Written by Jacob Okumu

A protesters throws back a tear gas canister at police during 2024 protests (AP Photo/ Andrew Kasuku)

June 2025 marks one year since Kenya found itself at a historic crossroads. Young people, forming the majority of the population, fuelled by frustration and yearning for dignity, poured into the streets in the hundreds of thousands in major towns and cities across the country. They protested as an expression of their dissatisfaction with the government led by President Ruto.

What started as cries against the draconian Finance Bill 2024 that threatened to increase and introduce more taxes onto the already overburdened citizens, quickly  metamorphosed into a vote of no confidence on the government, with the majority of the youthful protesters calling for the President to resign.

The rallies were defiant, hopeful, and deeply patriotic. But they were also tragic. Over 60 lives were lost, among them a 12-year-old child whose only crime was dreaming of a better future. More than 600 others were left nursing wounds inflicted by the very state that swore to protect them.

Today, as the dust of those momentous days settles, Kenyans are asking: was it worth it? What did we gain, and how have we sustained those gains in the face of continued repression?

The Gains: A Nation Awakened

For many, the protests were a painful but necessary awakening. The Finance Bill was eventually watered down, with some of its most draconian provisions scrapped in response to public pressure. But perhaps the deeper victory lay not in the fine print of legislation, but in the spirit of resistance that was born.

Ordinary Kenyans discovered their collective power. The protests stitched together a sense of shared destiny across tribe, class, and region. For the first time in years, young people felt they could confront the state not as passive subjects but as active citizens.

One year later, this culture of vigilance has not waned. Social accountability is at its peak. Citizens are more outspoken, more willing to protest, and less easily cowed by threats. The fire lit in June 2024 continues to burn.

The Costs: Blood, Fear, and Abductions

Despite the gains, the costs remain unbearable. The ghosts of the slain still haunt us. Families are left with empty chairs at dinner tables, parents with gaping wounds where their children once were. Activists whisper that the price paid in blood is too high, especially when justice remains elusive.

The government, rather than heeding the call for reform, has doubled down. Police killings persist, often with impunity. In a chilling turn, abduction has become a new weapon of silence. Activists vanish in the dead of night, only to resurface days later battered—or never to return at all. Fear stalks the movement, but fear has not killed it.

A Culture of Protest

If anything, repression has fertilized the soil of defiance. Regular protests now erupt over issues ranging from corruption scandals to skyrocketing food prices. What once felt exceptional has become almost routine: Kenyans on the streets, placards in hand, voices raised in unison.

This normalization of protest—what some call “protestism”—is reshaping civic life. More people, even those who once dismissed demonstrations as the work of radicals, now see protest as a legitimate and necessary tool of democracy. The youth, in particular, have embraced it as part of their identity, an inheritance they refuse to surrender.

At the Grassroots Level: Picking Up the Pieces

At the grassroots level, where wounds are most raw, activists carry the heaviest burden. During the protest they the were the ones comforting bereaved families, organizing medical support for the injured, and rallying communities long after the cameras have left. One year after, they are the ones left to pick the pieces.

For them, the protests were not a moment but a movement, and sustaining it is backbreaking work. They speak of exhaustion, of the loneliness that comes when the headlines fade, of the surveillance and not to mention the pressure of continuing to pursue justice.

For them, the struggle persists, and still, they have to keep showing up. The resilience of grassroots activists is perhaps the truest testament to the sacrifices made last year.

Was It Worth It?

So, was it worth it? The answer is complicated. No victory can justify the lives lost, the broken bodies, the tears of mothers burying their children. And yet, to dismiss those sacrifices as meaningless would be to dishonour the very patriots who stood tall.

The Finance Bill protests forced a reckoning. They reminded a generation of its power and forced those in authority to confront people unwilling to be silenced. One year later, Kenya is more vigilant, more restless, and more insistent on accountability.

The struggle is far from over. But perhaps that is the point: democracy is never a destination, but only a journey. The patriots of June 2024 showed us the way, in blood and in courage. It falls on us, the living, to ensure their sacrifice was not in vain.

Support gaps identified from finance bill protests

• Psychological support often falls on communities. Professional support often requires funding. This is further burdening most impacted community members.
• Media support; when big movement moments pass, critical work is still happening. This work becomes more dangerous when awareness and attention are pulled away rapidly.
• Training offerings to further skill up organizers often require funding; this excludes grassroots activists who need this support most.
• Finding counter-surveillance methods is falling on communities. Communities need access to knowledge and funding to implement preventative/counter measures.

The post One Year After the Finance Bill Protests: Was It Worth It? appeared first on Blueprints for Change.

Anonymous author

Dr Umar Khalid, a young muslim man, has been in prison for 5 years, without trial. Each bail application has been rejected – all the way from the sessions court, to high courts to the supreme court.

His crime? He gave a speech upholding the Indian Constitution that guarantees every citizen of India their rights and freedoms. He fought against a discriminatory citizenship amendment bill, which caused widespread protests against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) conservative regime. The Modi government accused Khalid of being a key conspirator in the 2020 Delhi riots that Modi’s party officials themselves have been openly seen inciting.

“We won’t respond to violence with violence. We won’t respond to hate with hate. If they spread hate, we will respond to it with love.” -Dr Umar Khalid

Umar Khalid’s case is not an anomaly. It is not a singular case of the failure of Indian judiciary or of gross misuse of terror laws. It is part of a long list of civil rights violations carried out by the Indian State apparatus against anyone that dares to oppose its economic and developmental policies.

