Introduction
The team at YouthXYouth has been exploring the power and sacredness of youth movements as a unique form of resistance. By distilling what young people have learned through practice, they offer us the gift of insights shaped by their brave and transformative work. Their reflections highlight the unifying elements that sustain youth-led collective power over time.
We are living in times that will demand courage. When people ask me how do I draw hope, how do I stay encouraged, how do I continue to show up? The answer is that I look back. I look back and I look at how my existence here today is owed entirely to the courage of people who came before me. And so, what do I owe myself in that moment and to those who come after me? To exercise courage in this moment. – Bree Newsome Bass
Authority – The Power of Inheritance
The legitimacy with which youth movements speak makes power undeniably uncomfortable. The way they often articulate themselves is grounded in survival rather than what we are used to seeing, which is self-interest. For example, there is no adequate rebuttal when a young person says “you are destroying my future”.
Young people didn’t create these systems, but they will live or die inside them. When youth speak, they speak as inheritors. And inheritance gives you standing. It gives you the right to inventory what you’ve been handed and to demand what was promised but never delivered.
This disrupts traditional power dynamics entirely. Adults are used to being the authorities, the ones who know better, who have experience, and who understand “how things work.” But youth movements flip the script by saying “you made this world”, now explain it to us. Justify it. Defend why we should accept it.
When Greta Thunberg said “How dare you” at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit, she exercised the authority of inheritance to invert established power relations. The youth climate movement operates from this position, and from the standing of being designated inhabitants of an increasingly unhabitable future.
The movement’s power lies precisely in its refusal to legitimise the terms of discussion itself in the face of a crisis that makes our current frameworks of response obsolete.
Temporal Agency – The Long Arc
Youth movements operate with future-oriented power.
They act with a long-term view, asserting responsibility for the wellbeing of future generations. This is transformative because our current systems are built on entirely limited temporal conditions. Youth movements recognise delays as harm. And every day of delay is measured in lives, species, and in possibilities foreclosed.
Instead, youth movements redefine time as something that can be shaped, contested, and reclaimed, rejecting narratives that present the future as predetermined or inevitable. This positioning empowers youth to rewrite the terms of progress and reorient our priorities.
They challenge systems that prioritise short-term gains over collective long-term “survival”. They expose the false binaries designed to make the status quo seem inevitable. This fundamentally creates space for imagination. It allows young people to say the world doesn’t have to be this way because it wasn’t always this way and it won’t always be this way.
When tens of thousands of students occupied Bangkok’s streets, they challenged institutions claiming timeless authority by exposing them as recent constructions serving current power. The movement asserted that Thailand’s seventy years of coup cycles weren’t inevitable but produced through specific violence that could be refused and reimagined.
Ontological Resistance – Being “Otherwise”
Youth movements challenge fundamental assumptions about what is real, what is possible, what it means to be human in relation to each other and the more-than-human world.
To us ontological resistance means challenging the very categories that structure our world:
- Rejecting the human/nature binary and recognising our interdependence with all life
- Refusing the individual/collective split and practising embodied collectivity
- Dismantling the sacred/political divide and bringing spiritual practice into social struggle (we are made whole by our humanness not in spite of it!)
- Questioning all imposed binaries: gender, sexuality, ability, the line between alive and thriving
Young people practise embodied transformation. They carry the future in their bodies, literally. They will live in the world that is being built right now. They feel it viscerally, in their anxiety, in their rage, and naturally in their exhaustion.
Youth movements are effective because they intervene at the root of societal meaning-making and institutional legitimacy (or lack thereof). They are sacred because they reorient humanity towards our most human obligations, challenging us to reconsider what kind of world will be inherited and who gets to decide. They are strategic because they operate in spheres of culture, morality, time, and imagination where traditional power cannot easily respond.
Curated List from the YXY team
Want to explore this more deeply? Here is a curated list of recommended resources from the YxY team.
- Movement Memos – hosted by Kelly Hayes (Kelly Hayes connects with activists, journalists and others on the front lines to break down what’s happening in various struggles and what listeners can do to help.)
- Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change – by Eve Tuck, Ph.D. and K. Wayne Yang, Ph.D (Academic anthology on youth activism)
- Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds – by adrienne maree brown (On transformation and collective organising)
- How to survive the end of the world – hosted by Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown (Podcast that delves into the practices we need as a community, to move through endings and to come out whole on the other side, whatever that might be)
Explore Further
- YouthxYouth – A global community focused on transformative education
- Youth-led movements: Commons Library resources
- Tomorrow Movement: Young People Applying the Momentum Organising Framework in Australia
- Supporting Young People’s Activism in the Climate Emergency
- Why North-South Intersectionality Matters in Climate Justice: Perspectives of South Asian Australian Youth Climate Activists
- Social Justice Resources for Teachers: Topic Guide
- The Power to be a Changemaker: Resources for Teachers and Students