue consuming hydrocarbons for decades, passenger road transport is steadily shifting towards electricity. According to the IEA’s Southeast Asia Energy Outlook 2026, EVs and biofuels in Asia and worldwide could eventually displace oil demand equivalent to a substantial share of the region’s crude imports under more ambitious policy scenarios.

To this end, and given that electrification, coupled with domestic renewable generation, offers greater energy security as well as lower emissions, the result is a structural shift in Asia’s energy landscape. Transport is becoming increasingly tied to electricity rather than oil, while electricity itself is becoming progressively cleaner. The winners are likely to be countries capable of building integrated ecosystems spanning renewable generation, batteries, charging networks and EV manufacturing.

Driving Influence: China’s EV Strategy In South Asia And Implications For India – Analysis

An XPeng electric car showroom at the Taikoo Li Sanlitun shopping center in Beijing, China. Photo Credit: Raysonho, Wikipedia Commons
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July 29, 2026
Observer Research Foundation

By Aditya Gowdara Shivamurthy and Sakshi Kapoor

Key Takeaways:

China has rapidly become the dominant supplier of electric vehicles and related ecosystems (batteries, charging infrastructure, software) to South Asian countries, driven by competitive pricing, state-backed overcapacity, and alignment with local green-transition goals.

This expansion creates long-term structural dependence on Chinese technology, standards, spare parts, and critical minerals, while raising security concerns over data collection from connected vehicles and potential intelligence risks.

The trend erodes India’s traditional advantages in automobile and petroleum trade with its neighbors and challenges New Delhi’s efforts to expand its own EV manufacturing and regional influence.

In April 2026, Asia became the largest buyer of Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), as Chinese exports jumped by almost 40 percent. Within this broader trend, South Asian nations – Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bhutan and the Maldives – are emerging as important markets. Through the export of vehicles, batteries, charging infrastructure and digital ecosystems, Beijing is steadily restructuring South Asia’s technological standards. China exports not just products but complete mobility systems designed to generate long-term structural reliance that binds importing nations to Chinese manufacturers, standards and supply chains. This will have long-term implications for the region by creating dependency and security challenges, and by eroding India’s trade advantages.
China’s Domestic EV Transformation and Global Leadership

China’s dominance of the global EV industry is the outcome of three decades of sustained state-led effort. Between 2009 and 2023, China invested over US$230.8 billion in the EV industry. Government spending has been the primary driver, accounting for 60 percent of total global spending in 2025. Schemes such as purchase tax exemptions, performance-linked incentives and scrappage schemes have accelerated adoption, while large-scale investment has enabled China to account for 80 percent of the world’s installed charging capacity. In 2025, it sold 13 million electric cars, accounting for 65 percent of global EV sales, with sales projected to reach 14 million in 2026. Chinese automobile firms – BYD, SAIC, Geely, Changan, NIO and Xpeng – have emerged as major players across the world. At the centre of this ecosystem is Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited, which controls 38 percent of the global lithium-ion battery supply, exemplifying how vertical integration has solidified China’s position.


China’s drive to dominate the sector is fuelled by both ambition and vulnerability. It seeks to break the historical pattern of Western and Japanese dominance in the conventional automobile sector. EVs offer a domain in which China can set standards, shape supply chains and gain a long-term technological advantage, while reducing its exposure to oil import shocks and advancing its 2060 carbon neutralitytargets. It has built a highly integrated system spanning the mining, refining and processing of key minerals, large-scale battery and component manufacturing, and software and charging infrastructure. China controls around 70 percent of global rare earth mining, 90 percent of separation and processing, and over 80 percent of lithium-ion battery manufacturing. Additionally, China has been expanding abroad because of its overcapacity and domestic price wars amid slowing demand.

Expansion of Chinese EV Ecosystem in South Asia

South Asia has emerged as an increasingly attractive destination for China’s EV industry. The West imposes high tariffs and other non-tariff barriers on the country, whereas South Asian markets offer expanding consumer bases, favourable investment conditions and policy alignment with national green transition agendas. Nepal aims for carbon neutrality by 2045, Sri Lanka targets net-zero by 2050, Bhutan emphasises sustainability via Gross National Happiness, and Bangladesh pursues 30 percent EV deployment by 2030. Furthermore, the rising cost and risk of importing fuel, along with multiple economic shocks since COVID-19, are motivating countries to embrace this transition. This creates a window for monopolistic Chinese firms to systematically exploit South Asian markets.

Chinese EVs also stand out for their competitive pricing. In Nepal, Chinese manufacturers account for the majority of new EV sales, owing to their affordable pricing. Dealers earn higher margins on Chinese vehicles than on those of other players. A mature manufacturing supply chain, lower input costs and favourable financing conditions allow China to offer the world’s lowest battery prices. Another tool of expansion is Government-to-Government assistance. For instance, in January 2026, China donated 100 electric buses to Sri Lanka for its major Colombo-Kandy and Colombo-Galle routes; similar gestures have been extended to Nepal. Such grants build familiarity and consumer appeal, while also creating dependence on Chinese spare parts and maintenance services. Recently, Sri Lanka requested Chinese assistance in building charging stations nationwide.

Chinese firms have also pursued assembly operations in the region. In Pakistan, BYD has established a facility, but operations remain limited, with no local R&D or component manufacturing. Bangladesh shows a similar pattern. Since the 2021 National Electric Mobility Action Plan was initiated, China has continued to establish distributor networks and explore battery assembly in export zones, though investments are yet to materialise. At the same time, Bangladesh’s structural dependence on Chinese capital across sectors gives Chinese firms preferential access that Asian and European competitors lack. With supply lines and local partnerships already in place, market entry is easier for Chinese firms. This also provides a way to bundle in vehicle software and connected charging networks, and to integrate them.

There has been a significant increase in both the value and the number of Chinese EV units imported into South Asia between 2019 and 2025 (as Table 1 and Graph 1 show). The year 2019 is taken as the baseline, given the noticeable shift in EV trade that year. In Nepal and Bhutan, around 90 percent and 60 percent, respectively, of vehicles imported from China are EVs. Graph 1 shows that imports have increased significantly in Sri Lanka, and moderately in Pakistan, the Maldives and Bangladesh. The demand for EVs has fuelled an increase in total imports of Chinese vehicles since 2019, with Bangladesh as an exception. Table 2 shows that Chinese EV imports dominate the EV market in the region, with Bangladesh and the Maldives being exceptions. While Japanese vehicles and two-wheelers have dominated the Maldivian market, Bangladesh, until recently, lacked a policy framework and public appetite for EVs. This is gradually changing.

Table 1. China’s Vehicle and EV Trade with South Asia

Source: Authors’ collation from UN Comtrade and official trade statistics from respective countries’ ministries. Note: *Figures are approximate and represent average estimates, as reported values vary across sources. **Total Vehicle Imports are derived from WCO HS Code 8703: Passenger vehicles (all types), whereas EV Imports are derived from HS 870380: Battery electric vehicles (pure EVs) category.

Graph 1. China’s Share of EVs in Imports into South Asia

Source: Authors’ own


Table 2. Chinese Dominance in the South Asian EV Market

Source: Authors’ collation from UN Comtrade and trade statistics from respective countries’ official websites. Note: *Figures are approximate and represent average estimates, as reported values vary across sources. ** Total Vehicle Imports are derived from WCO HS Code 8703: Passenger vehicles (all types), whereas EV Imports are derived from HS 870380: Battery electric vehicles (pure EVs) category.

