The Future with No Room
From protests across Europe to Justice Minister Nordio’s remarks on juvenile detention: as young people demand a say in decisions shaping their future, politics seems increasingly preoccupied with managing their dissent.
“There are times when, unfortunately, it is necessary to put these violent minors behind bars.”
With these words, on 22 October, Italy’s Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio, commented on the arrests of minors following unrest in Milan, suggesting an expansion of juvenile detention facilities and even the possibility of placing young offenders in designated sections of adult prisons.
His response deserves closer scrutiny, particularly at a time when Europe's streets and squares are once again filling with young protesters. For while politicians debate prison capacity and tougher security measures, a far more important question risks being pushed aside: what is happening to the relationship between younger generations and the institutions that claim to represent them?
Over the past year, Future Rights has devoted considerable attention to the movements of the so-called Generation Z. From Nepal, where protests against corruption and nepotism were met with deadly repression, to Madagascar, Morocco, Peru and university campuses across Europe, we have tried to understand whether these mobilisations, emerging from profoundly different political and social realities, might amount to something more than a series of simultaneous uprisings. Whether there was a global movement taking shape. A shared political consciousness. Perhaps even a new vocabulary of justice.
This was no rhetorical exercise. Future Rights works to promote participation and empowerment, particularly among young people, in the pursuit of social and environmental justice. And we know how easy it is, even for those who claim to stand with young people, to assign them a collective identity without first listening to what makes their experiences different.
A year later, the same debate has resurfaced in Europe.
In an article published a few days ago in The Guardian, Alberto Alemanno cautions against portraying the current wave of protests as a single, pan-European youth uprising. Images travel fast. Slogans cross borders. Social media magnifies everything. But visibility is not organisation, and shared images do not necessarily make a shared movement, with common demands and political objectives. We had already begun to suspect as much last year, when we brought together the testimonies of young people from Serbia, the Philippines and Nepal, comparing their experiences and aspirations.
Today, in France, students are protesting overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages and deteriorating school buildings, while wider discontent over the cost of living grows. In Belgium, they are challenging rising university fees and demanding greater investment in education. In Greece, the struggle is to find affordable housing. In Germany, young people are mobilising against the possible reintroduction of compulsory military service. In Albania, student demonstrations intersect with broader opposition to the government. In Serbia, following the Novi Sad railway station tragedy, students have spent nearly two years demanding political accountability and an end to corruption.
These are not the same protests. To bundle them together as one great adolescent rebellion would be to erase the very injustices that brought people into the streets.
And yet, something connects them.
According to the TUI Foundation’s 2026 European Youth Study, cited by The Guardian, 52% of respondents aged 16 to 26 across seven European countries fear they will be worse off than their parents. Housing is increasingly unaffordable. Public services are under strain. Secure employment is harder to imagine. Even artificial intelligence, so enthusiastically marketed as the next great leap forward, has become another source of uncertainty about work and livelihoods.
Young people do not need an international headquarters to recognise their own anxieties in the lives of others.
But there is another thread running through these mobilisations, from Europe's streets to those we have followed across the Global South: the growing distance between those who must live with the consequences of political decisions and those who hold the power to make them.
This is where the concept of captured democracy, closely related to the idea of state capture examined by Transparency International and International IDEA, becomes relevant. It describes situations in which democratic institutions and decision-making processes retain their formal appearance while being disproportionately shaped by powerful economic interests, influential groups and narrow elites, often at the expense of the public good.
This does not mean that every democracy facing protests has necessarily been captured. It does mean asking who actually has access to power. Whose interests shape public decisions. And whether institutions remain accountable to citizens, or increasingly responsive to those who already command wealth, resources and influence.
The danger is a gradual process of political and social exclusion, one that particularly affects young people. A generation expected to adjust to a future designed elsewhere, in a world where military expenditure continues to rise while schools, public services and social policies struggle to secure the resources they need.
According to SIPRI, European military expenditure reached $864 billion in 2025, a 14% increase over the previous year. Security concerns are real, particularly in an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape. But another question remains equally legitimate: how much space are we making for the social, educational and environmental security of the generations who inhabit, and will inherit, the world we are building?
It is a question of priorities. And, above all, of responsibility.
Meanwhile, in Italy, the response to recent demonstrations has once again placed the language of repression at the centre of political debate.
Nordio argues that the new security decree protects peaceful demonstrations while targeting those responsible for violence. The distinction matters. Assaults, destruction of property and looting cannot simply be justified in the name of dissent. But neither can the actions of violent groups be allowed to eclipse the demands of thousands of demonstrators, whose grievances are once again pushed into the shadows.
In September 2024, Future Rights warned, in an article on the so-called anti-Gandhi decree, about the progressive shrinking of civic space and its implications for non-violent protest. More recently, reflecting on the legislative proposal popularly labelled anti-maranza — a derogatory term often used to stereotype marginalised, frequently migrant-background youth — we wrote:
Today, that contradiction is becoming harder to ignore.
According to Antigone, the number of people held in Italy's juvenile detention institutions rose from 381 at the end of 2022 to 550 in August 2026. Of those detained, 68.1% had not received a final conviction. With a system already under considerable strain, proposals to expand detention facilities raise fundamental questions about the educational purpose of juvenile justice and the investment needed to prevent violence in the first place.
The sociologist Johan Galtung used the term structural violence to describe injustices embedded within social, economic and institutional systems. The kind that does not necessarily make a sound. That does not smash windows or appear in television footage. Yet it can quietly, systematically deprive people of the conditions needed to live with dignity.
Recognising structural violence is not an excuse for physical violence. It is a refusal to examine only the most visible eruption of a conflict while ignoring the long history of exclusion and inequality that may have preceded it.
There is something profoundly contradictory about a politics that endlessly demands responsibility from young people while struggling to acknowledge its own. A politics that funds youth participation and leadership programmes, provided they take place within carefully designated spaces and according to carefully arranged schedules. That invites young people to speak, but becomes alarmed when their words turn into organised dissent.
Yet democracy cannot survive on consent alone. It needs disagreement, contestation and the capacity to change. Its strength cannot be measured solely by its ability to maintain public order, but also by the space it allows people to challenge decisions, question power and demand accountability.
Our task is not to romanticise a generation, nor to pretend that every protest is just, every demand legitimate or every young activist beyond criticism. It is, as we wrote last year, “to listen, to make space, to stand alongside them in a process of change that must, necessarily, be intergenerational.”
That also means recognising that young people can be wrong. That they, too, can reproduce discrimination, exclusion and hierarchies of power. That their political positions can be deeply incompatible with one another.
Participation does not automatically produce justice. But without participation, justice risks becoming a word spoken on behalf of others by those who already hold the power.
For Future Rights, supporting youth leadership therefore means creating opportunities to acquire knowledge, connecting local and global experiences, opening spaces for dialogue and, most importantly, sharing decision-making power. It also means questioning the organisations and institutions that claim to work for young people without necessarily working with them.
When we first asked whether the many Gen Z mobilisations around the world might give rise to a global movement, we knew the answer would not be simple. Perhaps there is no single, unified movement. Perhaps there does not need to be one.
But there are questions our democracies can no longer afford to ignore.
Can we really ask young people to trust institutions while continuing to narrow the spaces in which they can challenge, understand and transform them?
Because the question is not only how to educate younger generations about democracy.
It is also how to prevent the generations already in power from forgetting how to practise it.
Z.Liew
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