How Gen Z Protests Are Reshaping Politics In Asia
Ruhi Bhasin – Photo: LinkedIn
10-13-2026 ~ Youth-led protests have forced concessions in India and changed governments in Nepal and Bangladesh. Can those victories produce lasting political reform?
Asia has seen a surge of “Gen Z protests,” led by a generation tired of accepting the status quo and increasingly using social media to drive change in deeply entrenched political systems. In India, protests over the education system helped force the education minister’s resignation in 2026. Protests in Bangladesh and Nepal in 2024 and 2025, respectively, led to government changes. These protests have helped expose fractured political structures in these countries.
Governments in several South and Southeast Asian countries have done little to address the economic distress and corruption plaguing them. The Gen Z citizens, who are facing the brunt of these crumbling systems, are increasingly demanding accountability and justice, using social media to fight back, organize, document events, and press their demands. Despite efforts to suppress them, these protests have brought political change. Whether these movements can sustain solidarity and organize beyond immediate demands to pursue lasting reforms remains to be seen.
India
In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has been in power for more than 12 years, having first been elected in 2014. Press freedom and other democratic safeguards have come under pressure during its tenure; Sweden’s V-Dem Institute has classified India as an “electoral autocracy.” As stated by an August 2026 Time report, “Modi has consolidated his grip on all manner of national institutions in recent years: from the media, where pliant owners have repeatedly bent the knee to the administration, to election authorities, which in a recent state poll erased millions of names from voter rolls in a move widely seen as benefiting Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).”
India has been facing increasing unemployment among its educated youth, even though the government has consistently maintained these claims to be false. The country’s youth have also been contending with an education system marked by repeated paper leaks. In May 2026, the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for undergraduate medical admissions was canceled over paper-leak allegations, fueling anger over the examination system.
Meanwhile, during the same month, the Supreme Court Chief Justice’s comparison of unemployed youth to “parasites” and “cockroaches” led to the formation of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) by Abhijeet Dipke, an Indian student from Boston University who graduated in 2025 with a master’s in public relations. The CJP’s Instagram account amassed 20 million followers within days, according to Time. Dipke eventually returned to India on June 6. Anger over the government’s mismanagement of the education system soon moved from social media to the streets as thousands of Gen Z showed up at Jantar Mantar, a popular protest site in India’s capital, New Delhi, with their main demand being the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
As the protest gained momentum and spread, authorities resorted to force against demonstrators. Young protesters used social media to document events on the ground and responded with “humor and grit.” For them, the protest wasn’t about any political party but rather about ensuring accountability for a broken education system. They finally succeeded in forcing Pradhan to resign on July 25, 2026.
“In the end, the young cockroaches proved so resilient because Modi’s regime of control had no punishment or humiliation to threaten them with beyond what the system already inflicts on them every day. These young men and women had reached a point where they felt they had no voice in the existing order—and nothing left to lose,” explains the Time report. Allegations of links to foreign funding were also made against the movement, but the Ministry of External Affairs said it had “no information” to confirm these allegations.
In July 2026, after the protest ended, the government introduced a bill to amend the public examinations law, and Modi announced an examination reform task force. Whether these actions succeed in reforming the education system and whether the CJP can keep pushing for their proper implementation remains to be seen.
The CJP announced another campaign in September 2026 demanding chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation over alleged manipulation of voter rolls. Street protests followed in October, with opposition parties and civil society groups participating. The Election Commission denies the allegations. These protests will test the CJP’s ability to sustain pressure and the authorities’ response to demands for electoral reform.
The CJP has already split internally, resulting in the formation of the Cockroach Janta Party—Democratic.
Nepal
In September 2025, Gen Z protests erupted in Nepal after the government banned social media platforms that had not met its registration requirements, according to a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health article. Gen Z saw this move to ban social media as an attempt to trample their freedom of expression, while the politicians were hoping to use their traditional tactics to also stop hashtags like #NepoKids or #YouthAgainstCorruption targeted against their children and the privileged life they led, in sharp contrast to the hardships being faced by ordinary youths daily. The government further shut down the internet, thinking that would muzzle the protests. However, they drastically underestimated the youth’s power and frustration.
