In a recent AudienceNet study conducted in partnership with the Center for American Progress, it was reported that only around 16% of young people in the US engaging in some sort of real world political action. While startling in and of itself, it’s even more baffling when considered in the context of modern social and political movements. These movements, led by young people, radically undermine the thesis of millennial apathy, but also give us some insight into some of the “best practices,” with regards to both the issues and the methods that have made these movements so successful. The movements in question—Black Lives Matter, Fees Must Fall, and the Umbrella Revolution—all illuminate different and important aspects of youth engagement and issue-awareness campaigns, specifically in the areas of disruption and outreach.

          Central to any effective social or political movement in any part of the world is the issue. This issue, whether it’s a societal ill or a government problem, will become the main talking point of any effective campaign. Yet, curiously enough, the issues that tend to drive millennial campaigns are focused almost exclusively on identity. Whether it’s race, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic class, there’s a greater focus on social location and personal privilege in these movements in comparison with the movements of yore. Even issues of governmental abuse are generally coupled with issues of personal identity. Take, for example, South Africa’s “Fees Must Fall” campaign. The college students’ primary grievance was with the government’s attempts to raise college tuition fees. But the nexus of that campaign, and the true sticking point, was the relation of race and educational access in a post-apartheid nation. White students, after weeks of being exempted from the physical abuse their black brethren experienced, acted as human shields when the police came to attack protesters. The primary college that drew protests was chastised for its history of racial oppression, exemplified in a statue of Cecil Rhodes that stood in the courtyard. Similarly, the central question of the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, while outwardly understood to be election fraud, evolved into a larger criticism of Hong Kong’s disparate economic and social classes.

Even when the central issue of a campaign is, at its most basic, a policy or governance question, the true power for change comes in the adoption of a poetics of closeness. That is to say, the closer the issue is to the essence of one’s being—their immutable characteristics—the more effective rallying efforts tend to be. It’s no longer adequate to just proclaim the heinousness of a particular policy or action. And there is no greater example of this than the Black Lives Matter movement, which has become well-known for coupling systemic racial issues (which previously would have been controversial in-and-of themselves) with personal stories and uncomplicated rhetoric.

          Another interesting facet of these identity/issue movements is how fluid the issue focus may be. Movements like Fees Must Fall and Black Lives Matter began as opposition to a specific action of the government (tuition hikes and the murder of Michael Brown, respectively), but evolved to encompass more instances of the same issue, and some tangentially related problems. College access and racialization became prominent issues in the Fees movement because of how the government responded. And as more issues of state-sponsored violence in the US captured the public imagination, so too did the expanded rhetoric of BLM.

          Something that generally fails to be lent focus in youth movements is the lineage and power of the techniques and methods that they use. For as long as youth movements have been able to affect change, there have been certain general techniques and strategies that help them to make the most visceral and impactful use of their platform. Chief among these is the act of disruption. Disruption, as the name implies, is simply the act of enter a space (either physical or social) without permission in order to create discomfort. The best historical examples of this would be acts like sit-ins, boycotts, and impromptu rallies. But now, in the context of an increasingly connected and digital world, disruption has taken on new prominence.

          To understand this, let’s take a look at the actions of Johari Osayi Idusuyi, the twenty-three year old woman who became famous overnight for reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen at a Trump rally. The fact that she was in both a physical space where black women are uncommonly seen, as well as participating in an act of defiance in that space, is what characterizes traditional disruption. But the true power of her act came in its proliferation across the nation via social media like Twitter, Vine, and YouTube. Within 36 hours of her act, she’d appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Gawker, Huffington Post, and more, and her actions had drawn the ire of both America’s right wing as well as the adoration of the left. In other words, her subtle act of disruption drew more attention than some generic politician’s carefully worded press-release or the “spontaneous” comments of another presidential contender. And while Idusuyi is not directly affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, her actions are definitely in line with their organizing philosophy.

          This is exemplified in how the Baltimore Bloc (a BLM-affiliated advocacy group) protested against the promotion of Baltimore’s interim police chief to full employment. The initial disruptive action, sitting in at the city hall, was made all the more impactful when they vocally interrupted the city council’s vote on his promotion. Their refusal to quiet down and allow the vote to continue forced the media’s coverage of the event (as a standard-fare municipal meeting) to pay attention to their grievances and note it as controversial. It may seem obvious, but it’s nearly impossible to ignore 20+ screaming people when covering any event.