EVs as a Diplomatic Instrument and Their Strategic Implications

China’s expanding EV footprint risks creating a new form of “dependency diplomacy,” in which technological and industrial reliance translates into long-term economic influence. Sri Lanka, for example, possesses critical minerals but lacks the processing capacity to convert them into battery-grade materials. For South Asian economies, developing even parts of the full value chain requires large investment, sustained policy action and time. Furthermore, these countries depend on China for critical minerals, advanced components and chips. When batteries degrade, nations face expensive replacements or premature retirement of vehicles, owing to a lack of battery recycling capacity. Given China’s technology-transfer restrictions, assembly lines are expected to generate only logistics and retail employment. This makes it difficult for South Asian economies to develop genuine domestic manufacturing capacity.

Security concerns also persist regarding these imports. Modern, internet-enabled Chinese vehicles generate detailed location data, driving patterns and camera feeds, which are stored on cloud servers. The most advanced variants function as ‘smartphones on wheels‘, equipped with facial recognition, AI systems and over-the-air software updates. This is further complicated by China’s National Intelligence Law, which obliges individuals and companies to assist state intelligence, opening up the possibility of Chinese authorities accessing this data. In sensitive environments, this could enable the tracking of movements near ports, diplomatic sites or military installations, as well as remote interference with vehicle fleets. Such concerns have already been raised in Norway and Denmark.


The Belt and Road Initiative’s (BRI) Green Finance Agenda, which has directed US$11.8 billion into renewable infrastructure, also feeds into China’s EV expansion. Pakistan’s BYD assembly facility, linked to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), illustrates how EV investments are being integrated with geopolitical objectives. Future BRI projects, especially highways, are likely to be designed with EV integration in mind. If this trajectory continues, South Asia’s transport, energy and data infrastructures will become highly vulnerable.

Finally, beyond these strategic and security challenges, Chinese dominance of the EV industry poses a significant threat to India’s trade in the region. India has traditionally been South Asia’s principal source of automobile and petroleum imports. Firms such as Tata, Mahindra, Ashok Leyland, Maruti Suzuki and TVS have built strong market positions through extensive dealer networks, joint ventures, readily available spare parts and well-established service ecosystems. As such, the growing preference for Chinese EVs is likely to affect India’s automobile and petroleum trade with all countries in the region (by 14 to 33 percent, as shown in Table 3), barring the Maldives and Pakistan.

Table 3. India’s Trade with South Asian Countries

Source: Authors’ collation from UN Comtrade and Trade Intelligence and Analytics Portal, Department of Commerce, Government of India. Note: *Total Vehicle Imports are derived from WCO HS Code 8703: Passenger vehicles (all types) **Petroleum Imports values are derived from Chapter 27 of the HS Code, which covers “Mineral fuels, mineral oils and products of their distillation; bituminous substances; mineral waxes.”

India is accelerating its EV transition to expand manufacturing and exports, and is deploying it as a foreign policy instrument — yet the scale of this expansion remains modest compared to China’s. Between 2020 and 2025, India’s EV sector attracted around US$25 billion in investment, well short of its targets, leaving China to dominate the market. At a time when India is investing significantly in energy and oil connectivity and easing trade and transit networks for its neighbours, the surge in Chinese EVs — and their potential transit through strategic regions, especially the Northeast — could add to existing economic and security risks.

China’s EV expansion in South Asia goes beyond commerce, reflecting a broader pattern of tactical economic integration. By exporting the entire EV ecosystem and offering India’s neighbours access to finance, technology and clean transport solutions, China builds leverage over them without resorting to coercion. For South Asia, affordable Chinese EVs — combined with growing climate commitments and the need to reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels — present a new set of choices. Taken together, these dynamics suggest that South Asia’s clean transport future lies as much in the realm of geopolitics as in markets and climate policy. While geography and commercial ties continue to favour India overall, these advantages alone may not be sufficient to sustain its primacy in trade.

About the authors:

Aditya Gowdara Shivamurthy is an Associate Fellow with the Strategic Studies Programme at the Observer Research Foundation.

Sakshi Kapoor is a Research Intern at the Observer Research Foundation.

Source: This article was published by the Observer Research Foundation.

Disclaimer: ChatGPT 5.5 was used to generate infographics and tables.

About Observer Research Foundation
ORF was established on 5 September 1990 as a private, not for profit, ’think tank’ to influence public policy formulation. The Foundation brought together, for the first time, leading Indian economists and policymakers to present An Agenda for Economic Reforms in India. The idea was to help develop a consensus in favour of economic reforms.

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Mizoram’s Chin Refugees From Myanmar – Analysis

File photo of Myanmar Chin women and children. Photo Credit: DANIEL JULIE, Wikipedia Commons

July 27, 2026
Gateway House
By Sifra Lentin

Key Takeaways:

Significant Refugee Influx: Mizoram currently hosts an estimated 40,000 Myanmar Chin refugees (plus about 1,000 from Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts), representing roughly 3.75% of the state’s population (and sometimes up to 5%), driven by Myanmar’s post-2021 civil conflict and unrest in Bangladesh.

Community-Led Humanitarian Response: Support is coordinated through a resilient informal partnership led by the Young Mizo Association (YMA), the state government, church organizations, and international donors; ethnic kinship, shared culture, language, and Christianity motivate Mizos to welcome the refugees as “cousins.”

Emerging Tensions: Despite hospitality, challenges include rising drug trafficking and addiction linked to the Golden Triangle trade, limited legal livelihood options for refugees, remittance-driven land price increases, and regulatory measures such as the reimposed Protected Area Regime affecting mobility.

Aizawl, capital of India’s northeast state of Mizoram, is a sprawling, densely built city that sits atop high mountains and gently slopes down to deep, lush, forested valleys. Its buildings, with few exceptions, are built on stilts and appear to cling precariously to the mountainsides. They flank both sides of its narrow, winding mountain roads – the only connectivity between its far-flung corners.

A district map of India’s northeast state of Mizoram. Champai district witnesses the highest refugee influx from Myanmar Source: ResearchGate


Aizawl and the rest of Mizoram are ideal destinations for the nature-loving tourist. But because it is one of India’s four northeast border states that require an Inner Line Permit (ILP) for even Indian citizens to visit, it is quite rare to encounter tourists on Aizawl’s streets.[1] [2] Flights into Aizawl are filled with Mizos returning home, as well as a sizeable number of Indian Army servicemen reporting back for duty at the Assam Rifles battalion base camp and administrative headquarters.[3]

A Gateway House map showing the border regions of Northeast India (blue) and Myanmar (brown) Source: Gateway House


Mizoram shares a border with Myanmar and Bangladesh. It is currently home to an estimated 40,000 Myanmar Chin refugees, many living in Aizawl, and about 1,000 Bawm and Chakma tribals from the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh, all of whom look like indigenous Mizos.[4] This is not surprising, as they all belong to the same ethnic family of tribes, share a common culture, language (Tibeto-Burman family of languages), and religion; most are Presbyterian Christians.[5] [6] The foreign tourists in Aizawl are usually expatriate Myanmar Chins from the U.S. who are visiting family living there or crossing the border to their home villages.[7] Many entered the U.S. under the (now largely suspended) United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) from 1980 to 2025.[8][9]

The refugee influx from Myanmar into India, Thailand, and Malaysia, though ongoing since the mid-1980s ethnic conflicts, has peaked with the 2021 military coup in Myanmar. But a wave of refugees crosses over when clashes escalate between the Myanmar military and Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) in its northeast border states of Chin, Sagaing, and Shan. The ongoing civil unrest in Bangladesh since 5 August 2024 has also brought Bawm refugees from the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) into Mizoram’s southeast border villages.