While the ban triggered the protests, several larger unresolved issues had been simmering for years, including unemployment, corruption, and nepotism, which strengthened the agitation. “In a country where 56 percent of the population is below the age of thirty, a geriatric leadership whose average age was seventy was woefully out of touch. In the last decade, internet connectivity had rapidly expanded to cover more than half the population. Young Nepalis were online—on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Discord—but offline, they saw none of the better future promised by the 2006 revolution against the monarchy. Instead, they saw widening inequality and corruption, and on their social media feeds, they saw the children of elites flaunting their privilege,” writes author Amish Raj Mulmi for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The protesters demanded Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli’s resignation. He finally heeded their demands on September 9, 2025. Read more
Extreme Weather Disasters Cost Hundreds Of Billions. Let’s Make Polluters Pay.
Michael Ash – Photo: PERI -University of Massachusetts Amherst
10-11-2026 ~ As the Trump administration guts disaster aid, it’s time for an extreme weather superfund paid for by fossil fuel firms.
One of the most visible consequences of global warming is the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as the powerful nor’easter that hammered the East Coast and mid-Atlantic for several days in late September with heavy rain, winds, and flooding. Indeed, a wide array of scientific studies over the past couple of decades have shown how human-caused climate change affects the intensity, frequency, and impact of extreme weather — from wildfires in the U.S. and Australia to record-setting flooding in China. And now, a major study prepared by two dozen scientists from across the globe has found a link between industrial emissions and the warming of the snow-capped Himalayan region that led to the collapse of the glacier that caused the catastrophic floods in Nepal and Tibet last month, in which over 1,300 people were killed while thousands are still missing.
In light of such developments, programs designed to address climate disasters are urgently needed. In the interview that follows, economist Michael Ash makes the case for the establishment of an Extreme Weather Superfund to protect U.S. communities from extreme weather events like those discussed above. Ash is professor of economics and public policy and co-director of the Corporate Toxics Information Project at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
C.J. Polychroniou: This past summer was the hottest on record in the United States as well as in western Europe. Indeed, new data shows that global warming is accelerating and the UN says that exceeding the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal above pre-industrial levels looks now unavoidable. As such, extreme weather events like last month’s nor’easter storm that produced strong winds, large waves, and coastal flooding along the East Coast, and Hurricane Helene, which ripped across the U.S. Southeast two years ago and was responsible for at least 250 fatalities, are expected to become more intense. Yet, instead of increasing funding for extreme weather, the Trump administration has actually slashed disaster aid programs and gutted agencies whose mission is to protect communities against extreme weather disasters. Can you talk a bit about the problem at hand with extreme weather events?
Michael Ash: Top weather and climate disasters, typically hurricanes, have costs running into hundreds of billions of dollars. In addition to its war on climate policy, the Trump administration has been utterly derelict in protecting communities from extreme weather disasters or rebuilding after disasters.
Hurricane Helene brought horrendous damage to uplands North Carolina, making very clear that the impact of climate change will not be limited to low-lying coastal areas. Immediately after becoming president in 2025, Donald Trump went around North Carolina saying, “the days of betrayal and neglect are over,” while simultaneously planning to institutionalize betrayal and neglect by getting rid of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), remarking: “If it was up to me right now, I’d end it right now.”
The Trump administration squeezed out 4,300 staff from FEMA in 2025. Its plan to reduce another 11,000 employees this year has been stopped by the courts for now. FEMA’s capacity is degraded. As The Nation article recounts, the North Carolina recovery funds have been delivered in an ineffective trickle.
How should we explain the Trump administration’s complete disregard of the risks associated with extreme weather events, which should be of deep concern to voters in the upcoming midterm elections?
It fits important patterns: climate denialism in service to fossil fuel companies; callous disregard for human suffering; and federal abdication of responsibility for the general welfare.
