In Kathmandu last week, a generation made history. Nepal’s Gen Z protesters, frustrated by corruption and a ban on social media, toppled the government and went further: they turned to Discord, a global chat platform, to debate, nominate, and select a leader. The result was the extraordinary rise of Sushila Karki as Nepal’s first female prime minister, chosen not by elite negotiations but by digital community consensus. It is an unlikely story — yet one with profound lessons for small states everywhere, including in the Caribbean.
Violence has long been the dominant language of global politics. From the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, to the military build-up in the Caribbean Sea, to the coups in West Africa’s Sahel, power continues to be asserted through armed force. The Caribbean is not insulated. Guns trafficked from the United States fuel some of the highest murder rates in the world, while young people across the region face limited opportunities, social insecurity, and migration pressures. In this environment, violence risks becoming normalised as both a global and local response to insecurity.
The issue is not only sovereignty, though that matters in a region that insists the Caribbean Sea must remain a Zone of Peace. The deeper challenge is whether societies will accept violence as inevitable, or whether they can reassert community as a political force. Here, Nepal’s youth offer a reminder that community is not only cultural but also strategic. By acting together, by creating new spaces of legitimacy when old institutions falter, they made change possible without resorting to violence.
For the Caribbean, the parallel is clear. Community has always been the region’s strongest resource. From neighbourhood associations to churches, trade unions to cultural movements, Caribbean societies have survived shocks through collective effort. Yet too often, youth are framed as a problem to be solved — associated with gangs, migration, or unemployment — rather than as a resource to be trusted. To reverse this, investment in civic education, youth leadership, and digital platforms must be treated as core strategies for resilience.
Divergence of views within the region is natural. Not every leader will take the same stance on foreign intervention, security cooperation, or sovereignty. But rhetoric matters. When public figures frame complex realities only through the lens of violence — whether by calling for traffickers to be “killed violently” or by celebrating foreign military deployments as simple victories — they risk reducing public discourse to the very logic the region must resist. As global debates around misinformation remind us, statements divorced from context are not harmless. They distort. They divide. They narrow options.
The lesson from Nepal is that young people do not wait for perfect systems to be handed down. They improvise, organise, and demand accountability in the spaces available to them. For the Caribbean, this is both a warning and an opportunity. If youth continue to feel excluded, migration and alienation will grow. If, however, their voices are invited into the centre of decision-making, the region can renew its democratic foundations through the very resource it risks losing — its people.
The Caribbean is not immune to the global tide of violence. But it has a choice in how it responds. Community is not a romantic ideal. It is a hard-edged survival strategy in a world that increasingly treats force as the default solution. From Kathmandu to Kingston, young people are showing that power is not inherited. It is created, shared, and defended in community. That is a lesson the Caribbean cannot afford to ignore.
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