When American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published The Clash of Civilizations, he argued that post-Cold War conflict would shift from ideology to culture, with Western, Islamic, Sinic and other blocs clashing along deep cultural fault lines. Three decades later, his map still explains much of the world’s violence: leaders in Ukraine, Gaza, Myanmar and India routinely invoke “civilizational defense,” showing how cultural identity remains a powerful political weapon.

Huntington remains relevant not because he foresaw specific crises, but because he recognized how elites use civilizational narratives to legitimize exclusion and mobilize support. Yet his framework missed a crucial overlay: the internal fractures within civilizations themselves, especially a rising generational divide.

Huntington did not anticipate that young people across very different cultural blocs would face strikingly similar economic and ecological disruptions, producing grievances rooted not in civilizational identity but in shared material insecurity. This internal rift is visible from Muslim-majority Bangladesh to Nepal’s Hindu-Buddhist politics to Western democracies, where young people confront ruling elites who benefited from systems no longer delivering for younger cohorts.

These parallel movements show that today’s conflicts are shaped as much by generational struggles within civilizations as by cultural boundaries between them. Huntington mapped the external edges; the generational fault lines running through his civilizations are the missing layer needed to understand contemporary upheaval.

How intergenerational inequality reshapes conflict

Intergenerational inequality has become a structural force driving unrest because young people across civilizations now enter adulthood under conditions fundamentally different from their elders. A harmonized study of 42 countries shows that intergenerational income inequality (IGI)  has risen sharply in most high-income states, as younger adults face widening wage and employment gaps while older cohorts benefit from asset gains and protected job markets.

At the same time, global reviews show that inequality between countries hasfallen while inequality within them has grown, creating internal hierarchies that disproportionately burden younger generations. These patterns explain why young adults from the US and the UK to Bangladesh and Kenya share a vocabulary of exclusion grounded not in culture but in material disadvantage: debt, insecure work, unaffordable housing and limited mobility.

Scholars argue that this economic gap is reshaping politics by producing distinct “historical generations” formed during periods of crisis — financial collapse, climate instability and pandemic disruption. Youth movements emerge when a generation’s ideals collide with existing institutions, generating conflict with entrenched systems rather than with elders as individuals.

A “generational us,”as described by Sociologist Cécile Van de Velde, forms when young adults recognize that broader structures favor older insiders. This aligns with theories that youth activism reflects both developmental needs for agency and the unique “generational times” in which they come of age, clarifying why generational pressures now fracture civilizations from within while extending — rather than replacing — Huntington’s framework.

How Gen Z mobilization extends Huntington’s thesis

Any claim about a “clash of generations” must reckon with history. The late 1960s and 1970s saw an unprecedented wave of youth uprisings — from Paris and Prague to Mexico City, Karachi and Berkeley — that challenged authoritarianism, colonial wars and rigid gender norms. Some historians now describe 1968 as a transnational youth revolt, linked by television, travel and a shared vocabulary of anti-imperialism and liberation. 

Those movements, however, were still largely organized through national student unions, parties and ideological currents — socialism, Maoism, anticolonial nationalism, feminism. Many tried to build new “isms” and institutions: radical parties, alternative universities and new media. Their victories and defeats helped create the world we inherited, from expanded university systems to more liberal cultural norms.

By contrast, today’s Gen Z mobilizations arise after those ideological projects have frayed. Austerity, privatization and climate breakdown have undermined faith in both old socialist and neoliberal promises.

Young people organize around more concrete and immediate demands — affordable housing, an end to police abuse, climate safety, honest elections — and less around grand blueprints for utopia. Sociologists of contemporary movements in Spain and Italy describe a “precarious generation” whose protests reflect frustration with unstable jobs and shrinking welfare states.

Digital media also changes the scale and speed of connection. When the climate movement Fridays for Future called a global strike in September 2019, an estimated 6 million people joined protests in over 150 countries, making it one of the largest coordinated youth mobilizations in history.

Gen Z is not the first protest generation. What is new is that they act as a global political generation formed in a hyper-connected, unequal and warming world where older ideological projects appear exhausted.