Modi’s Rise to Power

Modi became a household name in 2014. Fronted by his political party, BJP, his political campaign was the first to use social media, PR agencies and corporate style advertisements to court voters. His campaign openly used the power of misinformation to twist historical facts to suit Hindutva Ideology, and to attack critics who dared to confront him. Authoritarianism thrives where there is ignorance.

A poor education system, a society that does not know or value its history, that is excessively obsessed with capitalist growth and development, a society that allows hate and bigotry to fester unchallenged, is a society that can be made to give up its rights and its freedoms.

Christophe Jafferlot, an expert on the rise of right-wing politics in India, classifies modern India as a system of electoral authoritarianism. Elections have not been suspended, but there is an exponential rise in authoritarianism. This is achieved by interfering with institutions in charge of organizing elections, making competition unequal in terms of financial resources, and restricting freedom of expression, including media independence.

As of 2025, India has reached a point where ALL of its democratic institutions – all the way from its judiciary, investigation bodies, central banks, enforcement directorates, elections commission, media and parliament have been captured.

Modi’s India now shares several similarities and patterns with Israel. This is most apparent in the rise in Israel-like tactics to subdue and subjugate minority groups. There is a chilling similarity between India’s use of bulldozers to demolish Muslim homes and businesses and Israel’s use of similar tactics to demolish Palestinian homes and properties.

India’s close friendship with Israel has resulted in arms deals that include spywares and other surveillance softwares – one of which, (Pegasus) has  been used to target Indian activists and journalists critical of the State.

A Step Back To Pre-2014 India

This slide into authoritarianism and use of terror laws to subdue, intimidate and wrongfully imprison dissenters did not begin with Modi’s regime.

While it is true that the misuse and abuse of the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) – the primary terror law being used in India today – has been higher under the BJP government, it was under previous governments that these colonial legacy laws were formed, strengthened and allowed to continue.

The National investigation Agency (NIA) was formed in 2008 under the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. The abuse of power and use of State violence against voices that oppose the State’s economic/development policies is not unique to the current regime.

Violence against marginalized communities, particularly Indigenous groups, had been normalized by successive governments. The UPA government designated these individuals as terrorists and/or people committing terrorist acts for interfering with economic development projects, which threaten natural resources and land rights of Indigenous Peoples.

In India today, the authoritarianism under Modi and BJP is a logical conclusion to the path chosen by successive governments and its people. In failing to chart its own unique path – one that could have put ecological conservation and human rights at the center – and following in the footsteps of the western models of capitalist, imperialistic development instead – India and its people have made a grave mistake.

Impacts on Civil Society Groups/NGOs/Grassroots Groups

Specific examples of attacks on activists, and their charges, include:

• Newsclick, a media house critical of the government, offices were raided in 2023 and a number of journalists were interrogated and falsely charged with ‘receiving money to run pro-China propaganda’.
• Teesta Satalvad, secretary of the human rights organization ‘Citizens for Justice and Peace’, was arrested in 2022 under fraudulent charges. Satalvad has been demanding justice for the 2002 Gujarat riots victims and has been seeking prosecution of senior government officials.
• Safoora Zargar was framed on charges of “anti-national” activities, conspiring to overthrow the government. She was arrested in 2021 and thrown in prison while she was still pregnant. It was only after pressure from International humanitarian groups that she was granted bail.
• Disha Ravi – the co convenor of Fridays For Future – India Chapter was arrested under sedition law during the farmers movement of 2020.
• In 2019, the websites of three environmental youth based collectives were suspended for launching a nationwide campaign against the central government’s attempts to dilute one of the environmental regulatory provisions of India.

Role of Support Organizations (NGOs/funders)

Support organizations must develop a strong understanding of the political landscape of the region and communities where support is targeted. Without such an understanding, the flow of resources easily becomes diverted and diffused into campaigns that have little bearing on the real-life experiences of those living under unjust systems.

In an authoritarian environment, the role of support organizations becomes crucial. Ensuring that support organizations do not back down and withdraw resources because the environment is challenging is of the utmost importance.

India today requires support to set up awareness amongst its people, particularly its youth. Groups that are setting up alternative education curriculums, workshops, conducting trainings to generate political literacy amongst young voters, are severely under supported. Citizen groups that conduct research, data collection, and investigative reporting need funds and resources.

Independent media is critical in a democracy – and that has collapsed entirely in India. The few that remain are being targeted, jailed and harassed. Independent journalism is another area that can benefit immensely with financial support. Think tanks, policy advocacy organizations need to be restored. Environmental and human rights groups need resources so they can continue to fight, campaign, generate awareness, and pursue legal avenues of justice.

Grassroots activists need support systems so they are protected and do not have to face the brunt of state violence alone. Legal and monetary support are crucial to grassroots groups that are fighting along the frontlines and are the primary targets of state sponsored violence.

Suggested reflective questions

• What similarities can you identify between your region and India pre-2014? Are there similarities to present day India?
• What, if any, democratic institutions in your region been captured by the state (judiciary, investigation bodies, central banks, enforcement directorates, elections commission, media and parliament)?
• What tactics from other repressive regions is your region also using to target marginalized groups and/or activists?
• How are marginalized groups (Indigenous, disabled, trans, impoverished etc.) treated in your region when they exist or resist?
• What key area is your group/organization aiming to address to resist authoritarianism (alternative education, research, independent media, legal aid, physical safety aid, direct action)?
• What could solidarity with activists in India look like for your organization/group?

The post The Rise of Authoritarianism in India & Impacts on NGOs/grassroots groups appeared first on Blueprints for Change.

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 twenty percent 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.

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