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Kindness among the ruins was the motto of a video showing a Gazan boy feeding his kitten, surrounded by a view of nothing but rubble—a reflection not only of the destruction of the Palestinian people, but also of the fractures and moral ruin of an international community that has chosen to look away in the face of genocide. A “genocide broadcast live”. This stark phrase, repeated ad nauseam to the point of becoming almost a slogan for the barbarity, has followed us for over two years, without a decisive or even commensurate response from any international actor. It would seem that the cornucopian [1][1] L. Simon, Julian (1981) The Ultimate Resource. Princeton University Press. This notion was popularised first by Paul Ehrlich and other ecollogists, to refer to that limitless faith in growth and technological innovation in face of the biophysical limits our our planet. euphoria, technological optimism and the promise of linear progress that we discussed in The Generation Without a Horizon: Demands, Narratives and Aspirations of Global Youth have not made us any more engaged or aware of the history of the present [2]:[2]https://historiadelpresente.com/ a reality that shakes us to the core and challenges our humanity. The lived history we seek to understand is one of death, of normalised war rhetoric, of the pain of otherness before passive spectators—who, in a sense, seem to remain, day after day, in their own Matrix.

And it is not as though this international community, which appears lethargic and unmoved, had not previously shown obvious signs that it was stuck in a groove. The rise of far-right parties, the fascistisation of politics and the illiberal shift across the globe, coupled with the rise of megalomaniacal leaders and figures who behave like quasi-kings, absolute and untouchable. This could not, in fact, be explained without considering the societal normalisation of the dismantling of post-World War II democratic consensuses. This scenario is increasingly embedding the logic of laissez-faire into the very fabric of society, accepting the predatory nature of late capitalism—and its intrinsic need to devour resources, places and lives through what authors such as David Harvey have termed “accumulation by dispossession” [3][3] David Harvey (2005). The “New” Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession. Buenos Aires: CLACSO.—as inevitable and unquestionable. We are witnessing this through the rise in poverty and inequality, the precariousness of work, the global structural housing crisis, the privatisation of public goods such as education and healthcare, the financialisation of the economy, mass digitalisation, and the leap into the unknown with Artificial Intelligence—driven by powerful Big Tech firms that are also part of the “smartification” of the arms industry. Added to all this is an ecological crisis, often described as “irreversible”, which has been denounced for years—and, paradoxically, overlooked—in terms of political action, social change and intergenerational responsibility. Over the past year, it has become clear that, of the nine planetary boundaries set for life on Earth to continue within safe, stable and resilient limits, seven have already been breached [4].[4] c.f. «Planetary boundaries» (Available at: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html) and «Seven of nine planetary boundaries now breached – ocean acidification joins the danger zone» (Available at: https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/seven-of-nine-planetary-boundaries-now-breached-2013-ocean-acidification-joins-the-danger-zone)

This could be the fatalistic reading with which we conclude this volume, and we would have no shortfall of reasons or grounds to reach that verdict. However, without wishing to succumb to a fit of detached or delusional optimism, this volume does justice to the horizons of possibility. With it, we sing an anthem to hope which, though somewhat off-key, refuses to abandon the potential for transformative action that young people harbour as agents of change—a status or ability as an agency that we shall, however, see challenged in this issue. That is to say, we do not wish to take for granted, nor to regard as lost, the world in which we live, especially in the wake of certain events in the history of the present that continue to pile up as the months go by.

“Wanting to Be Human, We Seek Evidence That We Are” [5][5] From Ursula K. Le Guin (2024 [1986]). The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Rara Avis Editorial, pp. 33.

In her “bag of fiction” theory, Ursula K. Le Guin, a global icon of feminist science fiction and utopian thought, sought, with a sense of urgency, “nature, the subject, the words of the other narrative, the untold story, the story of life” [6].[6] Ibidem, pp. 36. This is the very exercise we aim to explore here, looking at the multiple identities, positions and repertoires of action of the new generations, clinging to every tiny revolutionary gesture—of awareness, affection, kindness, defiance or denouncement—that keeps hope burning and prevents a single narrative of terror, collapse and catastrophe [7][7] c.f. Emmanuel Rodríguez (2025). El fin de nuestro mundo. “La lenta irrupción de la catástrofe” [The End of Our Wolrld. “The Slow Advent of Catastrophe”]. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. from ultimately engulfing everything. Embracing, as Le Guin put it, “strange realism”, starting from the recognition of a plurality of actors and processes, of the simultaneous coexistence of forces that are eminently opposed, as well as those that resonate with one another. It could be said that, in a political landscape seemingly overwhelmed by polarisation, we believe there is still room not only for conflict, but also for solidarity. This volume is therefore a call to highlight a plethora of synergistic manifestations of resistance. Forces that transcend the single narrative and challenge the senselessness of violence for the sake of violence.