          This also applies to the methods used in the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, where protests outside the city hall building were accompanied by an almost immediate campaign of civil disobedience. The sheer size of the protests caused certain roads to be closed for nearly 80 days (which lent it a good deal of attention), but the true power of the civil disobedience came with the government’s reaction to it. The people’s disobedience, inconvenient but not illegal, was met with large-scale acts of brutality by the Hong Kong police. This, again, gave credence to the movement’s overall narrative that the government was corrupt. It’s hard to deny the government’s abuse when it’s cause on video and broadcast across the world.  And, with any widely known movement, there’s bound to be opposition.

          For the sake of this article, we’ll look past the obvious opposition that identity based movements encounter (e.g. racists opposed to racial equality movements), and look to the opposition more unique to youth movements. I’ve attempted to group them generally into two categories so we can better analyze them.

I. Methodological Opposition

          The people who make up this group are a loose coalition of older progressives, moderates, and people who value the old order or old methods. The primary lens through which they see youth movements is one of disdain. The most common line of offense is that the methods youth movements flock to, the ones mentioned above, are ineffective, and destroying the progress that they made in the prior years. This is made clear in a Guardian interview with Jesse Jackson (a somewhat integral figure in the 1960s Civil Rights movement), where he’s described as having “little interest or curiosity regarding the voices of the current movement,” despite trying to take credit for it by saying that his 1960s movement “never stopped.”

II. Ideological Opposition

          As discussed earlier, one of the newest and most interesting parts of modern youth movements is how they attempt to link their chosen issues to the very essence of one’s being. This promotion of identity politics above all has created a counter-culture where, despite the relative consensus surrounding the surface issues presented (no one condones state-sponsored murder or exclusionary schooling), the identities of those within the movements become the sticking points themselves. In Hong Kong’s Umbrella movement, critical ire was directed towards the so-called NEETs who, while contributing nothing to society, seek to force change on others. Similar criticism is leveled at those directing the Fees Must Fall movement in South Africa, who view the students seeking lower tuition fees as unwilling to work or pay for themselves. In fact, that’s one criticism that remains constant throughout all youth movements: the claim of entitlement. The passion and push for change, to the people in this category of opposition, are viewed as representative of a generational inability to reckon with “the real world” and the concessions necessary to operate within it.

With the two types laid out, we see a general trend among them that has affected our three test-cases in a number of different ways. Group I criticisms were somewhat uncommon in the Umbrella movement because, for all intents and purposes, it was unprecedented in its focus. The number of people who turned out, their diversity and relative ideological consistency, was more in line conceptually with Occupy Wall Street than anything that had risen up from Hong Kong previously. However, this type of criticism is far more common in the Fees and Black Lives movement. This is because these movements, despite their fresh rhetoric and methods, are ideologically in line with movements that came prior. Black Lives Matter’s fight against state-sponsored racism is perfectly in line with the 1960s Civil Rights movement, even if it’s not the grand and linear successor. Similarly, the Fees Must Fall movement’s focus on the eradication of colonial systems and icons (like the statue of Cecil Rhodes) also lines up with the aims of the anti-apartheid movements that brought people like Stephen Biko and Robert Sobukwe to prominence.

          And Group II opposition is seen throughout all the movements. The Fees Must Fall movement faced criticism from many of South Africa’s older intellectual elite, many of whom became part of the government post-apartheid. Their focus on the “entitlement” displayed by the protesters made for an interesting contrast, as their rhetoric (which basically boiled down to “deal with it”) echoed the very apartheid government they supplanted with their own youth movement in the 1980s/90s. The whole idea of “entitlement” recurs a lot around these movements. The marriage of identity and ideology makes it almost unavoidable for dissenters to criticize movements in a politically effective manner without also attacking the personalities surrounding the movement. It’s an extremely precarious position, one where the line between personal politics and politics-writ-large are blurred.

          And that’s largely the point of these movements. The decoupling of politics and personal experience that happened throughout the last half-century has, in the eyes of all of these movements, created a political system that legislates in spite of people instead of in support of them. The rhetoric of old vs. new, inclusive vs. exclusive, while nothing new, colors almost every facet of these movements. I can be seen in the grassroots, anti-government fervor of Black Lives Matter and the distinctly academic nature of the Fees movement. I could be seen in the populism of the Umbrella movement as well. And ultimately, this has become the single most powerful weapon in the arsenal of any youth movement. To harness an entire generation’s inclination towards progress, and turn it into something tangible is a revolutionary in and of itself.