In an interview with the ECPS, Professor Dinesh Paudel argues that the September 2025 youth uprising in Nepal was “the result of long-brewing frustrations.” Far from a sudden outburst, he situates the revolt at the intersection of elite failure, geopolitical maneuvering, and structural economic decline. Young Nepalis, caught in what he calls a “triple disjuncture” of mass migration, precarious labor markets, and digital mobilization, transformed simmering anger into protest. Yet Professor Paudel cautions against viewing it as a revolution: “It will not fundamentally alter the political structure that produced these conditions.” Professor Paudel highlights corruption as the “governing logic of elite power” and signals volatile struggles over Nepal’s political and economic future.
Interview by Selcuk Gultasli
The September 2025 uprising in Nepal has been described by analysts as a “Gen Z revolution,” but as Professor Dinesh Paudel emphasizes, “It was already brewing. This kind of uprising and discontent had been in the making for a long time.” In an exclusive interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Paudel—Professor in the Department of Sustainable Development at Appalachian State University—offers a critical interpretation of the forces driving this moment of rupture. His central argument is clear: “The youth uprising in Nepal is the result of long-brewing frustrations.”
These frustrations, he explains, stem from a convergence of structural, political, and geopolitical factors. Domestic elites failed to adapt to generational aspirations, leaving young Nepalis alienated from politics and unable to envision themselves in the nation’s future. At the same time, external pressures intensified: “Nepal sits right where these possibilities converge, at the center of the Himalaya and at the heart of what some call a Second Cold War, especially between China and the West.” Such tensions, combined with India’s long-standing dissatisfaction with Nepal’s constitutional framework and a dependent, deindustrialized economy, created the combustible conditions for revolt. Social media then amplified negativity and spread the belief “that nothing works in Nepal and that something else must come—even though that ‘something else’ was never really thought through.”
Professor Paudel situates this eruption within what he calls a “triple disjuncture” confronting Nepal’s youth: mass migration, precarious labor markets, and the expansion of the digital public sphere. These forces, layered onto chronic inequality and unemployment, have generated new forms of political subjectivity—angry, aspirational, yet fragile. “I would not call this a youth revolution—it is not,” Professor Paudel cautions. Instead, he views it as part of a recurring cycle in Nepal’s modern history: “Every decade Nepal has seen movements—the democratic movement, the Maoist movement—and young people have always been at the center.”
At the same time, Professor Paudel underscores that symbolic battles—such as the viral backlash against “nepo-babies”—have sharpened frustrations against entrenched entitlement. These spectacles, he argues, expose the persistence of a “feudal political structure still dominant in the country.” Yet he warns that generational framings risk obscuring deeper inequalities rooted in class, caste, and land.
Ultimately, Professor Paudel interprets corruption not as an aberration but as the very “governing logic of elite power.” For him, corruption sustains both domestic hierarchies and Nepal’s insertion into a regional and global economic order defined by dependency. Without profound restructuring—particularly rebuilding a national productive base—Professor Paudel doubts the present movement will transform Nepal’s political economy.
And yet, he insists that youth frustration is real and points toward new possibilities. “What they are seeking in the future is post-elite—some kind of egalitarian economic and political system.” Whether such aspirations can overcome entrenched interests and regional constraints remains an open question—but the long-brewing discontent that exploded in September 2025 ensures that Nepal has entered a volatile new era.
