The Map of Gen Z’s Justice
- Zeudi Liew
- Oct 14
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 15
Two billion strong: a quarter of humanity, the largest generation in history. Born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, they are the first true digital natives—raised in the glare of screens, fluent in simultaneity, living in many places at once. Heterogeneous and scattered, concentrated in Asia and Africa yet increasingly global in voice, they are redrawing language, consumption, politics—and, most of all, the meaning of justice.
From the quads of Oxford to the dusty ring road of Kathmandu, the same wind is rising. It carries students and the unemployed, creators and farmhands, city kids and village youth. This generation refuses to accept justice as a luxury commodity, dispensed only when the accused is the “right” kind of culprit. They have learned that “universal” human rights are often annotated in invisible ink, and that international law is a map sketched by those who hold power—not by those who bear its consequences. The discovery hasn’t only angered them; it has focused them. Disenchanted with institutions, they have begun to draft their own atlas of the future, with one word at its center: justice.
In the Global North, the story often begins in a seminar and spills into an occupation. At Oxford, Cambridge, King’s, Sciences Po, Berlin’s Humboldt, Pisa, Milan and Bologna, tents become classrooms, banners turn into footnotes, police vans into exclamation marks. Social media—native terrain—broadcasts the lesson as it is being learned. They are tired of the “normalization” of the intolerable. The vocabulary widened by Black Lives Matter and #MeToo has taught a new grammar in which racism, patriarchy, colonialism and climate collapse are not separate themes but chapters of a single plot: systemic injustice. So when Gen Z in Europe stands with Palestine, they are not merely performing geopolitics. They are practicing moral coherence. For them, justice is not a checkbox; it is a web.
They inherit the silences of the Cold War and see, with unblinking eyes, the hypocrisies of the present: democracies that teach rights while outsourcing exploitation; governments that condemn authoritarianism abroad and fund it by other names; a Global North that keeps writing rules and narratives while the South foots the bill.
In the Global South the fuse is different but the substance is the same. The uprisings do not begin in lecture halls but on the street. The language is hunger, precarity, the light that fails and the tap that coughs air. The first chapter is economic: degrees without jobs, wages without guarantees, futures priced out of reach. Then come the absences that humiliate—schools without teachers, hospitals without medicine, dry taps, blackouts that flicker hope off and on. In Morocco, stadiums rise while hospitals decay. In Madagascar, youth rage against darkness and chronic poverty. In Nepal, protests explode against corruption, nepotism, and a government that tried to muzzle dissent by choking off social platforms. In Peru, a pension law demanded payments from young people who don’t have stable work; beneath it lay an older sediment of anger—corruption, violence, impunity. In the Philippines, amid disinformation and a long memory of repression, students and neighborhood organizers stitch dignity back into public life.
In all these places, corruption is not an abstract noun—it’s the pothole that snaps a motorbike in two, the bribe that closes a door, the dynasty that bequeaths the state like a surname. When the internet slows or platforms are blocked, the young do not hear “security”; they hear the regime’s fear of their voices. And that fear sounds the same everywhere.
Across North and South, the squares are tied by an invisible filament. Both understand that injustice is not the sum of accidents—it is an architecture. And they are saying out loud what earlier generations often whispered including that aid and international cooperation, designed to “fix” the world, can also pin it to the status quo; that the South loses more to debt, unfair trade, and tax havens than it gains in benevolence; that wealth concentrates while poverty multiplies; that new autocracies rise behind democratic curtains; that the recognition—or denial—of genocides is not a moral epiphany but a political choice. All this is not cynicism. It is clarity.
Clarity, for them, is connective. A young man in Antananarivo finds his anger rhyming with a student in Lima and a graduate in Kathmandu. And where there is no shared experience yet, they attempt to build one: an international ethic that learns from struggles—Palestine among them—and translates lessons into practice: listening, witnessing, exchange, responsibility.
The old frameworks taught the language of rights; essential, but insufficient when they skim past history, power, and the unborn. Gen Z speaks of justice as a living practice—retributive when crimes demand consequences; restorative when communities need to heal; distributive when the pie has long been cut by the same hands; transformative when the house itself is crooked and must be rebuilt. The point is not to canonize one path but to keep all four in honest conversation, with memory, history, humanity, fairness as a compass.
From this flows a simple law: every peace deal, interim cabinet, and election that evades the question How will justice be delivered? is built to fail—and to seed the next round of chronic instability.
Their common ground is digital—often Discord before the public square. A student streams from Berlin; a nurse in Lima watches between shifts; an activist in Rabat posts tips on avoiding kettling; a coder in Dhaka uploads an anti-surveillance toolkit.
The web can lie and fake; yet, it can also translate. And translation births what is rarest: solidarity with context. The more they learn, the less they accept compartmentalized lives: climate is labor, is health, is housing. is gender, is decolonization.
The borders between causes look, increasingly, like those on colonial maps—arbitrary lines someone else drew. Yes, differences persist. In parts of the North, some youth may be sleeping under the scratchy blanket of authority. In the South, movements wrestle daily with censorship, blackouts, impunity. Yet the scene repeats: slow institutions, fast youth; closed systems, open networks. When parties resemble museums, streets turn into pop-up galleries of the future.
Listen to them. They are not only angry; they are far-sighted. They say simple things that are revolutionary precisely because of their simplicity:
name the system you inhabit;
ask whether, even unwillingly, you help sustain it;
do not stop at rights on paper—ask who writes and who prints;
link the self to the structure, the I to the We;
stay curious, even when it hurts.
And when you ask them, “What do you want?”, they do not wait for a leader to answer. The chorus is ready: Justice.
This is the thread that binds them—not the courteous ribbon that sits in a frame, but a stubborn sinew that tugs at sleeves, interrupts dinners, scrambles calendars. Their map is unfinished—from Morocco to Nepal, from Madagascar to Peru, from the Philippines to Europe—but the legend is already clear: dignity at the center, power named, memory kept, futures shared. Now comes the bridge-building: a manifesto without borders for a movement already here, dispersed yet real.
And with it, the question that must guide the work: How do we forge connection where experience is not yet shared—only conscience is?
How do we turn what Palestine taught to Gen Z in the western world—witness, non-complicity, divestment—into connections where experience is not shared yet, but responsibility is?
How can we learn from the Gen Z uprise in Asia , Africa and Latin America and North Africa?
Our work is smaller and harder: to listen, to make space, to stand beside them in a change that must be also intergenerational in dismantling the walls that block the road to justice: power hoarded; responsibility evaded. Justice insists we rearrange both.
For each of us change is hard. Of course it is. But change is also an act of identity. We act as we believe ourselves to be. Rewrite the “I”—neighbor, ally, witness, co-author—and the feet will find the path that already has a name. And when governments understand that identities intersect and interdepend—when they see the I leaning into the We—they grow afraid. Because connection becomes a corridor; corridors become networks; networks become solidarity that scales. And that is when ordinary people become an extraordinary threat to the status quo.
Z.Liew
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