Youth Movements in Fragile Democracies: Framing, Repression, Adaptation and Outcomes

Two continents away, 2024 saw two youth-led (Gen-Z) uprisings in Bangladesh and Kenya. Both movements had a presence of strikingly similar conditions, such as economic frustration, repression, digital mobilization, and a growing disillusionment with fragile democratic regimes. Yet, their outcomes could not have been more different. Bangladesh saw the collapse of the 14-year reign of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, while Kenyans had to remain “satisfied” with a mere policy reversal with no significant structural change. This thesis, using a comparative case study design, explores the mechanisms behind this divergence but from the viewpoint of framing strategies. This study asks how grievances are narrated, reframed, and sustained and how they interact with state repression and coalition-building to shape protest trajectories. Using process tracing as an analytical method, this study examines both movements across five distinct stages: grievance articulation, diagnostic framing, repression, reframing, and coalition formation. This study builds on Framing Theory propagated by Snow and Benford (1988, 2000, 2014) but it enriches the theory by introducing three new analytical tools: frame elasticity (the capacity of a frame to adapt and expand), moral compression (the reduction of complex struggles into stark moral binaries), and frame saturation (the extent to which a frame permeates public discourse. These concepts become crucial to explain why Bangladesh’s movement gathered cumulative momentum but Kenya’s plateaued. The thesis argues that framing should be treated not as a static descriptor in social movement studies but as a dynamic, responsive, and sensitive causal mechanism. Doing this, this study contributes to the study of contentious politics by offering a more granular understanding of how movements evolve under pressure.