In August 2024, Sheikh Hasina – Bangladesh’s longest-serving prime minister – was forced to resign and flee after weeks of swelling student protests. Just over a year later, on September 9, 2025, Nepal’s K.P. Sharma Oli was driven from office by a similar wave of demonstrations in Kathmandu, fueled by anger over corruption, economic decline, and heavy-handed crackdowns. These were not slow defeats at the ballot box or routine parliamentary votes of no confidence. They were sudden, street-driven ousters of sitting leaders.
Which begs the question: Why do protests in Dhaka and Kathmandu topple governments, while equally massive demonstrations in Paris, Delhi, or Washington never go that far? And why are such uprisings almost unthinkable in Beijing, Moscow, Riyadh, or Pyongyang?
The answer lies not in the anger of the crowd, but in the strength of the state’s political institutions. More than half a century ago, Samuel Huntington, in his classic “Political Order in Changing Societies,” argued that instability arises when popular mobilization outpaces political institutionalization. When citizens gain the ability and desire to participate in politics but institutions are too weak to channel their demands, the result is disorder.
That is exactly what we saw playing out in Bangladesh and Nepal. Elections exist, but they are mistrusted. Courts and parliaments function, but they are politicized and lack independence. These institutions provide neither a credible outlet for grievances nor the coercive muscle to keep protests in check.
In Nepal, the context was especially combustible. Since the end of the Maoist civil war in 2006, the country’s democratic experiment has struggled to deliver stability or prosperity. Economic growth averaged just 4 percent annually between 2008 and 2022, well below the South Asian average of over 6 percent, despite Nepal’s low base. Structural weaknesses – poor infrastructure, dependence on remittances (equating to nearly 30 percent of GDP), and a stagnant industrial base – have kept opportunity scarce. Outmigration has become a defining feature: more than 4 million Nepalis, about 13 percent of the population, now work abroad. For those left behind, especially in rural districts that once powered the Maoist insurgency, youth unemployment hovers above 30 percent.
Political instability compounded these economic woes. No elected government has completed a full term since the monarchy’s abolition in 2008. Coalition collapses, reshuffles, and infighting have left citizens with little faith in their parties or parliament.
The eruption earlier this week showed how quickly frustration could boil over in such a fragile context. Protests that began over corruption and the government’s ham-fisted attempt to ban 26 social media platforms spiraled into Nepal’s worst unrest in decades. Thirty people were killed and more than a thousand injured as demonstrators torched parliament, government offices, and the homes of senior politicians. Even the Supreme Court suspended its hearings indefinitely after its building was set ablaze. The army was deployed to Kathmandu, enforcing curfews and manning checkpoints as smoke still rose from the ruins.
Yet the protests were also strikingly generational. Nepal’s “Gen Z” activists, who had spearheaded the mobilization online, distanced themselves from the arson and looting, claiming their movement had been hijacked by opportunists and infiltrators. Many of them, some as young as 14, framed their struggle as one of accountability and integrity, rejecting a political class mired in corruption and nepotism. Young demonstrators cleaned the streets after the violence, insisting the revolution should remain peaceful.
Still, the sheer scale of destruction underscored how combustible the mix of economic malaise, broken institutions, and rising expectations had become. When Oli resigned just days ago, there was no clear successor, only a power vacuum and the demand from protesters that future leadership be independent, competent, and untainted by party patronage.
Bangladesh followed a similar trajectory. Young protesters mobilized against corruption and repression, but in an environment where courts and electoral institutions lacked legitimacy, their demands could not be mediated within the system. Instead, repression radicalized the movement, and Hasina, once thought untouchable, was eventually forced from office. In both countries, leaders fell because institutions were too weak to absorb the energy of the streets.
Contrast this with India. Its streets are rarely quiet: the anti-corruption movement of 2011, the farmers’ protests of 2020-21, and countless regional agitations have brought millions out in defiance. But they have not toppled governments. The difference is institutional ballast.