These refugees are putting a strain on a state which is just 12 lakhs in population. Already, refugees form 3.75% of the state,[10] and their numbers sometimes hit 50,000 to 60,000, or 5% of its population, as they did in May 2023 when the Myanmar Army began bombing the EAOs in its northwest. Manipur, another Indian Northeast state, which also shares a border with Myanmar, currently hosts just 8,000 Myanmar Chin refugees after deporting many home in 2024.[11]

So, how does Mizoram, India’s most remote state, bordered by two neighbours in political turmoil – Bangladesh and Myanmar – cope with the ebb and flow of refugees? And what drives its people to host them?


The answer to the first is the resilient informal partnership among civil society organisations, various church denominations, the state government, and international funding agencies and donors, which pool their resources and expertise to address the humanitarian crisis whenever it erupts.

The Young Mizo Association (YMA) flag Source: Wikipedia

In this quartet, the foremost civil society association in refugee aid is the Young Mizo Association (YMA), with its vast network of 830 district groups and village branches in Mizoram. The presence of YMA (pronounced Y-mah) is everywhere. In Aizawl, the YMA flag, with its three consecutive horizontal stripes of red, white, and black, is everywhere – very different from the political party flags and hoardings that are common in most Indian cities. YMA flags are painted on traffic police islands and flutter from rooftops. It is a community-based, non-political organisation, founded in 1935 by Christian missionaries and Mizo Christians, with a membership of 500,000 in Mizoram and with a presence in Manipur, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Assam, and Tripura. It even has a branch in Bangladesh.[12]


The second pillar is the Mizoram state government, which funds a large share of humanitarian aid. In the first year after the 2021 coup, it disbursed Rs 3.80 crore.[13] It has been approaching the central government for aid, which last month disbursed Rs 10 crore in rice aid to Mizoram’s refugees. Also, state-run schools provide free education through the 10th and 12th standards to refugees.[14] The next pillar is the many church organisations, such as the international Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), which fund health camps at local hospitals and classes for refugee children.[15] The last are international agencies and donors, like the Chin Health Organisation, operated by former Chin refugees in the U.S.

What motivates the Mizo to host these refugees? Prof. Malsawmliana, the secretary general of the Central YMA, Aizawl, says they consider the Chin as “our ethnic relatives or cousins”. We welcome them with open arms and administer humanitarian assistance.” According to him, the initial aid when the influx began was deployed by YMA village branches, especially those in Champai District, which always bears the brunt of any humanitarian crisis in Myanmar. As regards the recent Bawm refugees from Bangladesh, given their smaller numbers, the Group YMA in southeast Mizoram looks after them.

In addition to tribal and familial loyalties, a key convergence is Christianity.

Like a majority of Mizos, the Chin too are Christians. Christian missionaries arrived in this region after it was finally subdued by the British Indian Army in 1896, in a campaign that began in 1871 after the abduction of six-year-old Mary Winchester, the child of a Scottish tea estate manager in the Cachar Hill Tracts (Assam), by one of the Mizo tribal chiefs.[16] Within 50 years, the hill tribes, whether Kuki, Zo, Hmar, Ralte, Chin, or Naga, were largely converted to Christianity, mostly Presbyterianism.[17] The influence of church pastors on the daily lives of their flock is profound even today. It is visible in the number of churches of different denominations at almost every traffic turn in Aizawl.

Solomon’s Temple, a church and tourist attraction in Aizawl Source: Wikipedia

Despite this commonality between the local Mizo and Chin refugees, there are several areas of unease.

Ever since the 1980s, when Myanmar’s ethnic conflicts began, its illicit drug economy has grown in financial heft and spread across the land. Myanmar is part of the ‘Golden Triangle’ of illicit drug-exporting countries of Southeast Asia, which include Laos and Thailand. Since the military takeover in 2021 and with northwest Myanmar in the hands of EAOs, YMA secretary general Malsawmliana says the drug manufacturing units have shifted from Laos to the Indo-Myanmar border. This makes the Chin refugees both vulnerable and useful. They are used as carriers across the border and as peddlers. The local availability of drugs has increased addiction amongst local Mizo youth. Locals say the street price in Aizawl for a shot of heroin is just Rs 200 (USD $2).[18] “This”, says Lalduhthlana Ralte, a local Mizo from the Ralte tribe who, after retirement from the Indian foreign service – he was India’s ambassador to the Philippines and India’s High Commissioner to Brunei – has settled in Aizawl, “is of grave concern for Mizos who have largely lived protected lives as part of India, unlike their Chin brothers and sisters who have had it rough.”


A large part of this problem, locals say, is because Chin refugees have no legal avenues to earn a living, leaving the informal economy as their only source of income. Most refugees work as house help, taxi drivers, and day labourers and loiter in the bazaars; they often come across as ‘rude’ to the soft-spoken, courteous local Mizo.[19]

To tackle the drug menace, the state home department, police, excise, and narcotics launched ‘Operation Jericho’ in 2025 with the Central YMA, which has been very successful. Mawlsawmliana of YMA says, “The aim was that the 14 border villages should put in more effort to stop the transit of drugs through their villages.” The police have now also been posted here. The grassroots intelligence has led to increased drug seizures, resulting in a shift of routes to the Myanmar-Manipur border.[20]

Another point of unease is Chief Minister Lalduhoma’s outreach to overseas Mizos for FDI. There are a small number of Mizo families residing abroad. “This is something the people of Mizoram don’t like. We view Mizos outside Mizoram with a jaundiced eye,” observes Ralte. The two types of ‘outside’ money entering the state are drug money and refugee money. The refugee dollars are remittances from Chin refugees settled in the U.S. and Canada, resulting in their refugee relatives in Mizoram having plenty of money. Refugee dollars are rapidly buying up land in Aizawl and its surroundings, driving up prices beyond the reach of locals. Ralte points to the introduction of two flights a day on the New Delhi-Aizawl route. ‘Mizoram’s population alone would not justify the economics,’ he says, adding that the people returning ‘home’ for a visit are not Mizos but Myanmar Chins, who are identifiable to locals by their distinct dialect but are not recognisable by ordinary Indians.


To regulate the influx of foreigners, the Indian government reimposed the stringent Protected Area Regime (1958) in 2025, after relaxing it in 2011. A foreign tourist must have a Protected Area Permit before travelling to Mizoram. An unintended fallout has been on the few international students studying at Mizoram University who must leave and can return only once they have this permit.[21]

For most Indians, Mizoram is the most remote Indian state and one they may never visit. But even a brief sojourn to this green mountainous state reveals its strategic importance in India’s Act East policy, sandwiched as it is between Bangladesh and Myanmar. Though distant from the peninsular mainland, the problems faced by local Mizos like drug abuse amongst young adults share a common angst with some of India’s bigger and more developed states.

References:

The other three border states requiring ILPs are Manipur, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh.

Most locals spoken to commend the Indian government’s northeast connectivity push, especially the newly operational railway line to Sairang, a terminus 17 km by road from Aizawl. The last segment – Bairabi-Sairang – was completed in June 2025 and inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 13 September 2025. Building this segment was challenging and an engineering feat due to the susceptibility of its mountainous terrain to landslides. Of note is the towering 114-metre bridge 196, which is 42 metres taller than the Qutub Minar.

