DHAKA — Yemeni peace activist Tawakkol Karman once said that youth is a revolution; they cannot be stopped, they cannot be oppressed, and they cannot be silenced. That was certainly true in Bangladesh on August 5. The sudden ouster of the country's authoritarian premier Sheikh Hasina led Karman's fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus to declare it Bangladesh's 'second independence day.'

What began as a nonviolent student protest against the South Asian country's highly politicized system of public-sector job quotas quickly escalated into an anti-government Gen Z revolution. This youth uprising lit a match in a society that was already deeply dissatisfied with rising living costs, corruption and violent crackdowns on dissent.