Platformed Citizenship Rupture: Nepal’s Generation Z Protest and the Governance Consequences of Youth Digital Activism

This article develops the concept of platformed citizenship rupture to explain moments when digitally mediated protest unsettles established relations of political legitimacy and moves toward provisional debate over leadership, representation, and governance. Using Nepal’s 2025 Generation Z protest as an illustrative case, it operationalizes this concept through the Digital Momentum–Governance Translation Model. It argues that Nepal’s youth uprising cannot be adequately understood through binaries of online/offline activism, leaderless/organized mobilization, or democratic/authoritarian politics. Rather, it reveals a transitional condition in which formal democratic institutions, coercive state response, platform architectures, anti-corruption claims, misinformation, surveillance risk, and youth political agency converge. Nepal is used as an illustrative and conceptually generative case, not as an empirical reconstruction based on the original field data. Published news accounts and institutional reports establish only the publicly documented contours of the event, while the analytical contribution is grounded in the scholarship on contentious politics, digital repression, platform governance, political agency, digital citizenship, and digital inequality. The article develops the Digital Momentum–Governance Translation Model. The model is organized around six analytical phases: moral shock, digital assembly, repressive escalation, counter-sovereign deliberation, institutional translation, and surveillance backwash to explain platformed citizenship rupture. Through this model, the article clarifies how digitally mediated protest can unsettle state legitimacy, create provisional arenas of political imagination, and expose the limits of both spontaneous mobilization and formal institutional response. Its central claim is that the democratic challenge after platformed protest is not mobilization alone but translation. The article therefore examines how digitally mediated legitimacy claims can be converted into accountable, inclusive, and rights-protecting governance without reproducing the exclusions, vulnerabilities, and institutional distrust that generated the rupture.