EDUCATION AS REVOLUTION
Education Revolution is a youth-led movement that seeks to radically transform the education system in Iraq and other low-income countries across the Arab world. Its founders are young activists and educators who first came together in 2015 to provide informal, after-school classes in critical thinking to school-age children.

When they started, one of the founders recalls:
We couldn’t rent or get a place to carry out activities, so I turned my bedroom into a classroom. We gathered the kids from the area who didn’t have access to quality schooling and taught them how to discuss, dialogue and form opinions using our own education materials.

They began promoting their activities on social media and grew to include volunteer groups across all 18 provinces in Iraq and multiple Arab countries. They learned by doing, identifying the gaps in the formal education system and developing alternative approaches:
It was like an experiment. We didn’t have any systematic research on which methods would be most effective with our students, so we learned [from experience] what worked and what could be done differently.

This learning formed the basis of Education Revolution’s advocacy and campaigning. The group calls on governments and schools to increase education funding and replace traditional rote-learning approaches. It holds coordinated nationwide demonstrations and works closely with national media to gain visibility. Through collaboration with similar movements in the region, it conducted a 22-country study aimed at better understanding the state of education in the Arab world and discussing the effectiveness and replicability of its methods.

While the group seeks and obtains permits for specific activities, it remains unregistered and is self-funded through member contributions and donations from supporters.

ART FOR PEACE
In 2014, a group of young people in Syria founded Peace Makers, an organisation aimed at building peace through art, celebrating Syrian heritage and empowering young people to play a vital role in peacebuilding. One of its most popular activities is its peacemaking tour, which regularly travels through 11 regions of the country. The tour invokes the energy and imagery of a bazaar, a traditional marketplace that is also a gathering place where social connections are forged and community is strengthened.
The Peace Makers travelling bazaar features training workshops, dialogue spaces and artistic performances. While local restrictions limit the issues that can be addressed, the group works to make it a place of non-violence where participants can relax and connect with each other. Led by 20 core members, the group now boasts a volunteer membership of 700 and has been able to continue to operate despite significant civic space restrictions. In South Sudan, Anataban (‘I’m tired’ in Arabic) uses art to mobilise young people around peace and reconciliation. The organisation started as a campaign: in 2016, a group of 20 artists produced and shared a song to express their frustration with the country’s conflict and send out a call to action to others equally frustrated and seeking change. This sparked a movement that evolved into a registered civil society organisation that now has 810 members across nine chapters in South Sudan and refugee communities in the region. In 2017 it launched the Hagana (‘It is ours’) Festival, attracting over 5,000 young people from diverse ethnic communities. Over the years the festival grew, reaching 14,000 attendees in 2019.

Anataban has used this appeal to address other critical social issues. In 2020 it launched ‘Stop Corona’, a creative campaign urging people to observe government preventative regulations against COVID-19 and offering a platform for them to make suggestions on how to curb its spread. To promote a culture of public dialogue, Anataban hosts weekly poetry open-mic sessions, building on the local tradition of spreading invocations through music and poetry.

THEATRE FOR INCLUSION
The three founders of Taiwan’s Against the Wind Theatre formed the group in 2015, when they were 18. All three had had encounters with the justice system and wanted to help other young people potentially facing a similar situation to rekindle their passion for life and learning and avoid slipping into risky behaviours.
The group uses theatre to bring young people together to co-create something they can be proud of. Through this co-creation process, young people build confidence and employable skills. Most importantly, they form a sense of belonging and purpose. A key to its success is the cultivation of a ‘Zhong er’ mentality – a reference to adolescents’ unique patterns of thought and behaviour – which they repurpose to build confidence, prompting young people to view their youth, ambition and rebellious spirit as ‘superpowers’ that can help them achieve their goals.

CINEMA FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
DAKILA: Philippine Collective for Modern Heroism was founded 18 years ago by a group of artists who wanted to address the problem of political apathy in the Philippines. During what one of its founding members describes as their ‘rock and roll years’, DAKILA functioned as a loose network. It organised music gigs, poetry readings and other public events to bring people together and spark interest in critical social topics and civic engagement. According to an activist, ‘its success was due to it being a new way of carrying out advocacy and raising awareness with young people’.
The popularity of the artists helped it gain traction, and DAKILA is now a registered member-driven organisation known for its human rights advocacy and campaigning. One of its most successful events is the human rights film festival, which started as a small travelling film festival and grew through strategic partnerships with universities, becoming the main human rights festival in the Philippines. It is held in the metro area of the capital, Manila, and includes satellite festivals in cities across the country’s regions. In the year prior to the pandemic, it reached around 80,000 people.

