Bangladesh’s and Nepal’s massive protests in 2024 and in 2025 have been described as a new light for South Asian politics. The youth seemed to have emerged as a new crucial subject in these countries’ public affairs. Democracy seemed to have won. After decades of sleep, real politics seemed to be back. But is it really the case? In this commentary, the concept of ‘hyperpolitics’, developed by Anton Jäger in his homonymous book, is used to analyse the movements in Bangladesh and Nepal. What emerges is that the protests have had a more opaque history and that their future, along with the future of the countries, could not be as bright as it was depicted.
We are aware that our world is falling, but we are confused and powerless in front of the decline
(Jager, forthcoming)
This sentence encapsulates the thinking behind the book Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger, to be published in English by Verso Books in February 2026. In the book, Jäger provides an interesting perspective on the historical experience of Western democracies, describing how and to what extent public participation has evolved through the decades, leading to what he calls ‘hyperpolitics’, the situation we have ended up in.
Firstly, this essay will present Jäger’s arguments and his unique periodisation of the history of Western democracies, namely Mass Politics (1914-1989), Post-politics (1990-2008), Antipolitics (2008-2020) and Hyperpolitics (2020 onwards). Although the first three phases are applicable only to the Western context, it can be argued that ‘Hyperpolitics’ is a rather global category and thus has the potential to be applied to a number of contexts. That is to say, because it has a deep connection with the way people communicate and the communicative environment in which politics takes shape nowadays, it can lend itself to several situations and contexts.. Given that contemporary political communication in many parts of the world takes place via such channels as the internet or social media, we have certain similar patterns and trends , making a comparison between and across contexts possible. Secondly, the lens of Hyperpolitics will be used to look at Nepal and Bangladesh, two countries which have recently witnessed profound political turmoils and changes, fuelled through social media, and have been popularly described as ushering in the return of democracy.
OUTLINE OF THE BOOK
Jäger starts the book by dividing the democratic history of the last century of Western countries into four phases, according to the extent of public and organised participation in countries’ politics. His periodisation builds upon existing analyses of mass party democracy (such as those formulated by Otto Kirchheimer) and its subsequent erosion (drawing on the work of Peter Mair), which have variously highlighted the weakening of party-based representation, declining citizen participation, and the growing distance between political elites and the public, with Jäger offering one possible synthesis of these trends through a distinct temporal categorisation.
This periodisation has been criticised by many scholars who saw it as imprecise, failing to take into account structural differences between the left and right movements in history and risking to flatten the background of the organisations. However, even if these claims point out an important issue in Jäger’s text, they are of little relevance in the context of the endeavour this essay strives for. The present article will outline the author’s four-fold historical division only to describe the intricate processes behind the idea of Hyperpolitics, the central focus of this piece.
Mass Politics describes the time when parties’ influence was at its peak. They had a central role in both the public and private lives of individuals, giving them not only a sense of strong belonging and identity but also crucial material benefits, such as houses, food rations and jobs. In this phase, political decisions were long-term oriented and the public had a consistent and proactive role in the government’s decisions through active participation and dissent. With the spread of consumerism and globalization, we enter the Post-politics phase. Here, the social milieu of shared responsibilities and public cooperation, the cornerstone of the previous stage, started falling apart, leading to more individualised and atomised lives. This has had deep consequences for political organisations like parties and trade unions. Here, the number of members began to drop and their age began to rise. On one hand, parties lost the sense of touch with voters’ ground realities and opinions, and to compensate for this deficit, began to behave more like marketing firms, investing in PR activities and polls, essentially looking at their voters not as an electoral base but as consumers. On the other side, this phase, Jäger argues, signals a split between politics and policies. The first, understood as the ‘creation of consent’ (electoral campaigns and debates), remained in the hands of the parties, while the second, the actual decision on planning and beneficiaries, went to non-elected supranational technocratic organisations.
The 2008 financial crisis brought forth a wave of widespread disillusionment among people, marking the beginning of Antipolitics, also described as the ‘populist decade’. This phase represented the crucial step which transformed the slow and hollow years of 2000s into the accelerated ones of 2020s, injecting a new dose of politicisation, albeit without the same organised social milieu. After 2008, left parties found themselves caught between an old working class, still bound to demands for country-level social interventions and a new globalised middle class. This fracture undermined the very nature of these organisations, which ultimately became the voices of a well-educated elite, leaving the working class to vote for the competitors. But also on the right side of the political spectrum, the inclusion of these voters did not correspond to a new mass politics or social movements.
