01 ISSUE III
FEBRUARY 2025
FEBRUARY 2025
Lessons from the Gen Z Revolution
Six months after a student-led uprising ousted an autocratic Prime Minister, Bangladesh faces the challenge of governing, risking squandering the victory amid the complexities of leadership.
By Nader Rahman
When students across Bangladesh took to the streets to protest in the summer of 2024, they already knew what failure tasted like. Almost exactly six years earlier, tens of thousands of then-high school students took to the streets of the capital Dhaka to protest the lack of road safety after two of their own had been killed by a speeding bus. For five days, teenagers in their school uniforms and carrying ID cards took over the streets of the city. They protested government inaction. This included stopping cars to check and see if their paperwork and licenses were in order. The Awami League (AL)-led government violently responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and an internet blackout.
Bruised but not beaten, many of those same school children took to the streets of Bangladesh again in 2024, but this time as young adults protesting a quota system for government jobs that was not merit-based. The AL reacted by directing their youth wing to brutally attack the protesters, shut down the internet for five days, and, most chillingly, killing hundreds of people indiscriminately. Older, wiser, and bolder, the students did not back down this time and, in under two months, toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 16-year-long autocratic reign. “The Gen Z revolution,” as the protests became known, was not televised but (internet permitting) live-streamed.
Hasina fled to India with blood on her hands. Bangladeshis wearily counted the dead. Gen Z paid for the revolution with their lives as it soon became apparent that an overwhelming number of those killed were under 30 years old.
Now for the first time they were in a position of power. They rejected the Army (which is the usual default action in Bangladesh whenever there is a political crisis) from filling the leadership void and called on Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus to lead an interim government that is widely supported yet remains in power without a democratic electoral mandate. The 84-year-old Yunus formed his administration with veteran activists and intellectuals, but he also asked two student leaders to join the government. At 26 and 27 years old, Asif Mahmud and Nahid Islam became two of the youngest ministers in the world.
Yunus and his government inherited a country and system that had been hollowed out by politically-motivated crony capitalism, massive state-level theft and corruption, a broken judiciary and banking sector, as well as a deeply partisan civil service administration. After years of autocracy and nonexistent civil rights, the people of Bangladesh wanted change and they wanted it overnight. Yet the first issue they had to contend with was the ire of their neighbor India.
Within days of taking over, the Indian government – which vociferously supported the Awami League as a bulwark against Pakistan and the perceived rise of Islamic extremists – executed a narrative attack against Yunus and his regime. They claimed after the fall of Hasina, that religious minorities, especially Hindus, were being attacked in Bangladesh in larger numbers than before. These claims were further exaggerated and amplified online by supporters of India’s government and soon became the dominant narrative about Bangladesh inside India. The government of Bangladesh was not prepared to deal with such well-orchestrated attacks, as this narrative soon became the dominant post-revolution narrative about Bangladesh globally.
Riding the wave of post-revolution popularity Yunus, Islam and Mahmud were also ill-equipped to govern a country where seemingly every single institution had been defanged and politicized.
In their 2012 book, “Why Nations Fail,” economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson explored why some nations prosper while others remain poor. They argue that political and economic institutions determine a country's success, where inclusive institutions promote growth and innovation, while extractive institutions concentrate power and wealth, leading to instability.
By definition, extractive institutions are political and economic systems designed to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a small elite while restricting opportunities for the majority. Authoritarian rule left Bangladesh with extractive institutions and the Yunus government was woefully underprepared to reform the administrative state.
That’s when the problems began.
There was never going to be a quick fix for the issues at the heart of Bangladesh’s problems, but sky-high expectations from an anxious population of 170 million needed to be met or redefined. The interim government did neither, as they either tried to make wholesale changes to deeply dysfunctional institutions and processes or oscillated from inaction.
The interim government did not have complete control of all state apparatuses as both petty and violent crime were on the rise, leading to a national sense of unease. Long-suppressed conservative Islamic parties popped up out of nowhere, disrupting women’s football matches and attacking bookshops that carried what they believed to be blasphemous books. The students who led the revolution and were not part of the interim government flexed their muscles and nascent power by demolishing the spiritual headquarters of the Awami League, but no one stopped them. It was and continues to be, for lack of a better phrase, a free-for-all. Security services are still tainted by their support of the previous regime, thus leading to an exodus in their numbers. The few that came back did so under pressure and worked under the very real threat of mob justice being enacted upon them. They live with the stalking nightmare of their historic sins hanging over them.
Amid all this, Yunus, the elder statesman, seems to finally be clearing a path to the other side of the jungle. While law and order are still problematic, he has deftly managed to avoid significant questions about the legality of his own government, which continues unelected under extraordinary circumstances. He often sits down with major political parties and speaks about the importance of free and fair democratic elections without having his unelected presence questioned.
His government is no longer trying to fix the entire country but has narrowed their ambitions to 7 national reform commissions. One suspects even a few minor reforms will be considered a victory as this administration begins to feel more like a caretaker than a revolutionary government. But all is not lost, the students who led the revolution are on the brink of forming a political party, and in the next elections, they will see if their idea of a Gen Z government resonates with the masses because the revolution already did.
Nader Rahman is a journalist based in New York. He holds an MA in International Affairs from The New School.