How much more likely and how much more destructive are episodes of extreme heat or rainfall, droughts, or hurricanes because of climate change? The science is increasingly precise and clear. Attribution science — the subject of a terrific new National Academies publication, “The Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts” (2026) — can establish with remarkable accuracy how much anthropogenic climate change (human contribution of greenhouse gases to Earth’s atmosphere) has contributed to extreme weather events.
To address the problem of extreme weather events, and as part of the Game Changers: Economic Policies for a Working America project that has been launched by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, you and your colleague James K. Boyce have called for the establishment of an Extreme Weather Superfund (EWS). What would be the actual mission of an EWS?
The Extreme Weather Superfund is modeled on the original Superfund: the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, which was designed to clean up land and water contaminated with toxic substances. There were two key principles: the polluter pays; and joint and several liability, which keeps polluters from dodging responsibility by pointing the finger at other parties or declaring bankruptcy.
The original Superfund empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to find and sue responsible parties and collected a valuable trust fund that paid for many useful cleanups. My son went canoeing with friends last month on Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, which was horribly polluted for more than a century, declared a Superfund site in 2010, and is now on the road to cleanup.
The Extreme Weather Superfund works from the Superfund model: quantify the harms, identify the responsible parties, and make the polluters pay. Except here, the harm is the introduction of greenhouse gases by carbon majors. Read more
The Inspiration That Leads Workers To Unionize
Roxanne D. Brown ~ Photo: USW.org
10-11-2026 ~ New USW Members at Corning in Hemlock, Michigan, realized they had power together.
Davion Johnson long realized that they and their colleagues deserved higher pay, fairer treatment, and greater respect at the Corning plant in Hemlock, Michigan.
But nothing drove home the need for change more than a supervisor’s callous response when a coworker fell from a ladder.
Instead of calling an ambulance, Johnson recalled, the supervisor threatened to dock the injured man a sick day if he left to seek care on his own.
An angry Johnson subsequently helped to lead 1,400 coworkers in a successful union drive with the United Steelworkers (USW). Now, they wield a collective voice on safety, pay, and other issues as they do the important work of manufacturing components for the nation’s solar industry.
Rampant inequality continues to fuel record support for unions nationwide. In all, 71 percent of Americans now approve of unions, and a growing number want organized labor to have more influence in American life, a new Gallup poll found.
Johnson’s experience shows why.
With costs of groceries, healthcare, utilities, and mortgages all skyrocketing, everyday families are falling further behind in today’s economy than they did during the pandemic.
Banding together empowers workers to fight for the higher wages they need to survive an affordability crisis that’s battering everyone except the uberwealthy. Studies show that union workers make higher wages, on average, than nonunion peers while also narrowing wage- and gender-based pay gaps.
But as Johnson came to understand, inequality isn’t solely measured in money. It isn’t only working people struggling to make ends meet while the rich get richer at our expense.
It’s just as pernicious in how bosses view workers with disdain, deny them a seat at the table, and even put their lives at risk, treating them as expendable machine parts rather than the skilled people responsible for a company’s prosperity.
Consider these examples:
• The Occupational Safety and Health Administration repeatedly cited an Ohio contractor for failing to protect its nonunion workers from falls before a teenager on a company construction site in Pittsburgh plunged three stories, sustaining a serious head injury, in September.
• Four times, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health put Amazon—founded by Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest people—on its annual list of unsafe employers because of deaths, injuries and intimidation of nonunion workers at company warehouses.
• Residents of Ascension Parish, Louisiana, grew so alarmed about reports of child and prison labor in Hyundai’s supply chain that they’re pushing for unionization of workers at a steel mill the company is building there.
Corning’s mistreatment of the worker who fell off the ladder fits right into the pattern.
As workers there battled safety issues, however, they also faced arbitrary scheduling changes, favoritism, and other indignities. Attempts to discuss these problems with management got the workers nowhere.
