The literature on contestatory transnational youth protests indicates that these movements often borrow slogans, tactics, symbols, and strategies from abroad, while usually recontextualising rather than simply replicating them. These youth and Gen Z movements include, non-exhaustively, Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya (2022), the Bangladesh student movement (2024), Kenya’s anti-Finance Bill protests (2024), Nepal’s Gen Z protests (2025), Indonesia’s Gelap (2025), and Morocco’s Gen Z 212 movement (2025).
Taken together, these mobilisations raise important questions about how protest repertoires travel across national borders, how movements learn from and identify with struggles elsewhere, and how transnationally circulating practices are transformed when they encounter distinct political, social, and historical contexts. Against this background, this call invites proposals engaging with the following three thematic strands, while also welcoming contributions that go beyond them:
1. Transnational Diffusion and Local Adaptation
This thematic strand explores the mechanisms through which youth and Gen Z activists encounter and transform protest repertoires originating elsewhere. Contributions may also examine how identities can facilitate or complicate forms of transnational identification and solidarity among movements in different national and regional contexts.
2. Digital Mediation
This thematic strand looks at the role of digital media and social networks, examining how different platforms (e.g. TikTok, Instagram, X) help protest repertoires circulate across borders.
3. Rejection, Backlash and Limits of Transnational Diffusion
Diffusion can also fail, be blocked, or be actively countered. This thematic strand explores the counterstrategies enacted by states or other actors, the reasons for such failures, and the ways movements respond to or seek to overcome these obstacles. Contributions might also examine instances in which transnational connections themselves become a source of backlash or delegitimisation.
We particularly welcome contributions examining connections, exchanges, mutual learning, and solidarities between movements across national borders and regions, and investigating what travels between contexts and what remains context-specific despite wider transnational dynamics. We welcome proposals from academics, practitioners, and activists, as well as contributions emerging from collaborations between them. We particularly encourage work grounded in innovative methodologies and/or original field data capable of capturing the transnational circulation, adaptation, and contestation of youth and Gen Z protest repertoires.