Youth movements : The rise of a generational voice

From the Arab Spring to the pro-climate movement, most of the protests during the 2010s were initiated and driven by younger generations, particularly students and young graduates. This strong generational presence raises new questions about the emergence of younger generations as “global” political actors in this decade: young people are known to have participated strongly in the cross-national diffusion of ideas and repertoires of action, both through social media and face-to-face encounters (Romanos 2016). This phenomenon has even prompted some comparisons with the ’68 movements: while the latter had marked the advent of a new generation of middle-class students defending anti-authoritarian values, the different waves of 2010 would have in common that they were carried by a new generation of students affected by neoliberal education and austerity, and driven by pro-democratic values (Della Porta 2019).

Although the participation and role of young people in these social movements is now well established (Dufour et al. 2016; Brooks 2017; Bessant/Pickard 2018; Della Porta, Cini, Guzman-Concha 2020), little is known about how this massive presence is reflected – or not – in the claims themselves: how is the generational question taken up and politicised in the protests? What are the main generational narratives, and what do they reveal about shared grievances and the construction of a generational ‘we’? Can we identify an overriding and common discourse emerging at the global level? In response to this challenge and to better understand this current form of politicization of young people, this chapter takes a comparative and generational approach to the claims of post-2011 youth movements.

We rely on a large-scale analysis of slogans and signs (n=1914) directly Collected in different types of youth movements of the last decade pro-education, anti-austerity, pro-democracy and pro-environment – that have taken place on multiple continents, and carried by various profiles of youth: ‘Los Indignados’ in Madrid (2011), the student movement in Santiago de Chile (2011), the ‘Printemps Érable’ in Montréal (2012), the ‘Umbrella Revolution’ in Hong Kong (2014), the ‘Nuit Debout’ movement in Paris (2016), the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong (2019) and the “Friday for Future” movement in Montréal (2019). Drawing on the comparative analysis of these movements, this chapter will show the rise of a common discourse of intergenerational injustice at the global level, with an 165 increasingly radical critique of a legacy – be it economic, social, political, or environmental – considered too heavy for “future generations”.