Amid mounting frustration, Johnson sometimes thought about the previous generations of workers who powered the nation’s manufacturing economy. No one pushed them around. They raised middle-class families, owned their own homes, bought cars, took vacations, and retired in dignity.
“What are we missing?” Johnson asked, comparing workers at Corning with those who came before them.
The answer, Johnson realized, was a union.
Corning attempted to thwart the workers’ union drive, as corporations often do when workers decide to exercise collective power. Johnson expressed surprise at “how hard they pushed back with their anti-union messaging and how much effort they put into making sure those messages were heard.”
“They put TVs in all the breakrooms and a projector up on the wall of my department within probably three days of us filing for a union election,” they said, noting the anti-union propaganda played on a loop.
But the efforts backfired.
The harder Corning fought against the union drive, the more workers knew they had chosen the right path.
“It felt like a boys’ club,” Johnson said, referring to management before workers joined the USW. “Having a union will undercut that.”
By Roxanne D. Brown
Author Bio: Roxanne D. Brown is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).
Credit Line: This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
How Western Philosophy Shaped Our Relationship With Animals
Ondine Sherman – ondinesherman.com
10-08-2026 ~ Many of today’s attitudes toward animals have deep philosophical roots. Understanding how those ideas became embedded in culture, law, and social institutions helps explain why changing how we treat animals remains so difficult.
[Author’s Note: Humans are animals too. In this article, animals is used as shorthand for nonhuman animals.]
At age seven, sitting at the dinner table with my family, I prodded my fork into a thick, squishy brown shape on my plate. My grandmother, who lived with us, had cooked her traditional Lithuanian-Jewish Litvak meal, and everyone had dug in. “What is it?” I asked. My beloved gran whispered back from across the table, “tongue.” I stuck out my tongue. “This kind?” She smiled. “Yes, darling, but from a cow, not a little girl.” It was my first moral shock. Animals are our friends, aren’t they? Certainly, my dog Bronnie was, and all the animals in the picture books and animated films I saw as a child suggested this. Do we cut out our friends’ tongues and eat them? My second moral shock came years later when I saw images of the horror of industrialized animal agriculture and factory farms. How can grown-ups allow this? What I didn’t know then was that some of the most influential thinkers in Western history had already answered these strange paradoxes. The answers to these questions, and Western society’s broad agreement, have led to the systemic violence resulting in animal cruelty we see today, which I have spent my life trying to fight.
Our toxic relationship with animals has existed for more than 2,500 years. And while it may feel like humanity has advanced and we are progressive, we have inherited an ancient school of thought that normalized animal suffering and integrated it into our social structures; it is the water we swim in today.
Around 88 billion land animals were slaughtered globally in 2024. Meanwhile, people catch trillions of fish each year. These figures show a huge surge in meat consumption since reporting systems were established in 1960. Sentient Media reported that “poultry consumption has skyrocketed over the last 60 years: between 1961 and 2022, [as] the average person went from eating 2.86 kg of chicken every year to 16.96 kg—an increase of almost 600 percent.”
Despite decades of animal protection advocacy, suffering keeps growing. Sentient (feeling) animals are subjected to what many consider torturous lives: impregnated, separated from their young, caged, mutilated, and killed daily. Their suffering is not only legal but also unremarkable, part of the systemized functioning of our industries, institutions, and daily meals. Animals are legally classified as property, and many governments do not consider them sentient or as having inherent moral value. They are objects under our control.
Scholar Lori Gruen distinguishes between two kinds of anthropocentrism, or human-centered thinking. One is inevitable, given our human vantage point. The other kind, which she terms arrogant anthropocentrism, rests on the claim that humans are superior to all other beings. It is this belief in human superiority that justifies animal exploitation and is the focus of this article. We begin by asking, where did this idea come from?
