Gen-Z Uprisings in The Global South: Challenging Traditional Political Mobilization and Reshaping Civic Culture

This paper investigates the impact of Generation-Z-led uprisings in the Global South that not only disrupt the classic paradigm of political mobilization, but also alters the nature of civic culture in its entirety. It aims to address the following question: How do Gen-Z uprisings across Global South contexts challenge traditional political mobilization and reshape civic culture? The study is based on a media-ethnographic methodology and that investigates 35 news stories of the national and international media using a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and frame analysis approach. The findings show that such movements are defined by an advanced hybrid algorithm of activism, which combines seamlessly online and offline strategies to keep the movement going and avoid state repression. Some of the defining features are the strategic mobilization via the use of digital platforms such as TikTok and governance via the use of Discord, transnational cultural symbols like the One Piece flag to create a shared identity, and the creation of digital resilience against state authority. Media analysis reveals that these movements are framed two-sidedly as both mobilizing forces of democratic revival and dangerous, leaderless mobs. This paper argues that Gen-Z is leading a new era of networked activism that combines both international digital culture and local social-economic discontents. This way, they are establishing new, performative rites of political belonging, functioning more or less out of the official political institutions and pointing to a potentially irreversible change in the ways of thinking and acting civic engagement in the 21st century.