In a context where political consensus (on both right and left) was being built only on mediatic appearances and fame, new digital social spaces emerged. In the beginning, social networks were thought to be a fresh start for free and renewed political participation and articulation. However, this dream was soon broken, as social media became a grey area. Here, being part of a group, be it social, political or identitarian, assumed a more nuanced meaning compared to the past, and the modalities and practices of public participation drastically changed.
What was till then expressed together on the streets was now posted alone from the sofa Moreover, the internet, a place for free speech and debate, slowly became the splinternet, a series of highly fragmented and closed spaces, where political opinions become more and more polarised and self-referential (Aral 2020), ruling out any form of debate (Mhalla 2024). These factors, especially the exponential use of social media as political channels, led us to the current era, the era of Hyperpolitics where, along with war, politics has made a full comeback. Perhaps more than ever, people are engaging in politics, and it is permeating all aspects of people’s public and private lives. However, compared to the past, this phenomenon is more at the level of the individual than social.
After 2020, the world witnessed many protests and uprisings, but it seems that something was missing. Protests and mobilisations around issues of climate change, Black Lives Matter, Palestine, illegal immigration, and now digital identity have been the few instances that have made people, across the political spectrum, take to the streets and manifest their dissent with the choices and actions of their governments. However, the way these movements emerged, organised, and then ultimately dissolved was way different from how social movements have evolved in the past. First of all, these protests are the children of the digital era. They came to life from and through digital tools, and thus, far from representing the views and ideas of a single organisation, these are composed of many parties and individuals who mobilised around that specific issue only . This implies that the uprisings we have seen in the last few years didn’t have specific leaders or programmes either. The absence of a defined leadership, a solid base and structured programmes for actions caused these movements to face a lot of difficulties in achieving concrete results. As we know, besides making a huge digital clamour, these protests failed to accomplish their goals. Politics is back, but it encountered a deep institutional and social void.
Hyperpolitics marks the culmination of all those tendencies we encountered during Post-politics. Social fragmentation and isolation are at their peak. Technologies allow us to live social moments without experiencing them. The internet is becoming more and more a composition of opinion-based walled enclosures, and on top of that, artificial intelligence (AI) has developed to a point that many of the interactions we have online are actually with AI-enhanced algorithms(Taddeo 2024). Both religious and secular organisations are suffering from a lack of popular engagement and participation. Even family as an institution, which is the very base of social life, is struggling because more and more people are living alone (Anderson 2024), and couples are not having children (Medaris 2024). This climate of social loneliness has dire consequences on political planning and efficiency, producing the situation we have described before. Thus, the Western world, Anton Jäger writes, is not happy with the current political management but, at the same time, is apparently not capable of doing anything. But what about South Asia?
In the last two years, the region saw two major uprisings, driven by the youth who, both in Bangladesh and in Nepal, overthrew the former governments. These protests were hailed by many media outlets as ‘The awakening of the Gen Z’, ‘A win against corruption’, ‘A success for democracy’, and even a model for Western nations. However, after a deep look into the unfolding and the outcomes of the turmoil, some doubts emerge. Even if at first sight, it seems that the ‘revolutions’ in these two countries differ from the framework laid out by Jäger, it can be argued that the contexts have a different substance indeed but they share the same meanings and patterns. One one hand , the protests in Bangladesh and Nepal are more ‘political’ than the so called ‘Western movements’ (i.e. Climate change, Black Lives Matter, the genocide in Palestine) in the sense that they have a deeper concern with the current politics of those countries. Moreover, they were successful in achieving their short-term goals, which was the fall of the previous governments. However, on the other hand, the digital nature of these ‘revolutions’, their organisational background (the people’s groups behind the actions) and the absence of a clear structure or ideology make them very close to the example given by the author and, by extension, to the idea of Hyperpolitics. They made noise, but apparently they failed in proposing new and different political models for the two countries.
THE CASE OF BANGLADESH
In Bangladesh, protests erupted in June 2024 and lasted till August, causing more than 1400 victims, around 20.000 injured and 11.000 arrests. The trigger was the quota system in public jobs that benefited the children and grandchildren of the freedom fighters who fought for the independence of the country in 1971. However, this was not a new topic in Bangladesh’s recent history. In 2013 and in 2018 people manifested anger and disapproval against the same system (Mahmud 2018) and, even if in 2018 the Government effectively reduced the quotas, in 2024 it made a step back. On 4th July 2024, the government declared the 2018 change illegal, taking the system back to pre-2018 quotas. This was the spark that ignited the new protests. Actually, students were not fighting only against the quota system, but they manifested their anger directly against the government and against the Awami League (AL). In power since 2008, Sheikh Hasina and her party were accused of corruption, violence, electoral manipulation, and suppression of free speech.