Humans have eaten animals and used them for labor for time immemorial. This was supported by several ancient influencers and thinkers, almost all of whom were European men, who sanctified their use in the Western worldview. This moral permission structure has been carved into the bones of our laws, institutions, pedagogies, and civil societies. Philosophy didn’t invent our use of animals, but it justified and normalized that use.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose work reflected views similar to those of French sociologist Émile Durkheim, believed that human life is deeply social and that we each inherit ways of thinking from the culture and society we are part of. Bourdieu said, “In each of us, in varying proportions, there is part of yesterday’s man; it is yesterday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts to little compared with the long past in the course of which we were formed and from which we result.”
Ancient Foundations
Scholars tracing the historical origins of the ideas that shaped our treatment of animals often arrive at the same starting point: the ancient Greeks. Their rationality and reasoning provided the human-animal hierarchy with its philosophical backbone.
Plato imparted his teachings to Aristotle, and their ideas accumulated into a tradition that became foundational and ingrained in every aspect of life. Plato argued that rational men possessed immortal, superior souls, while enslaved people and barbarians lacked the capacity or strength for reasoning, and animals had inferior souls driven by desire and emotions. This theory shaped the rationale behind our worldview and was used to determine the moral worth of humans and nonhumans. Today, we can recognize this hierarchical thinking as the kind of overlapping inequality examined through an intersectional lens, which Merriam-Webster describes as “the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.”
Aristotle reinforced this hierarchy. He argued for virtue ethics: Every living being has a characteristic nature and a capacity to flourish in accordance with that nature. For instance, humans have reason, and so flourishing means justice and contemplation. Based on Aristotle’s theory, rationality measures moral worth, and the world is accordingly structured in a hierarchy. Plants exist for animals, and animals exist for humans. He said, “Since nature does nothing purposeless or in vain, it is undeniably true that she has made all animals for the sake of man.” Finally, the Stoics, despite their positive legacy in promoting equality among men, primarily maintained a doctrine that elevated human fraternity while denying animals ethical consideration.
Pointing to the works of Aristotle and the Stoic doctrine of oikeiōsis, which states that “human beings share a kinship with other humans but not with other species of inferior intellectual endowments,” the journal Arhe states that in the 21st century the doctrine of “human exceptionalism” is used “to justify the wholesale slaughter worldwide of non-human animals for food, clothing, medical and entertainment purposes.”
Alongside the Greek philosophical tradition, monotheistic religions conferred divine authority on hierarchical systems. The word “dominion” in Genesis has been understood, for centuries, as a social license for humans to use animals for their benefit. Monotheistic religions also broadly denied animals a soul, placing them squarely outside the circle of moral concern. The Church Fathers cemented this into institutional doctrine. St. Augustine was one of the most influential theologians and philosophers in Christian history, and he argued that animals existed for human use. He is credited with first cementing the interpretation of dominion as part of Church doctrine through scripture. Centuries later, St. Thomas Aquinas linked Aristotle’s hierarchy directly to scripture, helping embed it in Catholic doctrine. Aquinas, however, cautioned that one must be kind to animals, not because they have inherent moral value, but because cruelty to animals makes us harsher to one another.
However, dissent existed within the religious tradition, with certain voices challenging orthodoxy. For example, in the 12th and 13th centuries, the mystic St. Francis of Assisi preached reverence for all creation and urged people to treat animals as kin rather than property. He was later named the patron saint of animals and the environment. However, sadly, Francis was an exception. Pope Pius IX, in the 19th century, reaffirmed what had been an institutional doctrine for over a millennium: We have no duties toward animals.
I first discovered the theological debate about animals many years ago when I read Richard Schwartz’s Judaism and Vegetarianism. Exploring current scholarship, I have come to understand that the meaning of the word “dominion” in Genesis, and even its translation, is hotly contested. Some theologians argue that humans’ God-given role was intended to be stewards, a duty to care for creation rather than a license to exploit it. However, historically, the dominion interpretation became ingrained in Western law, science, and culture.
On the consequences of this view, Bible Odyssey, a biblical scholarship resource, points to “the abuses that notion has seemed to lead to in the modern period.” It adds that “Human activity is a key factor in the currently galloping rate of species extinction. The factory farming of animals and fish is a major driver of environmental degradation in North America and, increasingly, around the world.” Read more
The River
The River
The map is old. A red circle marks
where, years ago, we started out.
