Generation Z, Hybrid Regimes, and the Limits of Electoral Democracy in South Asia: Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

This paper examines why youth-led mobilisation produced governmental turnover in Bangladesh in 2024 and Nepal in 2025, while comparable youth anger in Pakistan has remained contained. The argument is that the Generation Z protest did not succeed or fail because young citizens were more courageous in one country than another. It succeeded where regime coercion fractured and where protest acquired enough cross-class legitimacy to make repression politically costly. It stalled where the coercive apparatus remained cohesive and where digital and physical repression prevented mobilisation from acquiring national organisational depth. The study uses a structured, focused comparison of three South Asian cases and draws on two theoretical traditions: hybrid regime theory and civil resistance theory. Hybrid regime theory explains the gap between electoral procedure and liberal democratic substance; civil resistance theory explains why mass participation alone is insufficient without elite defection, nonviolent discipline, and organisational durability. Digital censorship is treated not as a separate theory but as a mechanism that shapes the timing, scale, and coordination of resistance. The paper finds that Bangladesh and Nepal demonstrate the power of student-centred mobilisation to reopen political space, but their post-uprising trajectories also show the limits of street politics. Pakistan, by contrast, reveals the ceiling imposed by a military-centred hybrid regime in which the security establishment is not merely a defender of the regime but one of its constitutive pillars. The paper contributes to comparative debates on democratic erosion, youth politics, and civil-military relations in South Asia.