“When Governments Are Silent, the People Rise Up” [8][8]https://globalsumudflotilla.org/

The Global Sumud Flotilla, an international coalition of ordinary people [9],[9] c.f. Emmanuel Rodríguez (2025). El fin de nuestro mundo. “La lenta irrupción de la catástrofe” [The End of Our Wolrld. “The Slow Advent of Catastrophe”]. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. launched in the summer of 2025, sought to break the international blockade with which Israel continues to strangle the Gaza Strip, but it achieved much more than that. The flotilla was an act of genuine defiance. This coalition, which even today openly champions active defence and the power of non-violent collective action, resistance and international solidarity, has proven to be a catalyst, capable of generating a global resonance. Before, during and after the initiative, hundreds of movements and mobilisations were catalysed around the world, calling for an end to the genocide of the Palestinian people: mass protests and demonstrations, campaigns to expose injustices, and shifts in political direction at an institutional level, amongst others.

In a concerted effort, we have also witnessed another wave of global protests across different parts of the world, said to be led by Generation Z [10].[10] c.f. ElSalto (2025). La bandera pirata de “One Piece” se convierte en icono de las protestas globales de la Generación Z (Available at: https://www.elsaltodiario.com/comic/bandera-pirata-serie-manga-anime-one-piece-simbolo-protestas-generacion-z-peru-nepal-marruecos, and Amnesty International (2025). The Gen-Z Movement: This is why we’re risking our lives to protest (Available at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2025/10/the-gen-z-movement-this-is-why-were-risking-our-lives-to-protest/) Although grouping these under the same label sometimes seems like an attempt to deny the cross-cutting nature of the structural problems against which they have rallied, young people and the specificities of their position—from Africa to Asia and Latin America—are its undisputed protagonists. The spread of discontent to the streets of Nepal, Indonesia, Peru, Morocco and Madagascar has generated a new narrative of revolution in which the Asian, African and Latin American youth, weary of authoritarianism, empty promises and global power imbalances. They are charting new horizons for action—their horizons for action—regardless of the hegemonic models of antiquated colonial centres that still believe themselves in a position to lecture others. It is intriguing, to say the least, that this very letter, which has served to fuel the apocalyptic imagination—“Apocalypse Z”, as Emmanuel Rodríguez calls it [11][11] Emmanuel Rodríguez (2025), pp. 78.—is also the letter that identifies, by mere alphabetical sequence, the various youth movements which, in a scattered and uncoordinated manner,—each in or with their own historical, geographical, economic, political and cultural context—have temporarily converged in their particular ode to revolution. It would seem that not all young people are zombified and that not everything is speculative fiction in this intergenerational exercise of (re)thinking the future of our world.

And when we speak of the multiplicity and spacetime dissemination of such actions, in which we can find liminal glimpses of a revolution that need not always take place on a grand scale or in a monumental manner, we must ground our analysis and bring our imagination down to the realm of everyday life. At a time when society is becoming increasingly fragmented, and the loss of social ties and networks has become a genuine social concern in terms of relationality and collectivity—phenomena such as unwanted loneliness, deteriorating mental health or suicide are beginning to feature on the agenda—perhaps we need to start thinking about the different scales on which the revolution must take shape and find its place. When the seams of the social fabric come undone, we must also mend them at the local, neighbourhood and community levels, recognising the power of everyday life and the potential of human connection, paying attention to the survival strategies and small transformative acts of ordinary people, the people on the street.

In this second issue of the volume, in “The Kids Are Not All Right: Why Youth Will Not Succeed in Cooling the Planet”, geographer Matthew T. Huber reflects on the potentia—power as capacity or agency [12][12] Lukes, Steven (2005 [1974]). Power: A Radical View. Ebbw Valea: Palgrave Macmillan—of youth as a movement, a political subject and an agent of change. To this end, he traces a genealogy of the contemporary environmental movement, led primarily by European youth. He does not detract from their organisation, their political alliances, their achievements, or their repertoires of action—with that global re-signification of the strike as an insurgent practice—but he does question the scope and the spatial-temporal projection of these movements from the perspective of the theory of change and the relationship between the moral, the symbolic and the material. In his critical reading and attempt to answer the question “what went wrong”, Huber offers us a Marxist analysis of the horizon of action that is unfolding before us at a critical juncture, when we need, on a large scale, not only to “change the world” […], but also to “save the planet.”