Gen Z uprisings across the Global South

Recent uprisings from Dhaka to Jakarta show how generational anger erupts inside very different “civilizations,” exposing shared grievances beneath local histories.

In Bangladesh, student protests over a public-sector quota system in 2024 quickly escalated into a nationwide revolt against authoritarian rule, joblessness and police violence. Weeks of marches and strikes ended with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s resignation after the military refused to sustain a harsh crackdown. UN officials and rights groups documented hundreds of killings and alleged that the true toll may exceed 1,400, underscoring the extraordinary price young Bangladeshis paid to force political change.

Nepal reveals a related dynamic through the ballot box. The 2022 election of rapper-engineer Balendra “Balen” Shah as Kathmandu’s mayor reflected young urban voters’ frustration with corruption, pollution and stagnant services. Youth campaigns such as “Enough is Enough” and the rise of the Rastriya Swatantra Party channel a broader rejection of an older political class that promised federal democracy but delivered patronage and gridlock.

Indonesia’s recent unrest similarly showed how quickly discontent spreads. Revelations about lavish parliamentary perks triggered youth-led demonstrations across 32 of 38 provinces, coordinated on TikTok and messaging apps, resulting in several deaths and more than a thousand arrests.

Kenya offers another parallel: in 2024, Gen Z-led protests against a punitive finance bill forced the government to retreat even after security forces killed and disappeared demonstrators.

The most noticeable aspect of the “Gen Z” movement is that many of these movements are deliberately decentralized, more like swarms than hierarchies. As an expat participant of the Gen Z uprising in Bangladesh 2024, I closely observed this complex pattern. It was led by a generation, not political leaders. But people from all generations and walks of life spontaneously participated.

Taken together, these cases reveal young people confronting older ruling blocs within their own societies, often against the background of civilizational rhetoric deployed by those very elites.

When youth take power: beyond identity, towards material justice

Another sign that generational politics is reshaping Huntington’s map is the way youth-driven movements are now propelling leaders with layered identities and materially redistributive platforms into office.

In New York City, Zohran Mamdani’s rise from local organizer to mayor illustrates this shift. A Ugandan-born Muslim democratic socialist, he first won a New York State Assembly seat in 2020 by defeating a long-time incumbent with a grassroots campaign focused on tenants, immigrants and working-class voters.

In 2025, he then won the Democratic primary and general election for mayor against figures like former governor Andrew Cuomo, running on policies such as rent freezes, free buses and taxing the wealthy. Coverage of his campaign notes that his core support came from younger, more diverse voters mobilized through social media and volunteer networks rather than traditional party machines.

Globally, similar patterns appear. Chile’s president Gabriel Boric moved from leading 2011 student protests against inequality to heading a left-wing coalition that promised tax reform, expanded social rights and a new constitution. In many countries, young climate activists like Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate have not sought office but have shifted public debate by insisting that older leaders confront the long-term costs of their decisions. 

The clash between two generations

Social and political scientists define “generational units” as the unfolding of major events across local and world history that were experienced by a specific group of youth in their impressionable years. Sociologists theorized that different world times shaped different generations into historical or political generations.

The 1970s youth movements were the historical response of youth in a post-colonial world. Modernity, liberalism, communism and other “-isms” showed a path in the bleak era of nuclear and modern expansionism. The youth of the 21st century becomes a political generation with a realization of the modernist fallacy — the dangerous fiction, according to sociologist Bruno Latour, that promised freedom from dependency on nature, reduction of human labour, by separating nature and culture.

Rather, the youth now face an apocalyptic future of natural disasters, social and intellectual collapse, all made by older generations. The economic, technological, political and educational promises are already shattered. They can see how porous identities are, and they respond by not clashing between the civilizations — rather merging and reshaping them, like Latour’s Hybrids. These kids outrun shooting cops in Pikachu costumes in the middle of a full-on riot. Earth now has the largest youth population in human history, and our species is evolving culturally and socially to provide the basics for them.

[Casey Herrmann edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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