Over the past two years, I have observed a surge of spontaneous political resistance among youth in Africa and Southeast Asia, commonly known as Generation Z or Gen Z. I have reflected on what drives them to demand ethical accountability from the state, what types of political change they envision, and how they hope to achieve these goals. Finding answers to these questions is complex and requires a moral evaluation that considers various factors. The protests by Gen Z are unfolding amid a deeply troubling global era marked by the gradual decline of democracy, widespread disappointment with democratic processes, and a growing acceptance of alternative, often illiberal, governance systems. This situation is not just a crisis of institutions but a moral crisis of human recognition, intensified by the dominance of powerful elites over the state, the erosion of fundamental freedoms, and ongoing economic marginalization that reduces most citizens to spectators rather than active participants in public life. To a large extent, this decline is neither temporary nor confined to specific regions, but rather represents a profound moral and political crisis that places young people in a difficult ethical dilemma when deciding how to respond to their discontent.
According to a study by Nord et al. (2025), the global average level of liberal democracy has dropped to a historic low, similar to levels seen in the mid-1980s. For the average citizen today, the experience of democracy is significantly worse than it was just a few decades ago; for the first time in over twenty years, autocratic regimes now outnumber democratic ones worldwide. This shift marks a major political turning point, where democracy can no longer be assumed to be the preferred form of government.
What is particularly concerning about this democratic decline is that it is not primarily occurring through sudden coups or violent takeovers, but rather through the slow, everyday erosion of democratic freedoms and institutions. The study by Nord et al. (2025) shows that freedom of expression has decreased in about a quarter of all countries over the past decade, while more than a third of the world’s population now lives in autocratic states. These situations are further worsened by populism, authoritarianism, disinformation, polarization, and economic manipulation favoring the political elite, which further damages trust in democratic institutions. It is within these morally and institutionally fragile contexts that Gen Z’s political awareness has emerged, driving a moral response aimed at reshaping the global order to better serve the needs of the majority in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Gen Z as a Moral Generation
Catholic social teaching (CST) is rooted in protecting human dignity and the common good. CST provides a moral framework for Generation Z to pursue social, political, and economic change without alienating others. When young people join mass protests, they are not just reacting to poor governance, corruption, and economic hardship. Instead, they challenge a political culture that has lost its moral credibility, left most people behind, and prioritized populist rhetoric over evidence-based social change. In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis describes a “crisis of ethical commitment” in today’s political and economic systems, characterized by exclusion, corruption, and inequality—often accepted as normal with little moral challenge.
Generation Z in Africa and Southeast Asia has driven political change through mass protests, digital mobilization, creative artistic and symbolic actions, and civic defiance, claiming moral agency and a presence at the decision-making table. They reject power that is disconnected from responsibility, accountability, and service. In Sri Lanka, the 2022 Aragalaya movement became a key moment in contemporary protest politics, starting as a localized demonstration and growing into a nationwide movement against the regime. The moral uprising was against fuel shortages, inflation, and long-lasting power cuts. Gen Z activists turned Colombo’s Galle Face Green into a protest village—a site of dissent and a symbolic moral space expressed through art, music, prayer, civic dialogue, satire, viral memes, storytelling, dance, and social conversations. The protests resulted in the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in July 2022, marking a victory for popular sovereignty in the country’s politics.
Similarly, in Bangladesh, Gen Z university students mobilized against a discriminatory quota system that marginalized most students and favored certain social groups, undermining merit and fairness. Through their protests, Gen Z turned their moral concerns about equitable education into public debate on the ethics of dignity and equality in the country.
In Indonesia, Gen Z exposed the extravagance and luxury of the political elites as an everyday moral insult to the poor, unemployed, and struggling population. Through aggressive use of media, such as videos, WhatsApp images, hashtags, art, songs, and satire, they raised national awareness about the need for change. In Nepal, Gen Z mobilization in September 2025 against the government’s pervasive corruption, discriminatory citizenship amendments, unemployment, and marginalization of the majority of the population led to the president’s resignation.
Similar protests occurred across Africa. In 2024, Kenyan Gen Z mobilized against the government to oppose the 2024 Finance Bill, which aimed to increase taxes on citizens. Their activities used social media, satire, art, and protests to resist the lavish lifestyles of the political elite, corruption, false populism, and unmet promises at the expense of the population. The government eventually withdrew the bill. In Madagascar, the Gen Z mobilization in 2025 was fueled by daily crises, including an unstable energy supply, water shortages, rising food prices, corruption, unemployment, and governance failures. The widespread use of social media with the hashtag ‘we want to live’ led to the government’s collapse, and the president fled the country. In Tanzania, Gen Z organized nationwide protests against electoral injustice in October 2025, defying curfews and internet blackouts, while framing electoral fraud as a human rights violation that damages moral trust and erodes the ethical bond between the state and its citizens.
Although the Gen Z view of politics may lack a religious language, their commitment aligns closely with Catholic social ethics, which emphasizes inclusion, human dignity, solidarity, morally grounded authority, and the protection of the common good. Gen Z expresses this through five moral pillars explained below.
