Insight from the Frontlines: Asia Pacific

Written by: Keira Diaz

 

It started with food.

When thousands of Indonesians poured into the streets outside parliament, activists across Asia were already watching. From Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and beyond, they pulled out their phones, opened Grab, and started ordering food to the protest sites in Jakarta. Noodle soup. Rice meals. Whatever was available.

There was no central committee that decided this. No formal coalition that issued a directive. People saw other people standing in the heat and they fed them. That moment was small in the way that most honest things are small. It was also a window into something much larger that has been building across Asia for years.

A generation is confronting the same walls from different sides. Since 2020, young people have shown up in nearly every major wave of mass protest across Asia; Thailand, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Indonesia, Cambodia, Hong Kong. The names change and the shape of the movement keeps repeating.

Young people are the first to mobilize, the most willing to stay in the streets when repression escalates, and often the ones who absorb the worst of what governments decide to do in response. They are also the ones least represented in the rooms where decisions about their lives actually get made. This is exactly the condition these movements are growing out of.

What unites them has nothing to do with shared ideology or organized platforms. It is a set of shared experiences that keep producing the same rage in different countries. Corruption that everyone can see and nobody in power will address. Political dynasties rotating the same families through positions of authority across decades. Governments built to serve the people in their constitutions, and serving elites in practice.

 

Different triggers, same experiences

In Thailand, students took to the streets demanding constitutional reform and accountability from a military that has treated governance as its inheritance. In Bangladesh, young people rose against a quota system that protected the children of political loyalists at the expense of everyone else. What began as a student protest became something that shook an entire government.

In Myanmar, the military simply took power and shot people who objected. In Indonesia, the protests that drew the world’s attention were rooted in years of watching oligarchic networks tighten their grip on every institution that was supposed to push back. In Cambodia, the ruling party has been in power for four decades, and an entire generation has grown up never having known anything else.

And in the Philippines, it was floodwater. When Typhoon Carina hit and Metro Manila drowned while billions in flood control funds had quietly disappeared into contracts that built nothing, young Filipinos went online, traced the money, named names, and what started as outrage over infrastructure became a reckoning with a political class that had been stealing from the public for so long it had stopped trying to hide it.

Different countries, different histories, different immediate triggers. The people in the streets are angry about versions of the same thing.

 

A closer look at Nepal

Nepal is worth sitting with separately because it went further than anywhere else in the region, and still left the core question unanswered. A trend called NepoKids had been circulating on TikTok and Reddit for months before anything broke open.

Young Nepalis were posting side by side comparisons of politicians’ children living lavishly on social media while youth unemployment sat above 20% and the country quietly exported its young people abroad because there was nothing for them at home. When the government blocked 26 platforms in September 2025, students in school uniforms walked to the federal parliament expecting a rally.

The state opened fire. By the end of the month, at least 75 people were dead, forensic reports showing nearly every gunshot victim was struck in the head, neck, or chest. The parliament burned. The prime minister resigned. Protesters then ran an online poll to pick an interim leader and voted in Sushila Karki, who became Nepal’s first female prime minister. A government fell and a replacement was chosen through a Discord vote.

Nepal is now the third South Asian government in the 2020s brought down by young people, after Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Both of those are still waiting. Bangladesh’s interim government has seen arbitrary arrests and press freedom violations. Sri Lanka’s new leadership has not rolled back the laws that made the uprising necessary. Nepal’s newly elected government inherited both the wreckage and the expectation, and the generation that burned the parliament is watching to see whether any of it lands anywhere real.

 

The 1% vs everyone else

The elite versus everyone else. That is the thread running through nearly all of it.

These movements are also, almost uniformly, decentralized and spontaneous in ways that both give them strength and leave them vulnerable. There is no central leadership to arrest, no single organization to dismantle, no unified platform a government can pressure into silence.

When protests spread, they spread because people share what they are seeing in real time, because someone posts a video and someone else shares it and within hours, people who had no prior connection are organizing around the same moment.

