The Generation that Refused to Inherit? Political Socialisation, Digital Counter-Publics and Kenya's Contested Generational Transition, 2024–2025

Abstract

Kenya's Gen Z uprising began on 18 June 2024 and peaked between 25 June and mid-July 2024, when nationwide demonstrations against the Finance Bill 2024 forced the Bill's withdrawal and the Cabinet's dissolution. It recurred, in altered form and with different proximate triggers, through the protests of June and July 2025. Existing analyses have interpreted the uprising principally through digital mobilisation. This article argues that such accounts describe the mechanism of coordination while leaving unexplained the process of political formation that accompanied it. We advance the Socialisation Rupture model — inherited socialisation order, reproduction failure, counter-socialisation and coercive backlash — to argue that the uprising indexes a rupture in the intergenerational transmission of political identity, in which ethnicity, patronage, family-based loyalty and organised religion no longer reliably reproduce inherited orientations among a stratum of urban, educated, digitally connected young Kenyans. Following Tufekci (2017), we treat digital platforms not as neutral instruments but as agents of socialisation in their own right, alongside shared economic precarity and the 2010 Constitution as civic discourse. Methodologically, the article is a qualitative, theory-building case study; its evidentiary base is a purposively assembled documentary corpus of published scholarship, human rights documentation and the movement's publicly archived discursive repertoire, covering 18 June 2024 to 7 July 2025, analysed through qualitative content analysis and abductive pattern-matching. The article defends a conditional claim. A rupture in transmission is evident; a completed transformation of social reproduction is not. The political elite's post-2024 resurrection of ethnic bargaining and co-optation through the broad-based government shows that reproduction failure is uneven, contested, and potentially reversible. The contribution is an extension of Mannheim's sociology of generations to the digital Global South, not a rival theory of collective action.