POPULAR CULTURE FOR ENGAGEMENT
El Milenio (The Millennium) is a Honduran youth-run media platform that provides young people with a space to discuss sociopolitical issues. Initially launched as an informal blog, it grew into a mixed-media platform that publishes opinion and news articles, hosts a podcast and coordinates social media campaigns and inperson events. El Milenio engages young people who wouldn’t normally have much interest in politics because its content is ‘digital, fun and youthful’. Its media campaigns incorporate trends popular among young people to effectively deliver their messages. ‘We make social media campaigns that are accessible and interesting for young people. We adapt our content to our audience. To go viral, we use pictures of celebrities, hop in on trends and use TikTok viral sounds’, explains the group’s director. ‘When my parents saw us posting data on youth participation in elections next to pictures of Bad Bunny and looked super confused, I knew we were sending our message the right way’. In the lead-up to presidential elections in 2021, the group created ’Emil’, a WhatsApp bot that provided fact-checked information about candidates, including their areas of work, party affiliations, professional and academic backgrounds and campaign proposals.

A LATIN AMERICAN NETWORK
AGloJoven (Global Alliance of Young Politicians) is a recently formed Latin American network of young politicians committed to increasing youth participation in politics. Its founding members met at the first Global Encounter of Young Politicians in Bogotá, Colombia, in January 2020. It first included activists from Colombia and Mexico, and then expanded to Bolivia, Guatemala and Venezuela. The formation of the network, explains one of its founders, ‘was organic. It started by sharing and understanding our common needs’.

AGloJoven functions through regional hubs in the five countries. Each has autonomy to register locally, receive funding and organise activities aligned with the shared goal to promote and defend human rights, democracy and a peacebuilding agenda. Those unable to register locally can channel funding proposals through the other offices.

THE EXPERIENCE OF DIASPORA MOVEMENTS
Cross-movement collaboration appears to be particularly common among diaspora groups. Two cases among the groups involved in this research stand out: those of Students for a Free Tibet, a global chapter-based network bringing young people together in solidarity with the Tibetan people, and the Uyghur diaspora youth group POET.
Founded in 1994, Students for a Free Tibet is known for its action camps, which provide week-long intensive training sessions in skills and strategies of nonviolent action and grassroots organising. Camps used to target current and future leaders of the movement for Tibet’s independence, but recently became open to others, and specifically ‘Hong Kongers, Uyghurs and allies that share their vision of collective liberation’. The first cross-movement action camp was held in Europe in early 2023, with a second planned for later in the year, open to climate, Indigenous and racial justice movements such as Black Lives Matter. According to the group’s campaigns director, this decision came from the recognition of the camp’s potential to support allies and the value of cross-movement collaboration:
Different movements have different strengths. For example, Uyghurs have had many successes with advocacy; people can go to them to help with advocacy at the United Nations. Other movements come to the Tibetan movement for strategic campaigning. Cross-movement alliance-building offers us the opportunities to learn from our mistakes, contribute to others’ success and work together for our collective liberation.

A member of POET also describes recent exchanges the group has had with ‘communities facing similar struggles’, including Indigenous, Palestinian and Hong Kong groups. This comes with a personal process of learning and understanding:
Growing up I always thought that only Uyghur people were oppressed. It is enlightening to see that other people have had similar experiences. We can educate one another. First Nations communities have experienced generations of trauma. They are still going through it now.

CONTROVERSIES AROUND VOLUNTEERISM
Volunteerism is controversial among youth-led groups. Many view it as essential not only to their operations but also to their organisational values and culture, as a member of El Milenio explains: We believe the credibility of the movement is enhanced by volunteering. Our organisation is very accommodating and flexible, based on the understanding that the work is voluntary. We are open with each other about how much time we can dedicate, and we don’t ask people to commit to more than they can. This is the culture of millennials. It is not a duty to participate, it is what we want to do. It is more than a duty – it is a conviction.