The Assam Rifles operational base has recently shifted 15 kms away from Aizawl to Zokhawsang, although some operations and key administrative offices still function from Aizawl city. Its 95-acre base within the city was handed over to the state government under a 2024 agreement.

Many Myanmar refugees seek protection in neighbouring Thailand and Malaysia. Thailand is currently home to 90,000 refugees housed in nine camps in its bordering Tak district. The earliest refugees arrived here in the mid-1980s. Voice of America (VOA), “White House Order Halts Myanmar Refugee Resettlement Deal with Thailand,” February 8, 2025. https://www.voanews.com/a/white-house-order-halts-myanmar-refugee-resettlement-deal-with-thailand/7967957.html

The previous umbrella term used to refer to the northeast mountain tribes was the Lushai Hill tribes. After the 1986 Peace Accord with the Mizo National Front, which envisaged the formation of a new state – Mizoram – the tribes within this state’s territory (Kuki, Zo, Ralte, Hmar, Chin, etc.) all call themselves ‘Mizo’ (Mi = Mountain, Zo = People, or people of the mountains).

The Chin and Mizo dialects differ, although they belong to the same Tibeto-Burman family of languages. Only a Mizo speaker can distinguish the local dialect from its close cousin dialect spoken by the Chin.

The Free Movement Regime (FMR) on the India-Myanmar border, meant to facilitate border trade, is greatly curtailed, with only one (Zokhawthar) functional border crossing in the State of Mizoram. The current FMR permits only residents living within 10 kms to cross over to Myanmar, and they must return within seven days at the same border crossing to return their temporary pass.

See Gateway House’s CFR Fellow Purvi Patel’s article ‘US’s Temporary Protected Status for Myanmar’ (4 April 2024) Gateway House, “Understanding Myanmar’s Temporary Protected Status,” February 13, 2025. https://www.gatewayhouse.in/understanding-myanmars-temporary-protected-status/

The USRAP was introduced under the Refugee Act of 1980 and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on 17 March 1980. Today, it is greatly curtailed (only 7500 refugees permitted in 2026) and suspended, except for specific groups like white South Africans, by an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in January 2025. The United States of America has a few thousand (~35,000) Myanmar-origin citizens and residents, many of whom are refugees from Chin, Shan, and Sagaing states of Myanmar. They are concentrated largely in Indianapolis, Indiana, with some in the state of Texas. Indianapolis Monthly, “Welcome to Chindianapolis,” December 12, 2020.

https://www.indianapolismonthly.com/arts-and-culture/welcome-to-chindianapolis/
People interviewed by the author spoke of about 12 lakh-plus persons. The India Census 2011 data states 10,97,206 persons, while the projected population for 2026 is 13,08,967 according to https://indiacensus.net/states/Mizoram

The civil unrest in the State of Manipur caused by clashes between the Meitei and Kuki has resulted in the Ministry of Home Affairs closing Manipur’s border with Myanmar. Many Myanmar Chin refugees from this state were deported home in 2024, in light of the ongoing civil unrest.

The legal status of YMA is that it is registered as a society under the Indian Societies Registration Act (Act XXI, 1860). It has five lakh members and 830 branches in Mizoram. The branch in Bangladesh came up in this author’s interview with Central YMA’s general secretary, Prof. Malsawmliana. This interview took place on 11 June from 3 to 4 pm.
See the Mizoram Finance Minister’s speech in the state assembly on the refugee crisis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncuteHdNc10

The state government in the initial stage of the humanitarian crisis deployed its own funds, but as the conflict in Myanmar and Bangladesh (the CHT has an ethnic insurgency movement) borders continues, it applies for central funding. The latest tranche of Rs 10 crore is under Security Related Expenditure (SRE) scheme to Mizoram. The Hindu, “Centre to Provide ₹10 Crore Rice Aid for Refugees in Mizoram,” June 14, 2026. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/centre-to-provide-10-crore-rice-aid-for-refugees-in-mizoram/article71098587.ece

ADRA is an international humanitarian aid network, established by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, and is headquartered in Silver Springs, Maryland.

The first inroad by the British Indian government was in 1871 to rescue Mary Winchester, a six-year-old abducted by one of the Mizo tribal chiefs during a raid into Alexandrapur in the Cachar Hill Tracts (Assam). Mary Winchester, called Zoluti in the tribal chief’s household, was recovered from the tribe she lived amongst. Local lore says that at first she refused to return home to England but finally relented.

The Presbyterian Church appealed to the tribals because it combined tribal structures (a committee of elders) with evangelical elements. There are different Christian denominations like Welsh Presbyterian, Baptist, Pentecostal, Salvation Army, Adventist, and Roman Catholic and sects (like the white-marbled Solomon’s Temple, which is listed as a tourist site).

Myanmar’s northwest border states are under the control of Ethnic Armed Organisations, and conditions here are disturbed; drug manufacturing facilities have also shifted from Laos closer to the India border. They enter India’s border states via traditional forest trails. What has led to unease among Mizos is that most drug carriers arrested so far have been Chin refugees, who undertake this work out of desperation to support their families. The heads of these drug cartels are not necessarily Chin, and they are difficult to nab, as they are often located overseas.

India is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention (1951) and its 1967 Protocol, which defines the rights of refugees and the responsibilities of the host nation.
Drugs are not the only items being smuggled across this border. Arms smuggling is also sizeable, as indicated by the recent arrest of an American and a Ukrainian attempting to cross into Myanmar from Mizoram.

The Diplomat. “India Reimposes Restrictions on Foreign Nationals Visiting Three Northeastern States.” January 13, 2025.

About the author: Sifra Lentin is Bombay History Fellow at Gateway House.

Source: This article was written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations.

About Gateway House
Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations is a foreign policy think-tank established in 2009, to engage India’s leading corporations and individuals in debate and scholarship on India’s foreign policy and its role in global affairs. Gateway House’s studies programme will be at the heart of the institute’s scholarship, with original research by global and local scholars in Geo-economics, Geopolitics, Foreign Policy analysis, Bilateral relations, Democracy and nation-building, National security, ethnic conflict and terrorism, Science, technology and innovation, and Energy and Environment.
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Who inherits the Gen Z uprisings?

By Sushovan Dhar

Published 25 July, 2026

First published at Alternative Viewpoint.

On the afternoon of 5 August 2024, Sheikh Hasina boarded a military helicopter and fled Dhaka as hundreds of thousands of students and workers converged on her residence. Fifteen years of increasingly authoritarian rule ended in a matter of hours, brought down by an uprising that had begun five weeks earlier as a protest over public-sector job quotas; and that the state had tried to drown in blood, killing an estimated 1,400 people before it fell. Thirteen months later, in September 2025, a ban on social media platforms tipped Kathmandu into revolt; within two days, at least seventy-seven protesters were dead and Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli was gone, his party headquarters in flames. Weeks after that, young Malagasy who had taken to the streets over power cuts and water shortages watched Andry Rajoelina, a president who, it emerged, held the citizenship of the former colonial power, leave Antananarivo aboard a French military aircraft. Three years earlier, the Aragalaya had already given the region its template, when Sri Lankans occupied the presidential palace in Colombo and swam in Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s pool while he fled the country his family had treated as an estate.

