THE NEW RULES OF YOUTH MOBILISATION
In 2025, we saw something pretty remarkable: youth-led movements in Bangladesh, Nepal, Morocco, and Madagascar pushed political reform, brought down governments, and mobilised huge numbers of the population both on and offline. And they did it all without help from NGOs or the political establishment.
These weren’t traditional campaigns. Ideology wasn’t shared through slogans and leaflets, but everything from memes to skits, fandom culture to football chants. Protests didn’t just take to the streets, but to Discord, TikTok, and Instagram. Young people have fundamentally rewritten the rules of mobilisation, and those of us in the social impact space need to learn them fast.
FROM COLLECTIVE ACTION TO CONNECTIVE ACTION
For much of the last century, mobilisation followed a familiar script where collective action depended on formal organisations, central leadership, shared ideology, and strong collective identities. People joined movements, adopted a clear sense of “we,” and acted together under common banners and demands.
Over the past decade, there has been a shift toward something different: connective action. Rather than relying on organisations or shared ideology, connective action spreads through digital networks. It lowers the barriers to participation, allowing people to personalise their involvement and share it peer‑to‑peer.
This helps explain why many recent movements have been fast, decentralised, and difficult to control. But early accounts of connective action also pointed to a weakness: without collective identity, digitally driven mobilisation can feel fleeting — viral but shallow, intense but short‑lived.
What the youth‑led movements of 2025 suggest is that this limitation is being overcome.
WHEN SYMBOLISM BECOMES STRATEGY
In all these movements, symbolism became strategy.
In Nepal, young people ran civic education sessions and election organising on gaming social platform Discord. Memes making fun of Bangladeshi political elites went viral, in a political critique that circumvented strict censorship laws. Madagascans used TikTok to make skits and dances that doubled as political commentary. And in Morocco, protesters waved pirate flags from manga One Piece and remixed football chants to make their civic statement.
This is connective action in practice. Memes, emojis, and anime avatars helped young people find each other, connect with each other, and communicate ideas they might not be safe saying outright. It felt like a good-faith reversal of something the far-right has understood for years: coded language and dog-whistle symbolism – being “red-pilled”, Pepe the Frog, etc. – can help build community and avoid scrutiny.
Symbolism, in this sense, doesn’t just express dissent — it organises it.
CULTURE REBUILDS WHAT CONNECTIVE ACTION ONCE STRIPPED AWAY
Classic theories of connective action emphasised that large‑scale mobilisation could succeed without collective identity. Participation didn’t require adopting a shared ideology or signing up to a movement; it simply required sharing something that resonated.
What these youth movements show is something more nuanced. Collective identity hasn’t disappeared, it has been rebuilt through culture rather than ideology.
Memes, fandoms, slang, and visual symbols create a sense of “us” that is lighter, more playful, and more inclusive than traditional political identities, but no less powerful. Culture becomes a shortcut to belonging. You don’t need to agree on a manifesto to feel part of something; you just need to recognise the reference, get the joke, or share the vibe.
This matters because belonging is what turns participation from a moment into a movement. Earlier forms of digital activism often felt impersonal or transactional — a post, a share, a spike of attention. These movements feel different because they are fluid, but they are also sticky. People don’t just show up once; they stay, remix, contribute, and bring others with them.
In other words, connective action is now identity‑light, but culturally dense — and that density gives it staying power.
WHY BELONGING NOW OUTRANKS REACH
Lots of campaigns in the social impact arena measure success in reach: views, likes, retweets, and so on. But that’s not why these movements took off.
They took off because young people felt part of something. They made them feel they weren’t alone in their frustration with corruption, joblessness, broken systems, and being shut out of formal politics. The in-jokes, the slang, the memes – that sense of belonging made people show up and stick around.
More importantly, these movements worked because no one tried to manage them too tightly; they had space to grow on their own terms. This made for a different organisational structure where young people led from the front. For a lot of NGOs or advocacy groups, this can feel a little scary: the instinct is to protect the message at all costs. But micromanagement kills the energy, becoming a series of dos and don’ts that stops spontaneity in its tracks.
It isn’t a matter of how we reach young people. It’s whether we’re willing to let them take the lead. Most organisations still design campaigns for them, rather than co-authoring campaigns with them. But we’ve seen in these movements that young people are better placed to create the language, choose the format, and define the strategy from the start.
WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE
- Treat culture as core: Culture isn’t something you tack on to a campaign after the fact. It’s the ground people are already standing on. Memes, slang, fandoms — this is where identity lives. If your strategy doesn’t find young people there, you’re already behind.
- Co-create the strategy: This isn’t about hiring a youth consultant at the end of the process or including them during feedback rounds. It’s about working with young people from the start: deciding what the campaign is about, how it spreads, and which symbols resonate.
- Design for peer-to-peer: The best campaigns aren’t top-down but side-to-side. What tools are you building that enable young people both to talk to each other? That’s where the energy will come from.
- Expect remix: You can’t control the message and build belonging at the same time. So offer them a framework — an idea, a vibe, an aesthetic — and let young people grow it organically from there. If it evolves, that’s proof it’s working.
- Measure what matters: Stop counting views and start asking: did it spark action, not just attention? Did young people feel part of this? Did it help them express something they previously couldn’t?
- These movements have shown us that the future of activism is decentralised, cultural, and driven by young people who don’t ask for permission. You just need to be prepared for your polished strategy to get some fingerprints on it along the way…
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