The government of Nepal has become the third South Asian government to collapse amid mass protests in three years. It will take more than elections to restore stability. Young protesters want to see real change.
September 2025
On September 8, large-scale demonstrations began in Kathmandu and spread across Nepal after the government banned major social-media platforms. Young Nepalis identifying themselves as “Gen Z” took to the streets to protest the ban and voice their grievances against the country’s corrupt ruling class, underwhelming economic growth and enduring poverty, and a government whose leadership has cycled between three politicians in the last decade. When protesters began entering the parliament building, security forces opened fire with live ammunition, killing a number of young protesters and injuring far more. As protests spread amid mass outrage, Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli and his government resigned.
The next day, September 9, the violence spiraled, as a murky array of protesters, opportunists, criminals, and others burned buildings, looted shops, and targeted politicians. Chaos spread in a security vacuum until the Nepali army stepped in to restore order. In all, more than seventy people lost their lives. On September 12, after several days of negotiation, former Chief Justice Sushila Karki was named interim prime minister, the lower house of Parliament was dissolved, and elections were scheduled for March 2026.
The fall of Oli’s government marks the third time since 2022 that mass protests have toppled a South Asian regime. In Bangladesh in 2024, Sheikh Hasina fled into exile as her government collapsed amid mass protests against job discrimination and corruption. And in Sri Lanka in 2022, the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government was forced out by a sustained protest movement fueled by a mix of economic crisis and political miscalculation.
While there are important differences across the three cases, all marked the fall of an entrenched political elite that had been governing for an extended period. In Nepal, three main political parties have traded power among themselves for the last decade, sometimes joining in coalitions and sometimes feuding. In Bangladesh, Hasina had ruled since 2009, increasingly personalizing both her party and the state itself. And in Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksa family had led the country for most of the period between 2005 and 2022, enriching itself and its patronage networks but badly fumbling its management of the economy.
Mass protests are certainly not uncommon in South Asia. Nevertheless, the speed and success of the movements in these three countries is striking. Interstate crises — most notably, the Four Days’ Crisis between India and Pakistan in May 2025 — and insurgencies remain potent sources of instability, but mass citizen protests have driven the region’s most dramatic political changes in recent years.
What can we glean from South Asia’s new politics of instability, about the region and the Global South more broadly?
Four Key Lessons
First, organizationally amorphous, decentralized movements have proven to be remarkably potent tools against political establishments that lack legitimacy and whose governing institutions and ruling political parties have been hollowed out by patronage and personalism. In Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, worsening economies fueled widespread anger, which these governments — with weak political parties and declining popular legitimacy — were poorly positioned to handle.
Nepal’s government evaporated in just days, while the governments in Bangladesh, which saw extensive violence, and Sri Lanka fell in a matter of months. These are not isolated cases, though their success is unusual. Beginning in late August, thousands of Indonesians poured into the streets to protest unemployment, low wages, and a pay raise for parliamentarians, and in July Kenya experienced its own “Gen Z” protests. Indeed, seemingly stable governments, and even entire political systems, can crumble with surprising speed and thoroughness.
Second, elections alone — even those that are largely free and fair, as in Sri Lanka and Nepal (though much less so in Bangladesh) — cannot defuse dramatic upsurges of discontent. Elections are necessary but not sufficient to reform a political system, though there is little clarity or consensus on what is needed in addition to voting. Despite deep dissatisfaction with the inability of elected governments to meaningfully deliver growth or services, democracy of some sort remains the desired outcome for each of these protest movements. Although in many South Asian countries militaries have either remained or returned as key political players, few protesters idealize or wish for long-term military rule. Nor have protesters sought to forge a Chinese-style Leninist party-state, even if they appreciate China’s record of economic development. The Chinese political system simply finds few takers in South Asia.
Electoral democracy thus remains central to imagining political change. In Sri Lanka, a new civilian leader was put in place by parliamentary ballot in 2022, and in 2024 citizens voted in a new president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake of the National People’s Power alliance, whose election represented a rejection of the old order. Voters in Nepal and Bangladesh will go to the polls in 2026.