The protests bore their fruit. On 21st July, the Supreme Court ruled out the new quotas (Stambaugh et. al. 2024). However, protestors didn’t stop here. With the intention to prosecute Hasina for the crimes committed during the turmoil, they keep protesting. On 5th August, Sheikh Hasina flew to India , leaving a void in the country’s government. This void was filled soon. On 8th August, after an agreement between student representatives, the military and President Mohammed Shahabuddin, an interim government was formed, guided by Mohammed Yunus, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2006. So far, so good. People won, students won, democracy won. Unfortunately, this was not exactly the case. Even though the quotas issue had been affecting Bangladeshi students for more than ten years, behind the 2024 turmoil, there was no structured or organised group. It was only during the protest that the platform Students Against Discrimination came to life, and it was only in February 2025 that it set up the National Citizen Party (NCP). However, besides opposing the old establishment, these organisations don’t seem to have any particular program, foundational ideology or recognised leader.
Muhammed Yunus himself, despite being a well regarded and respected personality at the international level, doesn’t seem to be fit for the role that was given to him. Not having any experience in the political arena, he has proven to be unable to manage the plurality of the political groups and wills at the base of the protest, a situation which is leading to uncertainties and chaos in the country. It is exactly in these elements, it can be argued, that the category of Hyperpolitics can be applied. As described by Jäger, even if politics, conceived as participation, has proven itself to be successful in Bangladesh overturning the old establishment, it fails in creating a new one which is stable enough to guide the country. This happens because of the absence of a strong socio-political entity capable of containing and then expressing people’s demands. In this sense, the National Citizen Party is the product of the protests and not their originator, and besides sharing their dislike of the old government, people inside the party don’t seem to be connected by any ideological basis.
It can be argued that the scattered nature of Bangladesh’s protest can be seen as something very close to Jäger’s description of Hyperpolitics. As pointed out by the author, the current era is dominated by the absence of solid structures which can sustain the emergence of stable political entities.
This point is further proven with the fact that the Yunus Government is encountering several difficulties in managing the many and diverse groups of the movement (Ahmed and Kapur 2025) running into heavy charges. Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused the Yunus Government of having used anti-terrorism law to suppress political opposition (Human Rights Watch 2025), coming from the members of the deposed Awami League, banning the party from the Country’s politics and arresting its members (Mollah and Saad 2025). Again, without a solid organisation or ideology, the country finds itself in a political and social chaos, exposing it to the risk of both fundamentalism (Halder 2025) and foreign influence (Sagar 2024). To have a definitive picture however, we have to wait for the next electoral round, which is expected to be in February 2026 (Agencies 2025).
THE CASE OF NEPAL
Nepal experienced similar events. In 2023, the Government introduced the Social Media Management Directive 2080 which required social media platforms to register with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, trying to regulate the services (Government of Nepal). By August 2025, no platform was enrolled with the Government, and on September 4th 2025, twenty-six social media platforms were banned in the country. This measure was the straw that broke the camel’s back. On 8th September, Nepal’s youth, after organising online, hit the streets, manifesting not only against the social media ban, but also against the political establishment accused of corruption and of having put the country in a dire socio economic situation. Since 2008, in Nepal, no government has succeeded in completing a full five year mandate, causing frequent social and political instability. Moreover, the country has had a very high youth unemployment rate, at 20.82% in 2024 (Macrotrends 2024), lacking any productive industry or sector, thus forcing young people to migrate abroad.
The public turmoil, which caused more than 70 deaths and more than 2000 injuries, led the former Prime Minister, Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, to resign on 9th September. On 12th September, in a Discord server of more than 100.000 members, Sushila Karki, a former Chief Justice at the Supreme Court, was elected interim Prime Minister (Garcia Dé Videma 2025). Nonetheless, she was voted by only 3833 people out of a 30 million population, a practice which doesn’t seem really democratic, casting doubts on the validity and legitimacy of these elections. It can be argued that it can set a quite dangerous precedent for further elections in other countries. On one hand, data about the election could not be retrieved, leaving many doubts on the voting count. On the other hand, choosing the present-day internet —more and more populated with LLMs, bots or other actors with various interests— as a platform for direct democracy, could ease the corruption and the external interference on the democratic process itself (Mercz and Üveges 2025).
