Cover Story 
 

Cover Story

BEAT ’EM, OR JOIN ’EM?

Pakistan’s youth do not lack political consciousness; what they lack is a credible mechanism for turning that consciousness into meaningful structural change.

By Fathima Sheikh | September 2026

Across South Asia, a younger generation is testing the durability of political systems built long before it came of age. Bangladesh offered the most dramatic example: student protests over government employment quotas expanded into a national uprising that, in 2024, helped bring an apparently entrenched government to an abrupt end. In India, generational dissatisfaction has followed a less revolutionary trajectory, finding expression through elections, protests and an irreverent digital political culture increasingly willing to ridicule the solemnities of traditional politics. The emergence of the satirical “Cockroach Janata Party,” and the remarkable attention it attracted online, is instructive less as a conventional political success than as evidence of something broader: younger citizens no longer believe political participation must occur exclusively through the vocabulary or institutions inherited from previous generations.

Pakistan possesses many of the same ingredients: an overwhelmingly young population, pervasive economic anxiety, digital connectivity and a generation whose relationship with authority has been transformed by social media. Yet the question is no longer simply whether Pakistan is approaching its own Gen Z movement, for it may already be experiencing one. The more consequential question is why generational discontent here has struggled to produce the political consequences witnessed elsewhere.

The answer lies partly in the peculiar architecture of the Pakistani state.

Pakistan’s constitutional order is parliamentary, yet its political history has produced overlapping centers of authority whose boundaries have rarely remained entirely distinct. Governments hold office, Parliament legislates, and elections confer formal democratic legitimacy, but consequential questions of political stability, foreign relations and national security have historically involved institutions extending beyond the civilian sphere. The result is a political arrangement whose formal structure does not always explain where influence begins and ends.

For younger Pakistanis, this creates an unusually complicated paradox. Institutions associated with the protection and continuity of the state also occupy an exceptional place within its political history. Criticism consequently enters difficult territory: where does scrutiny of institutional influence end and hostility towards institutions of national security begin? How does a democratic society debate the appropriate distribution of power when questions of political authority can so easily become entangled with questions of patriotism and security?

This is where comparisons with Bangladesh become considerably less straightforward. Bangladesh demonstrated that mass mobilization can overwhelm an authoritarian civilian government when other institutions of the state ultimately decline to preserve the political status quo at any cost. Pakistan’s institutional history is more entangled. The institutions capable of containing political upheaval are inseparable from the broader architecture through which stability and national security have historically been understood. A movement challenging the political status quo therefore encounters a peculiar dilemma: the structure it seeks to contest overlaps with the structure charged with protecting the state itself.

That is the central contradiction of Pakistan’s Gen Z moment.

It also predates the current confrontation surrounding Imran Khan. The PPP carries its history of confrontation with military government; the PML-N fashioned part of its modern identity through Nawaz Sharif’s battles over civilian authority; and PTI, once accused by opponents of benefiting from institutional favor, subsequently found itself confronting many of the same constraints its rivals had previously described. Pakistan’s political parties have alternated between challenging the prevailing configuration of power and accommodating it when circumstances proved advantageous. Governments change, alliances reverse, and political protagonists exchange positions, and yet, the underlying argument over the boundaries of civilian authority persists.
Generation Z did not invent that argument; it inherited it with a smartphone.


Political arrangements once interpreted through newspapers, television anchors and party intermediaries are now examined instantaneously by millions of people. TikTok, X, Instagram and YouTube have made younger Pakistanis participants in political narration rather than passive consumers of it. Speeches are archived, contradictions juxtaposed, restrictions circumvented and official explanations subjected to relentless public scrutiny. Authority has not necessarily become weaker, but the ability to control how authority is perceived has.

The more consequential question is why generational discontent here has struggled to produce the political consequences witnessed elsewhere. The answer lies partly in the peculiar architecture of the Pakistani state.