Add the near-misses and the sieges: the storming of Kenya’s parliament in June 2024 over an IMF-scripted finance bill; the burning of regional assemblies in Indonesia after a police vehicle crushed a young motorcycle-taxi driver; the Discord-organised Gen Z 212 movement in Morocco demanding hospitals instead of World Cup stadiums; eighteen months of student blockades in Serbia that in June 2026 finally forced Aleksandar Vučić to announce his own resignation; the eruptions in Peru, the Philippines, Togo, Timor-Leste, Mongolia. Measured by the crude metric of governments felled or shaken, the youth revolts of 2022–2026 constitute the most successful wave of popular insurgency since decolonisation.

And yet in almost every case, someone else took the prize. In Dhaka, the February 2026 election delivered a two-thirds majority not to the students who had bled for the uprising but to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the oldest surviving machine of the very political order the July uprising had set out to bury, with an Islamist party as the main opposition and the students’ own party reduced to the margins. In Antananarivo, the colonel whose unit refused to fire on protesters is now consolidating a military regime, arresting the movement’s leaders and taking delivery of Russian weapons. In Kathmandu, the ballot box rewarded an anti-corruption party of engineers and television presenters. In Nairobi, the president the young tried to unseat remains in office, and the finance bill they forced him to withdraw has returned, clause by clause, in quieter legislation. The generation that proved it could empty the palace has, almost nowhere, managed to occupy it.

Let’s think about that gap between eruption and inheritance, without lapsing into either of the two registers that dominate commentary on Generation Z. The first celebrates: youth as the conscience of a fractured world, morally clear, digitally fluent, instinctively internationalist. The second dismisses: youth as impulsive, fragmented, oversensitive, incapable of sustained commitment. Both treat the generation as a moral character rather than a social location; both mistake a symptom for a cause. The real question is not whether this cohort is more radical or more shallow than its predecessors. It is why this generation, at this moment, has been forced into political visibility at all, and why the visibility it has won converts so poorly into power.

A generation summoned

To pose the question that way requires treating Gen Z as a socio-political category rather than a demographic one. Generational consciousness does not arise from shared birthdates; it is produced at the intersection of material conditions, institutional breakdown and historical impasse. A cohort becomes politically legible when it encounters the social order at the point where its contradictions can no longer be privately absorbed. The older sociology of generations was careful to distinguish between a generational location, a shared exposure to historical conditions, and a generational unit: a fraction of that cohort that becomes politically constituted, organised around a reading of its situation. Much of the confusion in contemporary commentary comes from collapsing the two. “Gen Z” names a location, not a subject. Whether subjects form within it, and of what kind, is precisely what is being fought over in Dhaka, Belgrade and Antananarivo.

The location itself can be specified. Four conditions define it, unevenly distributed but globally recognisable. The first is permanent economic instability. Unlike earlier generations whose radicalisation unfolded inside expanding or at least reformable economies, this cohort has entered adulthood in a capitalism where crisis is no longer the exception but the organising principle. Wages stagnate while productivity rises; housing has been converted from a social good into a speculative asset; education, once sold as a ladder, now functions as a debt-collection mechanism that chains future labour to present extraction. In the Global North this appears as the casualisation of once-secure work; in the South, as mass informality, vanishing formal employment and compulsory migration. Nepal exported more than a tenth of its people to labour markets abroad before its uprising; the September revolt was, among other things, a revolt of the families of exported labour against the political class that lives off their remittances.

The second is climate breakdown as lived condition rather than future risk; extreme heat, failing harvests, water rationing, displacement. It is worth insisting that the Malagasy uprising began not over an abstraction called corruption but over blackouts and dry taps: the infrastructure of social reproduction giving way.

The third is pandemic socialisation. COVID-19 did not merely interrupt this generation’s education and employment; it functioned as a pedagogical event, exposing with brutal clarity whose lives were considered expendable and whose labour was deemed “essential” yet disposable. It stripped away lingering illusions about state capacity at exactly the moment this cohort was forming its picture of the world.

The fourth is formation inside privately owned digital infrastructure; a condition to which we return, because it is routinely misdescribed as a matter of “media habits” when it is in fact a class relation.

To these must be added a fifth, too often treated as a separate story: the crisis of social reproduction falls first on women, and young women have been at the front of nearly every eruption of the period; from the feminist tides of Latin America to the schoolgirls facing gendarmes in Antananarivo. Where commentators saw a “youth” revolt, they were often looking at a revolt organised through the labour and rage of young women, whose unpaid work absorbs every withdrawal of the state.

Together these conditions explain the central paradox of the period: a generation summoned into politics by the exhaustion of the system it inherited, rather than one that announced itself. For decades, neo-liberal governance thrived on depoliticisation — fragmenting collective identities, privatising risk, presenting insecurity as personal failure. The re-emergence of youth as a visible political actor marks the limit of that project. When precarity becomes permanent and the future collapses into managed survival, the generational experience itself becomes political, whether or not anyone intends it.

1968 in reverse

Any account of these revolts invites comparison with the great student rebellions of the late 1960s, and the comparison is worth making, not to measure authenticity, but to clarify how the structure of capitalism has reshaped what youth revolt can be.

The revolts of 1968 erupted inside a specific configuration: Fordist production, relatively stable employment, expanding welfare states, universities growing fast enough to draw in new social layers whose expectations outpaced the system’s capacity to absorb them. Crucially, that generation confronted capitalism not as a system in terminal crisis but as one defined by the contradiction between abundance and hierarchy, productivity and alienation, formal democracy and imperial war. Its radicalism was fuelled by that tension. Students could imagine themselves as detonators of a broader transformation because the broader forces existed: May 1968 in France mattered not because students paralysed the country but because their revolt coincided with the largest general strike in European history. And the ideological air they breathed was thick with living socialist and communist traditions. Even those who rebelled against the official parties did so in dialogue with them; spontaneity defined itself against structure because structure was there to be defied.

Today’s revolts unfold in a landscape that is almost the photographic negative. The capitalism this generation confronts can no longer stabilise itself through growth or absorb dissent through reform. The working class appears not as a concentrated social force but as a fragmented condition — informal, platform-mediated, migratory, chronically underemployed. The mass parties and unions that once transmitted theory, memory and strategy across generations have been hollowed out or converted into instruments of management. The boundary between student and worker, still meaningful in 1968, has collapsed in lived experience: students are already workers, juggling lectures with gig shifts, anticipating precarity not as a phase but as a destination.

This reversal explains an apparent puzzle. Governments fall more easily now than they did then — de Gaulle survived 1968; Hasina, Rajapaksa, Oli and Rajoelina did not survive their own. But the fall changes less. The regimes of the postwar boom had something to concede, and conceding was how they survived: wages, welfare, university reform. The regimes of the permanent crisis have nothing left to concede except personnel. So personnel is what they concede. A president flees; the debt remains. A cabinet resigns; the IMF programme continues. The state sheds its skin and keeps its spine. The revolts of the 1960s faced a system strong enough to reform itself; the revolts of the 2020s face one weak enough to collapse locally but structured enough to reconstitute itself immediately, usually with the insurgents locked outside.

The comparison should therefore produce neither melancholy nor disdain. The radicalism of 1968 was not the fruit of superior consciousness; it was enabled by a configuration in which capitalism still had room to manoeuvre and therefore something to lose. Gen Z’s revolt emerges from a world in which that room has largely disappeared. Its intensity reflects not the imminence of victory but the depth of the impasse — and the ease with which it topples governments reflects not the strength of the movement but the hollowness of what it topples.