Contrary to Yunus in Bangladesh, Sushila Karki has a long juridical and political experience, a fact that makes the Nepali leader more suitable for the role. She is focusing on preparing the country for the next elections. However even if the leading figure is somewhat different from Bangladesh’s, the issues lie behind her. Even though Nepali cities witness enormous participation by the youth, they are not members of any particular political organisation. Rather, they came from scattered groups, even with divergent ideologies, considering the fact that in the start there was also a pro-monarchy wing, a fact later dismissed by Sudan Gurung in an interview for Al Jazeera (You Tube).
Sudan Gurung was a central figure in the movement. He is the founder of Hami Napal, an NGO born in 2015 to assist people after a violent earthquake hit the country. Gurung and his NGO played a crucial role in Nepal’s protests, becoming the reference point for the people, being also the moderator of the Discord server Youth Against Corruption (Ray 2025), on which the interim government was elected. However, after a brief research about this organisation, it emerges that among its most important donors appear two names: Deepak Bhatta and Sulav Agrawal, two names linked with corruption charges and shady affairs (Deb 2025).
However, Hami Nepal does not represent a political organisation. It does not have a specific ideology or political foundation. This absence of solid political basis makes the organisation and the protest so vulnerable to its adversaries that the former Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli has recently organised a rally with more than 70.000 people (Sharma 2025). It can be argued that such a comeback is itself a symptom of Hyperpolitics. The absence of a stable, united, and coherent political direction behind the so-called Gen-Z movement is an unequivocal concretisation of Jäger’s words, and this void can push the people back to the same establishment they struggled to fight with. Even if it is too early to draw conclusive remarks, Nepal’s current situation seems not to differ much from the one of Bangladesh. The election has been fixed for 5th March 2026, but, as of today, there aren’t any new or young political forces which could fight the old national parties.
CONCLUSION
While we are waiting for these contexts to evolve further to make definitive remarks, we can outline a brief comparison between the two cases analysed. First, both Bangladesh and Nepal (and many other countries such as Morocco and Madagascar at the time of writing this piece ) have witnessed major protests by the youth who, in both cases, asked, at the end of the day, for a better life: secure jobs, a trustworthy government and functional services. Second, these uprisings saw an enormous participation by people across social groups and ideological positions , who became united on these occasions and overthrew the former establishments in a matter of a few days. In both contexts, social media and technology played a crucial role, a fact that should make us deeply think about the implications, both positive and negative, which are coming from the ever-growing symbiosis between these platforms and real democracy. Third, the participants of neither the protests were coordinated by a single organisation or a specific leader. While this could be a sign of unity between different groups, the lack of institutional organisation and support will also pose a major challenge in the aftermath of the revolts. During and after the turmoil, some organisations emerged, but these are — as stated by Jäger— children of a specific conjuncture, apparently without a complex program or strategy besides the protests themselves. Because of this fragmentation, the interim governments struggle to maintain control over the groups and are failing at keeping the promises made during the days of the uprisings. Further, in the case of Bangladesh, it seems that non-democratic tools are used to gain control of the situation. Moreover, the current environment of confusion and difficulty makes it easier for foreign powers to interfere with the democratic processes of the two countries, in a historical moment when Cold War-like alliances are slowly coming to the surface. Last but not least, these two major protests, which were described and praised as ‘Gen Z revolutions’, have come up with two prime ministers who are more than seventy years old. Even though in Bangladesh and Nepal the youth have demonstrated political will and strong participation, being also victims of police and institutional violence, the lack of proper political planning and belonging — as described by Jäger — has made them fail, for now, to complete the revolution process and overturn the status quo and the pre-existing power dynamics.
What to do then? Democracy requires constant effort, blending knowledge (of what is happening), participation and responsibility (towards others). It’s clear that history can not be rewound. If we try to bring back the practices of Mass Politics, it won’t be possible. Conversely, we should take inspiration from the past to build the future we want. Following Jäger’s thought, two things are missing in today’s politics: institutionalisation and socialisation. It’s evident that the former is dependent on the latter. Thus, how could we re-socialise society? While the answer is far from being obvious or easy, in this moment of confusion and uncertainty, we should focus on what we do best: being human. This means that people need to prioritise relationships and connection with others. Every change or revolution in history happened as a result of deep collaboration and planning among individuals, who were guided by the same ideas and principles. The disgregation signalled by Jäger, and proven to be present both in Bangladesh and Nepal’s revolution, is corroding the very ties which once were at the basis of social movements. Jäger himself affirms that a new wave of socialisation and organisation are the only tools we have to overcome this period of Hyperpoliotics.
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Riccardo Campana holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in South Asian languages, history, and literature from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
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