The Five Ethical Pillars of Gen Z Political Action
The Gen Z activism is based on five moral pillars that both critique existing political systems in different contexts and express a vision and hope for renewing governance structures strategically: a commitment to nonviolence as a way to achieve social change, the pursuit of social cohesion to counter polarized politics, a call for social and political inclusion, especially of the marginalized majority, a demand for accountable governance, and an aspiration for ethical and morally guided leadership.
These pillars strongly align with CST and Pope Francis’s moral view of politics as a way to promote human dignity and the common good, and especially with his call for politics based on fraternity, responsibility, and social inclusion. What stands out is that these ethical insights do not come from church discourse, but naturally develop from real political struggles, showing that Gen Z is expressing a global moral framework for democratic renewal through action.
The nonviolence practiced by Gen Z is not passive resistance but moral discipline aimed at awakening the public conscience to respond to political challenges. Pope Francis, in Fratelli Tutti, states that violence cannot heal a fractured world and that nonviolence has a strong potential to break cycles of violence. Gen Z’s commitment to nonviolence reflects their refusal to mirror the moral logic of oppressive systems that isolate most of the population. However, the challenge for Gen Z is that nonviolence requires institutional support through codes of conduct, civic education, spiritual discipline, and coordinated leadership.
Social cohesion, another pillar, refers to a moral resistance against the politics of polarization and fragmentation. Gen Z emphasizes factors that drive division, especially in societies where elites leverage ethnicity, religion, and ideology to divide and polarize the society. Gen Z takes a bold ethical stance, viewing cohesion not just as social harmony but as a form of resistance against being reduced to simple political labels with no social value.
Social and political inclusion are rooted in calls for respecting human dignity and treating every person as a valued member of society. This involves structural reforms across economic, political, social, and religious levels, focusing on the population’s access to decision-making, economic opportunities, and narrative legitimacy. Evangelii Gaudium condemns systems that regard the majority of the population as disposable entities that contribute no value to the nation. Gen Zs take an ethical stand against entrenched governance systems that marginalize human dignity, whether within electoral or party systems, economic structures, budgeting processes, or manipulative political frameworks.
Accountable governance emphasizes strong opposition to corruption, violations of the social contract, and irresponsible financial borrowing that increases external debt. This burden often falls on the majority through taxation. These moral failings break social trust, harm the common good, worsen poverty, and privatize public authority. Pope Francis describes corruption as a spiritual illness that normalizes injustice, fuels public discontent, and weakens moral awareness.
The final pillar is the demand for ethical leadership, seeking new types of leaders grounded in integrity, humility, and service for the people. In Fratelli Tutti, Francis calls for leaders capable of creating “social poetry,” a creative form of solidarity that encourages dignified opportunities for the poor.
While the five pillars above show Gen Z’s ethical commitment to social change, they face several dilemmas that tend to weaken their apparent unified drive for social transformation.
Ethical Dilemmas Within Gen Z Movements
Since Gen Z movements are often spontaneous and lack structured organization, they tend to be short-lived and lack strategies for sustainable change to the systemic issues that they oppose. The desperation for change leads Gen Z to see all change as good and to believe that any disruption is better than maintaining the status quo. This can lead to pitfalls such as replacing current leaders with worse ones, implementing superficial social, political, and economic changes aimed at pleasing the public without addressing systemic injustice, and ultimately causing failure in governance structures.
Another dilemma is the insistence on leaderlessness due to fear of political capture. While understandable in situations of betrayal and co-optation, rejecting leadership can risk undermining accountability, mediation, and negotiation capabilities, as well as creating unaccountable authority.
Gen Z also tends to shy away from dialogue, absolutizing change at the expense of conversation, while simultaneously considering all existing leadership illegitimate. Fratelli Tutti strongly advocates for dialogue as a moral practice focused on truth and lasting peace, providing inclusion as a way to bring everyone to the table and break cycles of exclusion.
Conclusion
While the protests by Gen Z have led to significant changes in Asia and Africa, they still lack an ethical foundation to sustain the movement aimed at addressing systemic injustices in society. They offer a strong moral basis for structured dialogue on inclusion, justice, employment, wealth creation, accountable governance, and sustainable peace. The ethical growth of Gen Z needs to shift from protest to formation, from spontaneity to structured dialogue, from moral outrage to institutional development and reforms. As Evangelii Gaudium emphasizes, genuine social change depends on ongoing moral conversion, dialogical engagement, and a sincere respect for human dignity and the common good.
References
Francis. (2013). Evangelii Gaudium: Apostolic Exhortation on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
Francis. (2020). Fratelli Tutti: Encyclical Letter on Fraternity and Social Friendship. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
Nord, M., Lührmann, A., Tannenberg, M., & Lindberg, S. I. (2025). The Global State of Democracy: Autocratization and Democratic Decline in the 21st Century. Democratization, 32(4), 835–860.
Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. (2004). Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.