The ledger of eruptions

The period 2022–2026 now offers something the debate about youth politics long lacked: a ledger of completed sequences. Uprisings have run their course; interims have given way to elections or consolidations; the harvests have been gathered. Reading the ledger case by case is more instructive than any general theory, because the cases diverge , and the divergence has a pattern.

Bangladesh: the old order inherits. The July uprising of 2024 was the most massive of the wave and paid the highest price. It began over job quotas – that is, over the distribution of scarce formal employment in an economy of garment factories and labour export — and escalated, under murderous repression, into a revolt against the regime as such. That students led it surprised no one in Dhaka: in Bangladesh the student movement is the oldest organised force of popular politics, with a genealogy running from the language martyrs of 1952 through the mass upsurge of 1969 to the fall of Ershad in 1990 — a repertoire of regime-toppling that the July uprising consciously inherited and renewed. When Hasina fled, the movement’s advisers entered an interim government under Muhammad Yunus; a National Citizen Party was formed out of the uprising’s leadership; a “July Charter” was drafted and put to referendum. Yet when the vote finally came in February 2026, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, out of power for two decades, its machinery intact through every year of exile, took over two hundred of the three hundred seats, with Jamaat-e-Islami emerging as the main opposition. The students who had toppled the regime could not convert eighteen months of moral authority into an electoral machine, because a machine is precisely what cannot be improvised: it is accumulated, ward by ward, over decades. The uprising cleared the field; the oldest surviving organisations walked onto it. Meanwhile, in the months after Hasina fell, waves of garment-worker strikes swept the industrial belts; a reminder that the class question the quota movement had posed in displaced form remained open, and remains open under the new government.

Madagascar: the barracks inherit. The Malagasy sequence is the darkest and most clarifying. It is also the one with the longest national memory: it was a student uprising, the rotaka of May 1972, that brought down the neocolonial First Republic, a precedent every Malagasy government since has had reason to fear. A movement launched from Facebook and Instagram over blackouts and water shortages grew within weeks into a national revolt; security forces killed at least twenty-two people; and the turning point came when Colonel Michael Randrianirina’s CAPSAT unit refused orders to fire and sided with the crowds. The protesters greeted the defection as deliverance; “free at last,” one organiser recalled shouting. Within days Rajoelina was gone, the constitutional court had handed power to the colonel, and the vocabulary of the uprising was being spoken from the presidential palace. Within months the promised inclusive transition had become six hundred unilateral appointments, a finance act passed over the movement’s objections, the arrest of Gen Z leaders on conspiracy charges, Russian weapons deliveries and Africa Corps trainers guarding the new president as he prepared his own candidacy. Analysts coined the word “ coupvolution,” but the sequence has older names: Egypt 2013, Sudan 2019. Where a revolt has no organised force of its own, the best-organised force in the country — which is almost always the army — inherits it. The military did not have to steal the revolution; it filled a vacancy the revolution could not fill.

Nepal: the anti-political centre inherits. Kathmandu’s September 2025 uprising compressed the whole grammar of the period into two days: a social-media ban as trigger, Discord servers as assembly halls, parliament in flames, seventy-seven dead, a prime minister gone. It was the third time in four decades that the Nepali street had redrawn the state — after the Jana Andolan of 1990, which ended the Panchayat autocracy, and the second of 2006, which ended the monarchy itself — but the first conducted without the parties and unions that had led the earlier two. What followed was without precedent, an interim prime minister, the former chief justice Sushila Karki, selected in part through an online poll of the movement itself, an experiment in digital plebiscite that fascinated the world’s press. But when the election came in March 2026, the landslide went to the Rastriya Swatantra Party of Balen Shah, the rapper turned Kathmandu mayor: 182 of 275 seats, nearly half the proportional vote, the first single-party majority in the history of Nepal’s federal constitution, with the old communist parties reduced to rumps and Oli losing his own constituency. This was a genuine electoral translation of the uprising, the one case in the ledger where the ballot box registered the squares almost directly. But it registered them in a particular key: anti-corruption, technocratic competence, generational replacement of personnel. The RSP’s programme promises clean government and business-friendly reform inside the same remittance economy, the same debt structure, the same subordination to larger neighbours. The uprising’s class content — the revolt of exported labour’s children — has been translated into a promise of better management. Whether that translation satisfies or merely defers is the next chapter of Nepali politics.

Sri Lanka: an organised left inherits, because it already existed. The Aragalaya of 2022 is the exception that proves the rule, and it proves it twice. First negatively: when Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled, power passed not to the occupied squares but to Ranil Wickremesinghe, a six-time prime minister with a single seat in parliament, the system’s own fixer, who promptly cleared the encampments and signed the IMF’s seventeenth programme for the country. The eruption, having no vehicle, was dispossessed within days. But then positively: two years later, the National People’s Power alliance built around the JVP – a party with half a century of cadre, catastrophe and reconstruction behind it — won the presidency and then a parliamentary landslide, carried by an electorate whose common sense the Aragalaya had transformed. The squares did not take power, but they made it possible for an organisation that predated them to take power constitutionally. Despite our critique of NPP in office, and its continuation of the IMF framework, invites a hard one, the structural lesson stands: the only case in the ledger where anything resembling a left inherited an uprising is the case where a left with decades of accumulated organisation was standing by when the eruption came. Inheritance went to the prepared.

Kenya: containment, and the purest debt revolt. Nairobi’s June 2024 uprising deserves a special place in the ledger because it named the enemy with a precision most movements never achieve. The Finance Bill the young Kenyans rose against was not a metaphor: it was the domestic instrument of an IMF programme, a schedule of taxes on bread, sanitary pads and mobile money designed to service external creditors. The movement was leaderless, tribe-less, a genuine novelty in Kenyan politics, organised through X and TikTok, and briefly triumphant: after protesters breached parliament on 25 June and police killed dozens across the weeks of revolt, President Ruto withdrew the bill. Then came the demonstration of what containment now means. The withdrawn taxes returned piecemeal in later legislation; the movement’s visible figures began disappearing into unmarked cars, dozens abducted by plainclothes units; and the anniversary protests of June and July 2025 — held, pointedly, on Saba Saba, the date of the 1990 revolt that forced multiparty democracy from the Moi dictatorship — were met with live fire that killed dozens more. Ruto remains in office. Kenya identified the enemy more precisely than any movement of the period, and was outlasted more precisely in turn, because you can storm the parliament that passes a finance bill, but not the debt that dictates it.

Indonesia: the convergence glimpsed. The Indonesian August of 2025 began with the obscenity of parliamentary housing allowances worth many multiples of a Jakarta wage, and became a mass movement the night a police armoured vehicle ran over Affan Kurniawan, a twenty-one-year-old ojol, a motorcycle-taxi driver for a delivery platform. What followed was the clearest image the period has produced of the recomposed working class in motion: thousands of green-jacketed platform drivers, the most visible fraction of informal labour, riding in convoy alongside the students, their grief and the students’ rage momentarily fused. The state’s response combined concessions — some allowances scrapped, apologies offered — with force and mass arrest: the response of a ruling class that remembers 1998, when students brought down Suharto, and calibrates accordingly. The convergence did not congeal into organisation; the platforms that employ the drivers algorithmically discipline exactly the coordination the moment required. But for a week, the class that is usually described as ‘unorganisable’ organised itself around a martyr, and every ruling class in Southeast Asia took note.