And when we consider the multiplicity and spread of actions across space and time, in What Was Lost with Jesús Santos: Portrait of a Leadership Rooted in Closeness, by journalist, writer and anti-racist activist Lucía Asué Mbomio, the scale of analysis narrows, without, however, becoming narrow-minded. In a narrative tone that shifts between ode, elegy and epitaph, the author records a living collective political memory and champions the value of the common good and the power of political mobilisation of ordinary people. Jesús Santos is both a part of and the entirety of this story. His death and the void left in the community, in local politics, and among the young people and generations he inspired, serve as the catalyst for emphasizing the potential of the so-called emotional shift, of everyday politics, and of the ordinary geographies of neighbourhood identity—that local scale defined as “an experience of life, a point of reference and a meeting place”, but also as a space for political organisation within strained urban peripheries. The neighbourhood thus emerges as a central unit of analysis: a place to nurture hope and build an intergenerational momentum capable of resisting the housing crisis, social injustice or the loss of sense of belonging.

From the insurgent proposal of a seemingly almost oxymoronic pairing, sociologist Fefa Vila Núñez, an expert in cultural and gender studies, reflects on the “politics of failure” or, in other words, the potentia of defeat, fragility, boredom and slowness—not of surrender—in contrast to the neo/post-neo/techno/liberal imperatives of success and productivity. However, this political and creative power of failure does not arise in a vacuum, but within queerness, as a movement which, despite having emerged from “the margins of success”, has reimagined the horizons of possibility through resistance to the singular narrative, to biopolitics and to the binarism of the Western sex-gender system. It is in dissent and disobedience—in the reiterated vindication of the right to be, to exist, to think and to create; the subversion of language; and the appropriation of spaces denied to abject bodies—that the author ultimately identifies that political locus of hope, with the potential to generate a “space [of the] common”: relational, intersectional and intergenerational.

In The Mobilised Youth: Present Disputes and Future Prospects, sociologist and anthropologist David Veloso reflects on the mobilisation of young people and “Generation Z” as a political entity, addressing the central questions of this volume. In clear resonance with the notion of the “politics of failure” introduced in the volume by the author Fefa Vila Núñez, the author pinpoints the fissures in the bleak, despondent, apathetic and apocalyptic narrative that often looms large over youth movements and their repertoires of action. Way beyond the age factor, his intersectional, localised, and contingent reading of this political agent also challenges, in a delayed manner, the one-dimensionality that authors such as Huber seem to attribute to youth as agents of change. For Veloso, systemic crises, disaffection and disenchantment—the aftershocks of the failure of the neoliberal capitalist model—are, in a sense, spaces of enunciation for a multifaceted political subject—with ideological shifts that place them as much within progressivism as within the far right. A subject whose capacity to exercise their rights of citizenship, transform politics and build “a liveable future” is inscribed not only in institutional spaces and social movements, but also in the overflowing energy he attributes to solidarity and care as forces of change.

Addressing one of the issues running through many of the articles in this volume, The Tenant Generation: Inequality and Class Conflict in Rentier Capitalism, the political economist, researcher and housing activist Javier Gil tackles the housing crisis from an intergenerational and class-based perspective. In this article, the author locates the gradual shift in housing from a social good and right to a financial asset and central gear in the “economic architecture of contemporary capitalism”, looking into the recent consolidation of what he terms “rentier capitalism”, as part of a historical process dating back to the late 20th century. It is in the material reality of this predatory rentier capitalism—where landlords profit by turning a deaf ear to social needs and demands regarding the right to housing and the right to live in the city—that the author also locates the emergence and transformative potential of the “renter generation” or “renters”: a young and/or young adult political subject who, starting from a position of precariousness and housing exploitation, uses a new form of trade unionism to demand the re-politicisation and de-commodification of housing, as well as equal access to it—without distinction based on age, class, nationality, race, gender, etc.

Finally, in Youth in Handcuffs: A Tale of Criminalisation in the Slums, the criminal lawyer and candidate to Argentina’s National Ombudsman’s Office, Tatiana Delgado, portrays the realities and structural paradoxes that suffocate Argentinian youth. In the “villas”, housing and economic vulnerability feed into arbitrary punitive policing that exacerbates insecurity, both through omission and abuse. This issue has a particular impact on the young population, who remain unprotected and exposed to truancy, substance abuse and the commission of petty crimes as a source of income. In the face of the extremely punitive policies espoused by the current administration, Tatiana calls for justice and the enforcement of rights—measures that can rehumanize the youth of the villas and serve as an antidote to an insecurity that, under “heavy-handed” policies, has only increased. Just as the suffering of the people. Despite the grim reality revealed by statistics, the author reminds us how true security endures within community networks—despite mistrust toward law enforcement. Furthermore, through the story of a young ex-convict-turned-poet, she asserts that hope for prosperity remains the driving force behind transformation.

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