Gen Z Aspiration, Hybrid Agency, and the Madagascar Uprising

The 2025 youth uprising in Madagascar was a Gen Z–led movement sparked by chronic infrastructure failures and deepening economic precarity. Young Malagasy mobilized digital culture and global symbols to articulate local grievances and coordinate a generational protest. This mobilization represented neither a clean rupture nor a mere repetition of earlier crises, but a form of hybrid agency that is locally grounded yet expressed through transnational digital repertoires. Though the youth movement forced regime change, its horizontal structure struggled to convert protest into durable institutional reform in the context of the enduring “Malagasy paradox” of recurrent political breakdown.