Technology

The black pirate flag was the first thing I noticed.

Although I had seen the Jolly Roger image of a skull and crossbones before, this one was distinct: a grinning cartoon skull wearing a straw hat — the flag of a fictional gang of pirates fighting oppression and corruption in the Japanese anime series “One Piece.”

When it first started appearing in early 2025 on the TikTok and Instagram feeds of young people taking to the streets during protests in Indonesia, I paid it little heed. That was until my 13-year-old daughter pointed out that the “Straw Hat Jolly Roger” had started circulating on social media in reference to my home country of Nepal.

The One Piece pirate flag — now heralded globally as a symbol of youth resistance — first started showing up in Nepal in early September 2025. Within days it had caught digital fire, culminating in a youth-led uprising that would topple Nepal’s government, leave the country’s political class reeling, and stun the nation’s mainstream media over its failure to understand power, shape narrative, and comprehend the ways in which a new generation was mobilizing.

As a journalist who has covered Nepal and the region for over two decades, I’m still processing those historic few days in September. What I find most unsettling is the fact that my teenage children — who insist they don’t follow any mainstream news — saw it coming long before I did.

The dramatic turn of events in Nepal, and the manner in which they unfolded, have since become a template of sorts for protests in many countries, led by a generation that insists on defining its own narratives, employing digital tools, and spreading its message through internet memes, Instagram Reels, and posts on video gaming platforms like Discord. Since the Nepal uprising there have been similar protests in Madagascar, Morocco, Peru, Bulgaria, and beyond, where governments have been swiftly overthrown or leaders have been put on notice by a groundswell that starts on social media. Many participants in these movements, especially in Nepal, identify as members of Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012 and currently between 13 and 28 years old.

These spontaneous, youth-led, social media-driven uprisings across several countries appear to be less anchored in a shared global ideology, according to experts, but instead in a common grievance: the sense of a broken social contract.

“The level of conflict in these societies comes from that big chasm between a rapidly changing society and political systems that don’t keep up,” said Aboubakr Jamaï, a Moroccan journalist (and 2007-08 Nieman Fellow) who has studied protests from the February 20 Movement in Morocco during the Arab Spring uprisings, to the more recent Gen Z-led protests around the world.

In many of these countries, corruption — often manifested in failing government services — emerges as a core grievance that’s central to young people’s sense of frustration. A report by Bloomberg Economics — which used a machine-learning model to analyze 22 million data points related to youth-led global protests — has come to a similar conclusion: Rising inequality, unemployment, and corruption are strong predictors of youth-led unrest. The same analysis highlights several global hot spots that are at heightened risk of upheaval in the near future, including Angola, Guatemala, the Republic of Congo, and Malaysia.

“This generation does not benefit from what their grandparents, and to some extent their parents, received,” Jamaï said. “They feel short-changed.”