India’s fiercely competitive elections, relatively autonomous judiciary, and entrenched civil society have historically acted as shock absorbers. Protesters could believe their grievances would find an outlet through votes, court cases, or policy changes. Politicians knew that brute repression risked electoral punishment and reputational costs.
But here, too, cracks are showing. If citizens cease to believe in the independence of courts or the fairness of elections, India could drift into the very middle ground where protests become combustible.
France provides another instructive contrast. Paris seems perpetually on strike or in the streets – against pension reforms, austerity, or inequality. Demonstrations are disruptive, sometimes chaotic, but they rarely threaten the survival of the Fifth Republic. The institutions of French democracy, however battered, remain legitimate enough to ensure that no one is storming the Bastille anymore.
At the other extreme, entrenched autocracies endure precisely because mobilization is suffocated at birth. In China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, or North Korea, grievances abound, but dense surveillance, media control, and overwhelming repression make protest prohibitively costly. When it does erupt, authoritarian regimes show little hesitation in extinguishing it with force. Tiananmen Square in 1989 remains the starkest example: hundreds of thousands gathered, but tanks and guns ended the movement in bloodshed. More recently, Russia’s crackdowns on anti-war protests revealed the same dynamic. Strongman regimes may lack legitimacy, but they compensate with the ability to impose fear and silence.
Seen in comparative perspective, the pattern resembles a hump. At one end, autocracies suppress protest. At the other, democracies absorb it. But in the middle – where institutions are too weak to mediate yet too open to fully suppress – protests are combustible and regime-toppling. This is the danger zone where Bangladesh last year, and Nepal this month, found themselves. Elections were real but distrusted, civil society was active but fragmented, and leaders relied more on force than legitimacy. The streets became the ultimate arbiter of political power.
It is tempting for established democracies to see this as a problem for fragile states only. But the United States, India, and others are not immune to drifting into this middle ground if institutional credibility erodes. When Donald Trump insisted the 2020 election was stolen, he was undermining the very belief that elections can resolve political conflict. The storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 was one warning. The assassination of far-right commentator Charlie Kirk on September 10 of this year was another – evidence of how dangerously polarized American politics has become, and how quickly violence can move from the margins to the center when trust in institutions collapses.
India, too, faces its warning lights. Allegations of “vote chori” directed at the Election Commission, alongside the judiciary’s declining credibility after cases like Umar Khalid’s and the Ram Mandir verdict, have chipped away at once-strong institutions. If citizens no longer see elections or courts as legitimate arenas of contestation, protests will become sharper, angrier, and harder to contain.
Scholars of hybrid regimes have long warned that governments which are neither fully authoritarian nor fully democratic face the highest risks of instability. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s work on “competitive authoritarianism” showed how fragile such systems are. Andreas Schedler traced how manipulated elections invite crisis, while Larry Diamond highlighted the brittleness of “pseudo-democracies.” Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow demonstrated how contentious politics depends on the interaction of protest repertoires and state responses. Research on repression by Christian Davenport and Erica Chenoweth has shown that inconsistent or excessive coercion often fuels escalation instead of quelling it.
Bangladesh and Nepal show these insights playing out in real time. Mobilization surged. Institutions faltered. Protest cascaded. Leaders fell.
We live in an age of protest. From Berlin’s climate activists to Delhi’s farmers, from Parisian pensioners to American students, mobilization is rising. Digital networks accelerate it, economic frustrations deepen it, and youthful populations amplify it. The question is not whether protests will continue, but whether institutions will be strong enough to channel them peacefully.
The world’s democracies still hold an advantage: they have systems that can absorb and redirect anger. But if those systems lose credibility – if elections are widely doubted, if courts are captured, if oversight bodies are hollowed out – they risk sliding into the same dangerous middle where protests no longer just shake governments but overthrow them.
Bangladesh last year, and Nepal this month, are cautionary tales for fragile states. But they are also warnings for established democracies: institutions, not just streets, determine whether political fire burns within safe channels or consumes the house altogether.