Morocco: the monarchy absorbs. The Moroccan sequence adds a variety of containment the republics of the ledger cannot deploy. GenZ 212, named for the international dialling code, assembled on a Discord server that swelled past 200,000 members and voted nightly on its own actions, erupted in late September 2025 after eight women died following caesarean sections at a public hospital in Agadir, a short drive from a stadium being lavishly renovated for the 2030 World Cup. The slogan that followed, “ stadiums are here, but where are the hospitals?”, was the period’s most concentrated audit of accumulation by spectacle, and its trigger, the deaths of women in childbirth, made explicit what most of the eruptions carried implicitly: that the deepest front of the crisis runs through social reproduction. The state’s response combined the familiar repertoire — three killed, more than 2,000 arrested including minors, over 1,400 prosecuted – with an instrument unavailable to Rajoelina or Oli: a throne standing above the government, able to absorb the revolt by sacrificing ministers, announcing social budgets and receiving petitions addressed, deferentially, to the king himself. It is the same mechanism that carried the monarchy through 2011, and it worked again: the government was blamed, the palace was spared, the movement’s demands were translated into royal benevolence. Yet Morocco also produced one of the ledger’s most suggestive gestures: in mid-October, GenZ 212 suspended its own protests, announcing the pause as “a strategic step to strengthen organisation and coordination”, a movement discovering, in real time and in its own words, that the question is no longer how to erupt but how to endure.

Serbia: endurance as organisation. Against the grain of the whole ledger stands Belgrade. When a renovated railway-station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in November 2024, killing sixteen people, the students who took the streets refused both of the forms the period had made standard: the leaderless flash mobilisation and the charismatic front-man. Instead they built plenums: assemblies in blockaded faculties, with rotating spokespeople, decisions taken slowly, marches paced across months rather than days. The form has a genealogy. Belgrade’s students occupied their university in June 1968 too, denouncing the “red bourgeoisie” of the party-state and forcing Tito himself to answer them on television; the assembly as an organ of power descends from Yugoslav self-management, and had its most recent rehearsal in the Bosnian citizens’ plenums of 2014. Whether or not today’s students cite these ancestors, and their own politics is studiedly non-ideological, they mobilise inside a political culture that remembers assembly as a way of exercising power, not merely of expressing opinion. Memory, too, is a form of accumulation. The movement made the corruption of infrastructure contracts its wedge into the corruption of the state as such, forced the prime minister’s resignation within three months, absorbed tear-gas, terrorism charges and organised loyalist violence for a year and a half; and in June 2026, Vučić himself announced his resignation and early elections. It is the longest sustained protest campaign in Europe in a generation, and its duration is not a mystery: it is the direct product of organisational form. The plenum distributed the labour of mobilisation that elsewhere burns out a small core; the blockaded faculty gave the movement territory and rhythm; the refusal of celebrity denied the state a head to cut off. The limits are equally instructive. The movement’s demand horizon — elections, rule of law, accountability — remains within the constitutional frame, and Vučić has resigned the presidency while openly manoeuvring to return as prime minister; the fight over inheritance in Serbia is only beginning. But Belgrade has already falsified the claim that this generation is constitutionally incapable of duration. Given form, it endures.

The Global North: visibility without leverage. The Gaza solidarity encampments that spread across hundreds of campuses in 2024 belong in the same ledger, though their sequence ran differently. They confronted not a fragile state but the most heavily institutionalised environment in the ledger — universities integrated into debt, credentialing and security regimes — and the response was correspondingly administrative: more than three thousand arrests, suspensions, expulsions, the machinery of discipline replacing the machinery of negotiation — at Columbia, police entered the campus for the first time since the Vietnam-era occupations of 1968, an anniversary that measures exactly how the university’s tolerance for its own students has narrowed. Measured in divestment achieved, the encampments won little. Measured in ideological ground, they shifted more than any movement of the period: they broke a decades-old consensus in the imperial core about what could be said regarding Palestine, at the price of demonstrating exactly how little leverage moral clarity carries when it cannot touch accumulation. And behind them stands the earlier warning of Chile, where the estallido of 2019, the eruption that seemed most likely of all to become a refoundation, was routed into a constitutional convention whose draft was then defeated at referendum, in 2022 and again in 2023, leaving the neo-liberal constitution it rose against still standing. Eruption channelled into procedure, procedure into defeat.

One more Latin American thread belongs here, because it points in the opposite direction: the feminist tides. The movements against gender violence and for abortion rights that swept Argentina and the region were youth-heavy, assembly-based, and decisively, durable, accumulating through annual encounters, neighbourhood organisation and sustained campaigns until, in Argentina, the law itself changed. They are the period’s standing demonstration that movements rooted in the crisis of social reproduction, organised through patient assembly rather than episodic eruption, can win structural victories and survive backlash. It is no accident that the durability the youth revolts lack was achieved first by movements of women organising around reproduction; the sphere where the permanent crisis is lived daily and cannot be logged off from.

Read together, the ledger yields a brutal regularity. The uprisings vary enormously; the inheritances do not. Where the movement had no accumulated organisation, the prize went to whoever did: the oldest party (Dhaka), the army (Antananarivo), the system’s fixer (Colombo, at first), the anti-political centre (Kathmandu). Where accumulated organisation existed — the JVP’s half-century, the Serbian plenums’ eighteen months, the feminist assemblies’ decade — the movement kept a hand on its own harvest. The variable that decides the aftermath is not courage, clarity or scale. It is what existed before the square filled, and what was built while it was full.

The question of class, retested

The original wager of this analysis was that Gen Z’s condition is a class condition experienced without class language; that class is everywhere as experience and almost nowhere as articulation, felt but not organised, lived but not theorised. The eruptions of the past two years have tested that claim, and largely confirmed it, while complicating it in one important way.

Confirmed, because in case after case the content of the revolt was unmistakably material even where its vocabulary was moral. “Corruption”, the master-word from Nairobi to Kathmandu to Belgrade — is the form in which a generation without class language names expropriation: the observation that the social surplus is being siphoned upward, that taxes fund creditors and capitalists rather than hospitals, that the children of the political class study abroad on the remittances of everyone else’s children. The Kenyan movement raged against a finance bill, which is to say against debt service. The Nepali movement raged against “nepo kids,” which is to say against the private appropriation of a remittance economy. The Malagasy movement raged against blackouts, which is to say against the collapse of the infrastructure of social reproduction. The Moroccan movement counted stadiums against hospitals, which is to say it audited accumulation by spectacle. In every case the critique of corruption is a displaced political economy’ accurate in its instinct, disarmed in its form, because “corruption” implies that the system would work if only cleaner men ran it. That is precisely the promise on which a Balen Shah rises, and the ceiling against which his voters will eventually strike their heads.

Complicated, because the period also produced real, if fleeting, convergences between youth revolt and the recomposed working class; the convergences the earlier analysis said were structurally blocked. The ojol convoys of Jakarta; the informal transport workers and street vendors who fed and shielded the Nairobi protests; the garment strike waves that followed the fall of Dhaka; the trade unions that joined the later phases of the Aragalaya and the Serbian blockades. The boundary between student and worker has collapsed in lived experience, and in these moments it briefly collapsed in political practice too. What did not happen, anywhere, was the conversion of convergence into common organisation. The gig platforms atomise; the informal economy disperses; the unions that survive are hollowed or defensive. The recomposed class met itself in the streets and had nowhere to keep meeting. That, and not any deficiency of consciousness, is the strategic problem of the period: not to teach this generation that it is a class, which its instincts already know, but to build the mediations through which a class scattered across platforms, borders and informal labour can act as one — mediations that do not yet exist at scale.