This makes movements fast. It also makes them uneven. Information during a protest is sporadic, emotional, and travels before it can be verified. Governments and well-resourced political actors have learned to exploit this, seeding disinformation into protest spaces, muddying the narratives of these organic movements. 

The question of violence also sits at the center of all of this in ways that rarely get honestly discussed. Most of these movements begin peacefully. Young people are the ones holding that line, often under enormous pressure, because they understand that the moment violence enters from their side, governments gain permission to escalate. But the state’s monopoly on violence is real and it gets used.

In Myanmar it has meant live ammunition. In Thailand it has meant legal persecution and the weaponization of courts. In Indonesia it has meant batons and water cannons and the slow grind of criminalization. Movements that began with students holding signs end up having to reckon with what happens when the state decides it has had enough of being embarrassed in public.

The militarization of protest response is a regional pattern. Governments across Asia have been learning from each other how to pacify resistance while maintaining the appearance of stability.

 

What is different now?

There are also fault-lines within the region that complicate any easy narrative of unified youth resistance. The Rohingya situation sits painfully at the edges of regional solidarity. In Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Thailand, Rohingya people face discrimination from states, and sometimes from the same communities that march for democracy at home.

The movements calling for justice in their own countries have not always extended that call to people who arrive at their shores without papers and without protection. Young activists across the region are starting to name this contradiction, even when it is uncomfortable.

Young people are anxious. They are entering a world where economic instability is the baseline, where unemployment and rising costs and contracting opportunities are answered by a political class that has no intention of doing anything. Corruption, inequality, elite capture of institutions, these have existed in various forms for generations.

What is different now is proximity. When you wake up and open your phone and the first things you see are evidence of exactly the failures you already knew about, political reality stops being something you encounter occasionally and becomes something you move through all day. Political awakening for this generation is an accumulation of daily exposures that eventually tips into something that cannot be walked back.

And yet these movements remain volatile and vulnerable. The same spontaneity that makes them powerful makes them hard to sustain. Without structures that can hold people together between moments of crisis, movements flare and recede. Governments know this and sometimes simply wait. In relatively open societies there are pathways toward policy engagement and civic organizing that sustain participation over time.

In more repressive environments the options narrow considerably, pushing organizing underground or into diaspora networks or into the quieter forms of resistance that do not draw immediate attention. What works in Jakarta does not automatically work in Naypyidaw.

 

What comes after?

What is largely missing from the table is a real alternative. The movements across Asia have been clear about what they are against. Oligarchy, dynastic politics, corruption, military impunity, governments that treat public resources as personal property. What remains underdeveloped, and this is an honest description rather than a criticism, is any coherent picture of what comes after.

Anti-elite sentiment is widespread but it has not yet cohered into a politics that can name a different economic arrangement and organize around it. That space is dangerous. Populism rushes in to fill it, and leaders who speak the language of the streets while practicing the politics of the elites are a recurring feature of Asian political history, and the conditions right now are ones that keep producing them.

The flow of information within these movements matters more than most outside observers acknowledge. How people inside a protest understand what is happening, who is framing events, which narratives stick and which get lost; these shape what a movement becomes and what it is remembered as.

Young people building platforms for horizontal communication, sharing what is actually happening on the ground rather than waiting for media that may arrive late or arrive sympathetic to power, are doing something with real political consequence. The conversation infrastructure is an integral part of the struggle.

Where does this go? Nobody can answer that cleanly, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What is clear now is that young people across Asia are building forms of participation in the space between what exists and what should exist, under surveillance and legal pressure and sometimes direct physical danger, in countries whose governments have been studying how to suppress them.

The protests have already destabilized arrangements that looked stable. They have already produced moments that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. They have also, in several cases, been absorbed or crushed without producing the structural change they were demanding. That tension, between the energy these movements generate and the structures that contain or outlast them, sits at the center of youth activism in Asia right now.

 

What effective activism looks like

Part of what needs rethinking is what activism looks like. The march, the rally, the press statement, these still matter. However they are also no longer sufficient on their own.