Fresno?
Red lines for that summer. Blue for another.
A pencilled scrawl names a river,
breaking over a page. Folding one
memory into another. Worn
thin from the unfolding.
The map is old and I am old, recalling
in some drawer
in some room
somewhere—Pasadena?
dog-eared photos, cool to the touch.
There is a green pen on the desk.
—
Mike Russell is the author of a radio play, “The Lobby”, which is set in a failing academic institution in downtown Budapest in the 90’s. Will be published soon.
An Abolitionist Vision For the World We Want
Sonali Kolhatkar
10-05-2026 ~ Ahead of the midterm elections, voters need to clearly articulate a radical framework for spending our collective wealth.
A recent New York Times editorial by Tim Wu, a former antitrust adviser for the Biden administration, caught my eye for the criticism it leveled at Democrats for making affordability a central issue ahead of the midterm elections. Wu contends that the party needs to go further and focus not merely on the high price tags of necessities, but on the unfairness of the entire economic system.
While this is a refreshing shift in the right direction, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. It’s true that a majority of Americans across the political spectrum believe our economy is rigged in favor of the rich. But merely pointing out the obvious is unlikely to attract a huge shift in voting toward the Democratic Party.
Moreover, Wu says nothing about the racist rage that has defined President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s decimation of our democracy, about the devastation to communities of color, immigrants, women, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized members of our society. Nor does he acknowledge the corporate harms that Democrats failed to tackle when they were in power and are now being accelerated under Republicans: fossil fuel emissions, tech domination, and AI, harms that disproportionately impact poor people and people of color.
To Wu and most Democratic Party consultants, these issues are distinct and, depending on the cultural tides, are either worth tackling or anathema.
In fact, they are intimately linked. White supremacy feeds capitalism by distracting poor whites from billionaire-fueled inequality and climate devastation using immigrants and people of color as scapegoats. To take on an unfair economy without addressing the systematically racist impacts of policing, immigration, corporate oligarchy, and the climate crisis does us all a disservice. Moreover, there is an absence of a radical vision for tackling economic and racial justice risks to prevent repeating the same crises in the future.
Democratic Party leaders are falling deeply short by offering little more than undoing Trump’s worst excesses. It is a conservative position to seek a return to the “good old days,” when a predatory capitalist system was overseen by articulate, sensible-sounding statesmen who didn’t embarrass the nation on the global stage, who championed police and prisons as tools of safety, who echoed Trump’s rhetoric on “border security,” who preserved corporate profiteering in healthcare, who embraced endless war as long as it was their party’s doing, and so on.
The Democratic Party is essentially a modern-day conservative party, while Republicans are the extremist, fascist party.
No wonder Americans in general dislike both major parties at roughly the same rate. And while the Democrats’ chances of taking control of Congress appear to be surging ahead of the midterm elections, it is likely because the pendulum is swinging away from Republicans, rather than toward Democrats and their milquetoast agenda.
So, what can Democrats do to ensure victory?
Frankly, it is not our job as voters—or for that matter, the job of newspaper editorialists—to offer advice to political parties.
Our job as voters, especially in this moment, is to seize power in a system that has rendered us powerless and articulate our demands loudly and clearly. Politicians win our votes by acceding to our agenda. Not the other way around.
Therefore, the far more important question is, what do we, the voters, want?
If we agree that the economic system is rigged against the majority of Americans, then how do we unrig it? Is it as basic as “a promise to level out a lopsided economy,” as Wu advises, while ignoring other issues? Is it as simple as a rallying cry to “tax the rich,” as some Democratic-leaning states are doing?
If we want to end the wild pendulum swings of American politics, which are veering us further into the abyss of authoritarianism with each election, we need a complete reset on all fronts, not merely a return to a more balanced economy.
We require, I would argue, an “abolitionist mindset.” Read more