[Answered] Examine the role of Gen Z’s digital activism and episodic protests in countering global democratic backsliding. Evaluate the efficacy of this decentralized engagement in challenging authoritarianism and fostering sustainable, accountable governance in a technologically mediated political landscape.

Introduction

According to the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Report 2024, over 70% of the world’s population lives under autocratising regimes. Amid this democratic recession, Generation Z has emerged as a digitally empowered counter-public.

Democratic Backsliding and the Rise of Digital Native Politics

1. Context of Democratic Erosion: Reports by International IDEA and Freedom House highlight shrinking civic spaces, weakened institutional checks, and concentration of executive power. Traditional opposition parties and civil society groups often struggle under surveillance regimes and restrictive laws.
2. Emergence of Gen Z as a Political Subject: Generation Z (born 1997–2012), raised in a hyper-connected ecosystem, engages politics through networked individualism. Unlike earlier ideological mobilisations such as Occupy Wall Street (2011) or the Arab Spring, Gen Z activism is fluid, decentralised, and digitally mediated.

Anatomy of Gen Z’s Digital Activism

1. Leaderless and Decentralised Mobilisation: Gen Z protests in Bangladesh (2024) and Nepal (2025) illustrate horizontal movements coordinated via encrypted platforms. This structure reduces vulnerability to state repression targeting singular leaders.
2. Episodic and Issue-Centric Engagement: Their mobilisation is often burst-mode activism — intense, short-lived protests triggered by corruption scandals, institutional opacity, or perceived injustice. Climate strikes inspired by Greta Thunberg demonstrate transnational solidarity without rigid partisan affiliation.
3. Transnational Digital Public Sphere: Social media creates what scholars call a networked counter-public, enabling real-time circulation of grievances across borders. Viral documentation of state excess delegitimises authoritarian narratives.

Digital Tools as Democratic ‘Shield and Sword’

1. Mobilisation and Information Verification (Sword): Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), livestreaming, and citizen journalism expose corruption and human rights violations, eroding regime legitimacy.
2. Circumventing Censorship (Shield): Gen Z’s digital literacy enables use of VPNs, encryption, and algorithmic evasion tactics, challenging state-controlled media monopolies. However, this also triggers a digital arms race, where governments deploy AI-based surveillance and predictive policing to pre-empt dissent.

Evaluating the Efficacy of Episodic Engagement

1. Strengths: Agility and Moral Visibility: Decentralised protests are adaptive and resilient. They rapidly mobilise collective outrage and reshape public discourse. Even when short-lived, they generate normative pressure on regimes.
2. Limitations: Institutional Sustainability Gap: Critics highlight the slacktivism dilemma — online engagement without durable organisational infrastructure. Unlike sustained movements such as India’s farmers’ protest (2020–24), episodic protests may struggle to convert street energy into legislative reform. Policy transformation requires bridging the protest-to-policy gap — drafting reforms, institutional negotiation, and electoral participation.

Psychological and Sociological Dimensions

1. Gen Z combines radical individualism with reduced prejudice and greater openness to diversity.
2. Exposure to therapy culture and mental health awareness reflects a politics of introspection. Yet economic precarity and job-market anxiety generate fragmented engagement.
3. Market-driven identity formation and consumer culture complicate their political ethos — digital dignity sometimes substitutes structural equality.

Democratic Renewal or Fragmented Resistance?

1. For Gen Z activism to foster accountable governance: Digital rights (privacy, access) must be institutionalised as democratic rights. Civic education should integrate digital literacy with constitutional values.
2. Youth participation must transition from networked protest to structured political engagement — party reform, local governance, and policy drafting.
3. Democracy in a technologically mediated landscape requires institutions to adapt to horizontal power structures rather than suppress them.

Conclusion

As Dr. B.R. Ambedkar warned in his Constituent Assembly speech, democracy is not merely a form of government but a mode of associated living. Gen Z must convert digital dissent into durable democratic institutions.