PTI has benefited enormously from this transformation, but reducing the phenomenon to Imran Khan would obscure its larger significance. Khan may have become its most effective political beneficiary, but he did not create the demographic or technological conditions behind it, and those conditions will survive him. May 9, 2023, exposed both the potency and the limitations of this politics. The unrest following Khan’s arrest demonstrated how rapidly digitally cultivated anger could enter physical space. Its aftermath demonstrated the opposite proposition: digital mobilization can transform perceptions of authority far more quickly than it can transform the institutions through which authority is exercised.

Pakistan therefore does not lack political consciousness among its young; it lacks an obvious mechanism for converting that consciousness into structural change. Student unions, once important incubators of political organization, have remained constrained for decades. Political parties are intensely personalized and frequently dynastic. Elections themselves are routinely accompanied by disputes over legitimacy and interference so much so that no prime minister has completed their full term, and there has never been a peaceful exchange of power between parties. Social media has filled part of the resulting political vacuum, but a digital constituency is not an institution.

There is another dimension to Pakistan’s predicament, and it may ultimately prove as consequential as protest itself: nihilism, which has resulted in the growing impulse to leave.

Political dissatisfaction elsewhere in South Asia often coexists with a powerful insistence upon ownership—the conviction, however embattled, that the country remains something its citizens can contest and remake. In Pakistan, a different psychological condition has become increasingly visible. Among graduates, professionals and even families traditionally insulated from economic precarity, conversations about the future frequently become conversations about departure. Migration is hardly new to Pakistan, but the contemporary attraction of leaving increasingly extends beyond the pursuit of higher wages.

“Student unions, once important incubators of political organization, have remained constrained for decades.”

The continuous erosion of Pakistan’s institutions and the enormous disparities of wealth sharpen this disillusionment. People experiencing poverty confront inflation and diminishing mobility; the middle classes face shrinking professional opportunity; while even sections of the elite, despite possessing the resources to insulate themselves from economic hardship, increasingly seek lives elsewhere when wealth can no longer guarantee insulation from instability, institutional pressure or an unpredictable political climate. Economic privilege may purchase comfort, but it cannot entirely purchase certainty.

This distinguishes Pakistan’s generational crisis from one concerned exclusively with who governs. It increasingly concerns whether young Pakistanis believe the country offers them sufficient political, economic and personal space to build their futures within it.

Among Pakistan’s neighbours, India provides one contrast: dissatisfaction can still alter parliamentary arithmetic, while its increasingly irreverent digital political culture—including phenomena such as the Cockroach Janata Party—reflects a generation asserting ownership over the national conversation rather than abandoning it. Bangladesh demonstrated another possibility: mass mobilization capable of precipitating political rupture. China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square protests offer a far more distant and imperfect comparison but leave one relevant principle: demographic energy and mass mobilization do not, by themselves, determine political outcomes; institutional arrangements do.

Pakistan occupies an uncomfortable territory between these examples. Its Gen Z movement may already be visible in declining deference towards authority, distrust of inherited political arrangements, resistance to information control and a growing awareness of the distance that can exist between constitutional form and political reality. Yet, Pakistan’s defining contradiction remains its own. A generation seeking greater political agency confronts a system in which questions of political authority are deeply intertwined with institutions associated with national security and state continuity. Challenging the boundaries of power consequently becomes more complicated than challenging a government. The very architecture capable of containing political upheaval is also presented as indispensable to protecting the country in which that political agency is being demanded.

Pakistan may therefore already be living through its Gen Z moment. What distinguishes it is not an absence of dissent, but the formidable structure through which dissent must travel. The danger is that prolonged frustration produces neither reform nor revolution, but exit. A generation that believes it owns its country will continue trying to change it; a generation that ceases to believe change is possible begins imagining its future somewhere else.

The question, then, is not whether Pakistan’s young people have learned to challenge authority. They have. It is whether the country’s political architecture can accommodate that challenge before too many of them decide that the future they are fighting for is easier to build elsewhere.

Read More