The Milk Tea Alliance for example, a transnational solidarity platform across Asia, did not begin as an organization with a strategic plan. It began as a hashtag and became a living regional network that has now continued coordinating campaigns for Myanmar, amplifying crackdowns in real time, and connecting activists across borders who would otherwise have no way to find each other.

Building movements through digital infrastructure, through shared narrative and horizontal coordination rather than vertical hierarchy, holds up under repression in ways that centralized structures often do not. The question is how to deepen it, how to move from coordination to sustained collective power without recreating the same centralized structures that make movements easy to target and dismantle.

Activists and researchers who have been watching these movements closely point to several lessons that keep surfacing. Movements combining online mobilization with offline community roots last longer than those living entirely in either space. Humour, creativity, and cultural expression keep people in struggle through the long periods when nothing seems to be moving.

Decentralized structures survive repression better but require deliberate investment in communication and trust to hold together over time. And solidarity that never becomes material, that never translates into shared resources, protection networks, and concrete mutual aid, tends to fade when the immediate crisis fades with it.

 

Impact of US foreign funding cuts

These lessons matter more now because the landscape movements have depended on is breaking down. When the Trump administration shut down US foreign funding agencies, NGOs closed and programs ended, and the impact traveled down the chain to very local, very grassroots organizations that had been receiving support from those NGOs.

Organizations doing legal aid, documentation, community organizing, safe spaces for activists facing persecution; the civil society funding architecture that many movements across Asia had come to rely on, imperfect as it was, has contracted sharply.

What fills that space is not yet clear. What is clear is that movements and grassroots organizers cannot afford to wait for it to be rebuilt from the outside. Building alternative funding models, community-based resources, and regional solidarity funds that flow horizontally between movements rather than vertically from institutional donors, is not a peripheral concern. This now becomes a question of survival for civil society.

 

The major central questions 

The food sent from Manila to Jakarta was a small thing. It was also honest. Someone saw people in the street and decided to feed them. That impulse, to act across distance on behalf of people you may never meet because their situation and yours are connected, is where regional solidarity actually lives, in choices made in ordinary moments when no one is watching. But impulse alone does not build movements that last. Impulse is where it starts. Structure is what carries it forward.

Two questions sit at the center of everything else and neither has been answered yet. The first is about narrative. Across Asia, from Bangkok to Dhaka to Jakarta to Manila, young people are rising against versions of the same thing. But these struggles have not yet found a common story that travels across borders the way the problems do.

How do we build a narrative, regional first, and if we dare global, that weaves these different but same calls into something that people in different countries can recognize themselves inside? How do we build the platform that carries it?

The second question is harder. How do we turn this organic movement energy into something with a robust political program, something capable of effecting actual structural change rather than pressuring systems that are very good at absorbing pressure and continuing unchanged?

Spontaneity gets people into the streets. It does not, on its own, rewrite constitutions, redistribute wealth and power, or dismantle the oligarchic networks that have spent decades learning how to survive popular anger.

 

Meeting the momentum

The movements that have produced durable structural change historically are the ones that found ways to connect mass energy to political program, to translate the rage in the streets into demands specific enough to fight for and win.

It has been months since the peak of the Gen Z protests in Asia, but this does not mean that the momentum has died down already. Young people across Asia are already doing the hardest part. They are showing up, repeatedly, at considerable personal cost, in countries that have made showing up dangerous.

The more urgent question now is whether the movements around them can build what is needed to meet that energy, the narrative infrastructure, the alternative funding models, the political programs, the regional solidarity that goes beyond hashtags into something that actually shares the cost of resistance. That work is less visible than a protest and harder to photograph. It is also where the next chapter gets written.

 

Support gaps identified

• Young people need more decision making opportunities. Meeting this need might look like including youth positions on boards, or paying youth for their input on strategic decisions.
• Horizontal conversation infrastructure; supporting existing communication that is happening, and helping to make further opportunities happen.
• Funding for things like navigating physical safety risks, or holding secure conversations and convenings. Long term, support to build alternative funding models is needed.
• Support to build protection networks and long-term mutual aid structures.
• Narrative weaving support to combine narratives across countries.