The platform is not a commons

One of those missing mediations hides in plain sight, misdescribed as a tool. Every account of these movements dwells on their digital fluency: the Discord servers of GenZ 212 and the Nepali uprising, the TikTok pedagogy of the Kenyan revolt, the hashtag internationalism that let a Malagasy organiser say he knew his moment had come when he watched Kathmandu burn. All of this is real. But to describe platforms as the movements’ infrastructure is to repeat, in digital form, the oldest error of agrarian struggle: mistaking the landlord’s field for a commons because one is allowed to assemble on it.

The platforms on which this generation’s political life is conducted are not neutral terrain. They are enclosures — privately owned, rent-extracting, surveilled by design — and their owners are not bystanders to the class conflicts staged upon them but parties to those conflicts, integrated into the same circuits of capital the movements confront. The attention that movements generate is harvested as revenue; the coordination they attempt is legible to every security service with a subpoena or a purchase order; the amplification they enjoy is an algorithmic grant, revocable without notice. The Nepali state understood this better than most commentators: it triggered an insurrection by attempting to ban the platforms, an act the young correctly read as the confiscation of their assembly hall. But the deeper lesson cuts the other way. An assembly hall that can be confiscated by the state or reformatted by its owner was never the movement’s own. The same architecture that lets a revolt scale in hours lets it be mapped in real time, starved of reach at the flip of a ranking, and, as the Kenyan abductions demonstrated, mined for target lists afterwards. Digital-native mobilisation is thus not simply fast politics; it is politics conducted on expropriated ground, paying rent in data to a fraction of capital that will always, in the last instance, side with order. Any strategy for durable organisation that does not include building infrastructure the movement actually owns — federated, encrypted, boring, unprofitable — is a strategy for assembling in perpetuity on someone else’s land.

Repression, capture, absorption

If these movements are marked by intensity rather than endurance, it is not because this generation lacks stamina. It is because the political environment has become expert at containing dissent before it accumulates, and the past two years have displayed the full repertoire.

Repression has become pre-emptive and increasingly extrajudicial. The Kenyan abductions, activists taken by plain-clothes units, some returned broken, some not returned, mark the frontier: a state that no longer bothers to criminalise dissent through courts because disappearance is cheaper. Serbia charged student organisers with terrorism; Madagascar’s junta arrests the very Gen Z figures in whose name it claims to govern; Bangladesh’s uprising was met, before it won, with the largest state massacre in the country’s peacetime history. Surveillance is woven into the platforms themselves, so that the infrastructure of mobilisation doubles as the infrastructure of the manhunt.

Capture, the ledger shows, comes in three varieties. Military capture, where the armed forces adopt the uprising as legitimation for their own seizure — Antananarivo, following Cairo and Khartoum. Electoral capture by the old order, where parties that survived in the deep freeze of authoritarianism thaw out and collect the votes the uprising liberated — Dhaka. And technocratic capture, where the revolt’s anti-corruption vocabulary is translated into a programme of better management under unchanged social relations — Kathmandu, and before it a hundred municipal experiments. Each variety works on the same vacancy: an eruption that has produced legitimacy without producing an organisation capable of holding it.

Absorption, finally, remains the softest and most continuous mechanism. NGOs, foundations and liberal institutions convert insurgent energy into projects, campaigns and careers; radical language is rebranded as inclusion and resilience; the movement’s most capable organisers are hired, one by one, into the administration of the grievances they once mobilised. Electoral cycles periodically summon youth anger and return it, lightly used. And beneath all of it runs exhaustion — burnout not as psychological failing but as political condition, the predictable result of asking a small unorganised core to sustain, on donated time and rented platforms, a confrontation with states and creditors organised on a planetary scale. The system has learned to outlast outrage, wait out occupations, professionalise dissent and criminalise persistence. What appears as activist fatigue is the ledger entry of a prolonged asymmetry between mobilisation and power.

From messenger to subject

Earlier, it was argued that Gen Z is not the subject of history but its messenger; that its eruptions signal the exhaustion of the old mechanisms of consent without themselves constituting the force that will replace them. The two years since have delivered the message with a violence no one predicted: five governments down, several more besieged, the political map of South Asia, the Balkans and the Indian Ocean redrawn by people too young to remember the Cold War. The messenger, it turns out, can burn down the post office. What the messenger still cannot do is dictate the reply.

But the ledger also forbids the fatalism that conclusion might invite, because it contains its own counter-cases, and they converge on a single variable. Sri Lanka shows that an uprising can put an organised left in power, where the left spent fifty years building before the uprising came. Serbia shows that a youth movement can sustain confrontation for eighteen months and force an autocrat’s resignation, where it invented assembly forms that distribute labour, hold territory and refuse decapitation. The feminist movements of Latin America show that struggles rooted in social reproduction can accumulate across a decade and change law and common sense alike. In every case the lesson is the same, and it is the oldest lesson in the workers’ movement, returned in new conditions: spontaneity poses the question of power; only organisation can answer it. The eruptions have done their work. They have shattered the illusion that the present order is stable or legitimate, dragged debt, climate, war and expropriation back into the realm of political choice, and demonstrated, five times over, that the palaces are emptier than they look. To ask them to do more than that, as eruptions, is to ask fire to build.

What must be built are mediations adequate to the class that actually exists: forms that can hold together the gig driver and the graduate, the garment worker and the coder, the migrant and the one who stayed; that own their own infrastructure instead of renting it from the enemy; that can pace struggle across years, as the plenums and the feminist assemblies have learned to; that treat elections as one terrain among several rather than the harvest itself; and that link the national uprisings to the international architecture of debt and empire that guarantees each national restoration. No generation can build this alone, and none is excused from it. The young have already done what messengers do — they have made the crisis undeniable and the interregnum visible. Whether the interregnum ends in inheritance or restoration will be decided by what is organised now, in the flat years between eruptions, when the cameras are gone and the platforms have moved on.

The ledger, meanwhile, is still being written, and its next entry may be the largest. As these lines are drafted, India, so far absent from the sequence, has produced its opening move: the Cockroach Janta Party, a satirical formation conjured out of nothing in the weeks after the Chief Justice of India likened unemployed youth to “cockroaches”; twenty million followers within a month, cockroach masks and dog-eared exam guides at Jantar Mantar, an encampment demanding the education minister’s resignation over leaked entrance examinations. Every element of the period’s grammar is already present: the elite insult reclaimed as an identity, the platform scale that outstrips every established party, and the trigger located, as in Bangladesh, at the gates of scarce formal employment, where a generation’s years of unpaid preparation can be annulled by a single leaked paper. Whether the cockroaches remain a meme, are absorbed, or begin to accumulate is exactly the question this article has posed of every case before it. The largest generation of young people in history will now pose it on the hardest terrain, against the most formidably organised ruling party in the ledger

The uprisings have posed the question of power with a clarity no manifesto could match. The answer will not be generational, and it will not be spontaneous. It will be organised, or it will not come at all.

Sushovan Dhar is an Editorial Board Member of Alternative Viewpoint.