While new leaders are important, protest movements also demand reforms for the future and accountability for the past. Yet it is not always obvious what form the new democratic order should take. In Bangladesh, Chief Adviser Muhammed Yunus, who was appointed the country’s transitional leader after Hasina’s ouster, has been trying to achieve consensus for rebuilding the political system. But ongoing violence, political instability, and factional conflict have badly stalled movement toward major reforms. In Nepal, the protesters’ general commitment to democracy is matched by a lack of clarity about exactly what comes next. The solutions to the country’s problems are either extremely challenging or far from obvious, and the decentralized protest movement, without an especially developed governance platform, may not be well equipped to take on the job of rebuilding the political system. The damage to state institutions will make this challenge even greater.
Third, alongside protests and electoral politics, militaries have shown that they are crucially important political players. In Nepal and Bangladesh, the army became a key decisionmaker as ruling civilians increasingly lost credibility and power in the face of growing protests. It was police and internal security forces who carried out the governments’ anti-protest crackdowns, and they have been implicated in human-rights abuses. This has left the military as one of the few institutions considered to be above the fray. When the civilian governments crumbled, both militaries were deeply involved in negotiating the transition.
While understandable attention has been focused on the threats to democracy posed by elected politicians, today the military directly rules Myanmar, de facto rules Pakistan, and has unambiguous political influence in both Nepal and Bangladesh. Sri Lanka and India stand as exceptions to this pattern. This is part of a resurgence of military politics in large swathes of the world — from the centrality of armies in shaping the fates of regimes and protest movements during the Arab Spring in the 2010s to the spate of African coups in the 2020s.
The most likely danger is not that Nepal or Bangladesh will experience military dictatorships, but that once militaries become a crucial force in political life, it will be difficult to get them fully back into the barracks. Civilians, whether on the streets or among the political elite, may seek the army’s backing in their battles for power, while the militaries could see themselves as the only force able to manage and mediate political crises. Analysts and policymakers will need to closely follow how these militaries position themselves during and after elections.
Fourth, all three cases show how quickly internal political changes can unsettle international politics. Just a few days before he was forced to resign, Oli had traveled to China for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, seemingly seeking to tilt Nepal toward Beijing. Now that whole agenda has ground to a halt, with deep uncertainty about what the future role of outside players (most importantly, India) should and will be. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina had struck a delicate but apparently stable “balancing act” between India and China. With her flight to India and deep suspicion of that country among many Bangladeshis, this approach is now over: Bangladesh has sought new ties with Pakistan, reached out to both China and the West, and shown wariness toward India, alleging that Hasina and her Awami League are using it as a base to subvert the new order.
Even in the less dramatic case of Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksas’ longstanding (though not uncomplicated) ties with China have been replaced with a truly nonaligned foreign policy in which Dissanayake is seeking to maintain good relations with as many countries as possible to help Sri Lanka emerge from its economic crisis. The domestic politics of Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka have clearly led to important shifts in foreign relations and created new uncertainties at the international level, forcing major powers such as China and India — which, despite their considerable influence, are often unable to control their neighbors’ domestic politics — to respond to the internal developments of these regional “swing” states.
The future of Nepal is unclear. It is very possible that new elections will not directly address protesters’ grievances: Old parties may still perform well, corruption is likely to endure, and the weaknesses of state institutions cannot be easily fixed. Temptations to appeal to the military or quickly revert to street protests may be hard to resist. Instead of taking these routes, those demanding reform will be best served by identifying a small number of crucial but politically plausible priorities and making them central to their appeals in the coming elections. Quickly reestablishing basic state functions and then moving toward elections fought over core political questions has the best chance of laying the foundation for enduring changes in Nepal.
Paul Staniland is professor of political science at the University of Chicago, nonresident scholar in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and nonresident senior fellow for Asia Studies at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He is the author of Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (2014) and Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation (2021).
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Sunil Pradhan/Anadolu via Getty Images
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