Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina begins with the famous line, “all happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.

But the youth-led protests that have spread across Asia, especially South Asia, in recent years, show that there is plenty that is common to be found in unhappiness too.

In Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia and most recently Nepal, a different set of local issues sparked initial protests.  In Colombo, years of fiscal mismanagement culminated in a sovereign debt default and currency crisis that left the government unable to pay for essential imports, leading to inflation, blackouts and shortages.  In Dhaka, students protested against a quota system that reserved 56% of government jobs, including 30% for descendants of freedom fighters from the 1971 War of Independence. In Jakarta, public outrage erupted after parliamentarians awarded themselves a US$3000 per month housing allowance, 20 times the minimum wage in poorer provinces. And in Kathmandu, a ban on 26 social media platforms — essential for communicating with family members working overseas and for organising daily transactions — came just weeks after a viral online trend exposed the privileged lives of the children of political elites, drawing young people out onto the streets.

The tinder that caught fire in each country was broadly the same. All have disproportionately young populations but none has succeeded in comprehensively capturing the demographic dividend that is supposed to fuel their development.  Youth unemployment remains high, exceeding 20% in Nepal and Sri Lanka. Weak education systems and job shortages have forced many into precarious informal work, entrenching low wages and poor living standards. The structural economic transition necessary to bring large pools of labour into a competitive manufacturing sector — the recipe for economic development across East Asia — has stalled. Whatever modest progress had been made in the years before the pandemic was largely undone by COVID-19, and the recovery has been uneven at best.

The scale of political upheaval across the region reveals that young people are not the sole custodians of popular grievances against prevailing socio-economic and political conditions.

As Rojan Joshi and Jae Brieffies point out  in this week’s lead article, “Gen Z does not have a monopoly on public dissent”. But young people galvanise wider disaffected sentiment because of their vulnerability to underemployment and low socio-economic mobility, as well as the alternative internet informational ecosystems they have built in parallel to more traditional media.

Widespread dissatisfaction at an inability to generate positive economic outcomes is directed at entrenched elites seen as corrupt and ineffective. A political trigger can aggravate the simmering discontent of a youth cohort — such as the social media ban in Nepal — and prompt these underlying frustrations to boil over. When the state meets that discontent with unreasonable violence — as it did in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal — it risks rapid escalation into a broader movement for regime change as a youth movement bleeds into a much larger anti-government backlash.

Deposing of an incumbent government is, usually, just the beginning of political transformation; what’s harder is determining what comes next. Anti-regime coalitions are broad tents which unite diverse groups — with their own demands for recognition, justice and prosperity — under the umbrella of kicking out the old regime, often with little coherent unified vision for what should replace it.

As Nepalis celebrate the outcome of their most recent revolution, it is clear that the real work of political transformation is just beginning. Joshi and Brieffies observe that “optimism about the potential for socioeconomic mobility is once again rising”, but a future for Nepal, in which people’s needs are meaningfully addressed, is far from assured in the movement’s aftermath. “Switching out top leadership is no guarantee of transformative change” – and civic space is open for the taking, including for elite recapture. Conservative elements and entrenched political parties are circling the current power vacuum, well-equipped to assert themselves at the forthcoming elections in March.

Earlier this year, Kathmandu was rocked by protests organised by the conservative Hindu nationalist and monarchist Rastriya Prajatantra Party, which captured some of the widespread discontent with corruption in calls for a fundamental transformation of the state. The Hindu monarchist movement in Nepal is largely dominated by the interests of conservative elites – old ruling families, businesspeople who benefitted from close associations to the royal family and newer, ideologically untethered actors like Durga Prasai, for whom the republic’s advent had undermined preferential business arrangements. But it is in such moments of present uncertainty that opportunistic actors can turn underlying popular discontent into nostalgia for an imagined past, and conservative elements can make significant ground. This became startlingly evident when, in the wake of Nepali Prime Minister K.P. Oli’s resignation last week, the president invited Prasai as a “key stakeholder” for discussions on the formation of interim government, a move squarely rejected by Gen Z representatives.

The inability to consolidate a meaningful reform agenda following a power vacuum is not limited to Nepal. In Bangladesh, Muhammad Yunus’ interim government, appointed in August 2024 after a student-led popular movement toppled then-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, has faced criticism around election timelines that will see it continue to govern extra-constitutionally until February 2026. In Sri Lanka, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna landed a sweeping electoral victory in 2024 on a strong anti-corruption agenda, ending the political dynasty of the Rajapaksa family. Yet deep public frustration remains, as the government is accused of using high-profile anti-corruption manoeuvres against former government officials — such as the arrest of former President Ranil Wickremesinghe — as a smokescreen while neglecting more fundamental issues such as the civilian effects of austerity and post-civil war transitional justice.

Anti-corruption, as an agenda, has toppled many governments. Yet without addressing the structural conditions which hold back real economic and social transformation, subterranean discontent will continue to simmer until another trigger brings it back to the forefront.

No country has the capacity to resolve these underlying economic tensions alone. Achieving the scale of labour absorption and industrial reallocation needed to create and distribute broad-based economic opportunities requires a regional strategy founded on trade, openness and integration. Only a co-operative approach that recognises regional prosperity as a shared public good is likely to deliver lasting solutions to the region’s fundamental development dilemma.

Republished from East Asia Forum, 22 September 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.