Nepal Gen Z Protests

This week we talk about corruption, influencers, and pro-monarchy protests.

We also discuss Nepalese modern history, Gen Z, and kings.

Recommended Book: Superagency by Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato

Transcript

The Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, usually referred to as just Nepal, is a country located in the Himalayas that’s bordered to the northeast by China, and is otherwise surrounded by India, including in the east, where there’s a narrow sliver of India separating Nepal from Bhutan and Bangladesh.

So Nepal is mostly mountainous, it’s landlocked, and it’s right in between two burgeoning regional powers who are also increasingly, in many ways, global powers. Its capital is Kathmandu, and there are a little over 31 million people in the country, as of 2024—more than 80% of them Hindu, and the country’s landmass spans about 57,000 square miles or 147.5 square kilometers, which is little smaller than the US state of Illinois, and almost exactly the same size as Bangladesh.

Modern Nepal came about beginning in the mid-20th century, when the then-ruling Rana autocracy was overthrown in the wake of neighboring India’s independence movement, and a parliamentary democracy replaced it. But there was still a king, and he didn’t like sharing power with the rest of the government, so he did away with the democracy component of the government in 1960, making himself the absolute monarch and banning all political activities, which also necessitated jailing politicians.

The country was modernized during this period, in the sense of building out infrastructure and such, but it was pulled backwards in many ways, as there wasn’t much in the way of individual liberties for civilians, and everything was heavily censored by the king and his people. In 1990, a multiparty movement called the People’s Movement forced the king, this one ascended to the throne in 1972, to adopt a constitution and allow a multiparty democracy in Nepal.

One of the parties that decided to enter the local political fray, the Maoist Party, started violently trying to shift the country in another direction, replacing its parliamentary system with a people’s republic, similar to what was happening in China and the Soviet Union. This sparked a civil war that led to a whole lot of deaths, including those of the King and Crown Prince. The now-dead king’s brother stepped in, gave himself a bunch of new powers, and then tried to stomp the Maoist Party into submission.

But there was a peaceful democratic revolution in the country in 2006, at which point the Maoists put down their arms and became a normal, nonviolent political party. Nepal then became a secular state, after being a Hindu kingdom for most of their modern history, and a few years later became a federal republic. It took a little while, and there was quite a bit of tumult in the meantime, but eventually, in 2015, the Nepalese government got a new constitution that divided the country into seven provinces and made Nepal a federal democratic republic.

What I’d like to talk about today is what has happened in the past decade in Nepal, and how those happenings led to a recent, seemingly pretty successful, series of protests.

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In early 2025, from March through early June, a series of protests were held across Nepal by pro-monarchy citizens and the local pro-monarchy party, initially in response to the former King’s visit, but later to basically just show discontentment with the current government.

These protests were at least partly politically motivated, in the sense of being planned and fanned into larger conflagrations by that pro-monarchy party—not truly grassroots sort of thing—but they grew and grew, partly on the strength of opposition to the police response to earlier protests.

That same distaste carried through the year, into September of 2025, when the Nepalese government announced a ban on 26 social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Youtube, because the companies behind these platforms ostensibly failed to register under the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology’s new rules that required, among other things, they have local liaisons that the government could meet with in person, and complain to if a given network failed to remove something they didn’t like quickly enough.

The general sense about that ban is that while this failure to properly register was used as justification for shutting down these networks, which are incredibly popular in the country, the real reason the government wanted to shut them down at that moment was that a trend had emerged online in which the rich and powerful in the country, and especially their children, many of whom have become online influencers, were being criticized for their immense opulence and for bragging about their fami