Others, however, are strongly against endorsing unpaid work and therefore seek to minimise their reliance on volunteers. As a member of ReFuse, a group from Lebanon, puts it,
We have very few volunteers and we do our best to not count on them because we believe everyone should be compensated for their work.

A member of Venezuela’s Voto Joven adds some practical considerations that have led the group to look for ‘alternatives to unpaid volunteering’:
Young people need their time to be economically sustainable. But not all donors understand the need to pay volunteers, even though it is essential to sustainability. Volunteer turnover is very high, and whenever someone leaves, we lose knowledge and end up having to do the same work all over again.

These two opposing views are found among informal groups and established ones alike.

In 2020, Thai youth movements sparked the largest wave of anti-government protests since the 2014 military coup. But the regime reasserted itself through persecution and fear. It harassed, arrested, prosecuted and convicted activists, while increasing restrictions on civil society work. In response, a Thai pro-democracy group established a ‘village’ where activists who have participated in anti-government protests can seek refuge. The village provides a safe space where activists can rest, regroup and strategise. Additionally, the initiative offers support to environmental activists displaced by large-scale development projects, providing a space for cross-movement connection.

BREAKING DOWN CULTURAL BARRIERS
Taiwan’s with Red & Period Museum collaborates with faith and cultural leaders to shift popular thinking about menstruation. According to widely held beliefs, people cannot enter religious temples when menstruating. This perpetuates the underlying idea that menstruation makes people ‘unclean’. At temples, people collect amulets, so the group produces and distributes amulets with ‘period positive’ messages – which are endorsed by the highly influential temples.

DECOLONISING KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS
In Thailand, a community-based network that defends land and collective rights collaborates with local scholars to collect and systematise evidence to feed into advocacy work. One of its members highlights the importance of these partnerships:
Our activities have been successful because we have access to in-depth data. When authorities or corporations try to discredit us, we can refute their claims with real time information collected by community members but reviewed and supported by academics.

In partnership with local academics, the network recently conducted a study on regenerative agriculture, in which farmers rotate different types of crops over time, and its relation to air pollution. Now it is looking to expand its academic partnerships:
We have connections with older academics who we have worked with for decades, but we want to expand to younger academics who may be able to provide a new approach to issues of land rights and collective rights.

After decades of activity in which it chose not to engage with ‘political’ movements, the network recently joined forces with other youth movements pushing for government reform. It did so prompt by its younger members, who view their organisational mission as intrinsically linked to broader political goals.

Several groups describe power imbalances within activist communities as a barrier to progress. Uquira, an unregistered, volunteer-led, intersectional feminist network advancing Afro-feminist and queer agendas in Venezuela, is among those struggling to make itself heard amongst the louder voices that dominate the activist community:
LGBTQI+ activists are mostly men. Leadership is dominated by men; they are the spokespeople, yet they don’t understand the key advocacy points. It is different when women lead.

While acknowledging that activist work is always hard, the activist emphasises that the fact that they are ‘women, part of the LGBTQI+ community and disruptive’, makes it worse.

Other feminist networks note similar struggles. An intersectional feminist organisation based in Indonesia that requested anonymity says it receives threats from both the government and conservative civil society organisations that view feminism as a western agenda.

Other power imbalances include tension between rural and urban activists, trans and cis-gender activists, groups of different generations, mainstream and disability inclusion activists, and different ideological factions of the same movement. The latter is highlighted by a Thai activist who acknowledges that ‘internal conflicts and lack of trust within the movement has contributed to our failure’.

MANAGING SUCCESS
To manage and secure funding for its growing portfolio of human rights projects, DAKILA established and registered a sister organisation. This allowed it to ensure effective management while staying an activist group that allows its members space to experiment with new ideas. Although the group recognises that maintaining two organisations is a resource-intensive solution, it credits it with allowing for the development of the systems it needed to support its growth while maintaining the creative spark of its beginnings, 18 years ago. The separation of the activist and management structures has also helped DAKILA minimise risk.

If there is no funding, we can always let go of project-based activities. We however will never let go of DAKILA as we have always believed that the community spirit that DAKILA exemplifies is what will always fuel movement building.