The Political Neutering of Pakistan's Gen Z

A generation born online, coming of age under curfews, censorship  and increasingly choosing exit over engagement.

Some books really fit the evolving dynamics of a country, and Stephen P. Cohen’s The Idea of Pakistan is one such work. Building an argument that Pakistan’s political future cannot be forecasted without reckoning with the oversized role of its security establishment, Cohen also intertwines the long shadow this system casts over civilian life. The idea in between the lines is the structural fact that military primacy coopts fragile institutions, revealing the bottom-up reason for understanding why an impatient, digitally-focused generation finds itself both energised and shut out. 

Per Pakistan’s Bureau of Statistics, the younger generation comprises more than two-thirds of the country’s population. Gen Z  is, by dint of sheer numbers, central to Pakistan’s destiny; however, in the hybrid-authoritarian regime of the South Asian state youth are considered as a minority, rather than centring the majority whose aspirations will shape the country’s immediate future. That sheer demographic weight has repeatedly collided with a political system that often treats youth-led energy as a security problem rather than a political constituency rife with possibility. 

The collision was visible in sharp relief around the fall of Imran Khan’s government and its aftermath. The no-confidence vote that removed Khan in April 2022, resulting from both internal plotting and external interference, triggered months of mass mobilisation by his supporters. Mr. Khan’s party, the PTI, primarily comprised youngsters building a strong digital narrative in recent years. Khan’s removal marked the moment many supporters realised that formal politics could be overridden by forces beyond the ballot box. The post-ousting period exemplified two mechanisms which systematically edged Gen Z out of political agency. First, the security-state’s repertoire of containment converted political mobilisation into a risky proposition for young participants. Second, and perhaps more directly felt by a generation that organises, learns and narrates its politics online, were digital clampdowns. In the wake of these demonstrations the divided nation experienced internet disruptions and blockage of some social media platforms. When platforms, messaging and livestreams are cut off, the most potent organising tools of Gen Z are disabled; when digital speech is policed, the political apprenticeship of a generation is throttled. 

The bulk of young Pakistanis see in this sequence of repression and sidelining a sense that political stakes are existential and that participation is often punished rather than rewarded. Resultantly, twin disillusionments have arisen: political disillusionment (why invest in a system that can be so easily reset from above?) and precarity (how do you invest in a future when jobs, safety and mobility are uncertain?). These are not hypothetical grievances: Pakistan’s youth face disproportionate unemployment and economic stagnation, while institutions that should mediate grievances are seen as captured or impotent. For instance, the appointment of retired military officers to senior bureaucratic positions is a rot which has been long building. 

If we read this pattern analytically, three linked dynamics explain where Gen Z stands today in Pakistan’s political diaspora. First, institutional capture: when the rules of politics are perceived to be manipulable by non-electoral actors, youth lose faith in incremental engagement. Second, digital repression: because Gen Z organises and learns online, internet shutdowns, platform blocks and surveillance inflict outsized political costs on them. Third, socio-economic squeeze: high youth unemployment and weak public services convert political frustration into migration decisions. Such forces coalesce to produce a political geography in which large numbers of young people might seem politically active, but increasingly in fragmented, or transnational ways rather than as a consolidated civic force inside Pakistan. 

It is certainly hasty to say Gen Z has vanished from politics. It reappears in fragmented forms. You will see them arranging climate marches, or digital human rights campaigns for the marginalised communities in the North-West of Pakistan. But the character of Gen Z politics has shifted and seems more volatile, less institutionally anchored, and more transnational. That raises an uncomfortable but stark reality: ‘the cohort that could modernise Pakistan’s politics is simultaneously the cohort most likely to leave it’. What does this mean for Pakistan’s near future? If the state persists with containment the centrifugal pull on youth will strengthen. If, instead, state and civilian actors invest in credible political inclusion, the demographic dividend could be reclaimed. The first path deepens the political diaspora; the second opens an avenue, however narrow, for renewed civic bargaining. The choice will determine whether Pakistan’s political diaspora is a temporary circulation of talent or the beginning of a lasting demographic and democratic rupture.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Alisdare Hickson

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