In December 2025, I (born in 2002) logged in from Iran to speak to students gathered in “Arts Tower LT5” at University of Sheffield. The screen flickered; their winter coats rustled in a distant auditorium I could not see. I told them something that felt obvious and astonishing at once: look how close we have become. I speak from Iran; you listen in Sheffield; you understand me. This is not because we share politics or language. It is because we have watched each other for years. We have heard each other’s grief and arguments through the same glowing windows. That, I said, is the quiet revolution of Generation Z. We are no longer strangers.

What I did not fully articulate that night is that this intimacy is changing international law itself. It is creating a new kind of political subject—the global student, the connected witness, people whose very incompleteness, as the next section explores, is what allows them to act together.

The Generation Without a Stable Name

Georges Didi-Huberman’s work, which I had been revisiting before that lecture, offers a difficult insight: the people without identity are always incomplete, always in the act of redefining themselves. “The people” is never a closed substance; it is a process, a montage, a fragile construction built from fragments of memory, images, grief, and desire. He explained that making the people “visible” is not enough. One must create forms through which they can appear to themselves, to others, and to history. This is what he called making the people sensible—turning abstraction into experience.

Generation Z lives inside that unfinished category. It is not a nation, not a class, not a religion. It is a temporal cohort shaped by the internet, the algorithm, and the collapse of informational borders. Its members speak in memes, short videos, sudden solidarities, and ephemeral campaigns. Their incompleteness is not a defect; it is their condition of possibility. They are perpetually redefining themselves because they inhabit a world where identity is negotiated in real time before an audience of millions.

In this sense, Gen Z is the first generation to feel the law before reading it. They encounter international law not as treaties in archives but as hashtags about war crimes, videos of refugees crossing seas, leaked documents, live-streamed protests, viral court decisions. Their imagination of justice is formed through proximity. The Palestinian child, the Ukrainian soldier, the Sudanese nurse, the Afghan student, the Iranian protester—these figures appear on the same glowing screen. They are not abstractions but presences. The result is an emotional cartography of the planet, where suffering and dignity circulate faster than diplomats. This does not mean Gen Z agrees on everything. It means disagreement is informed by shared visibility. They do not share ideology; they share exposure. That exposure produces a new sense of “the people” that is global, unstable, and porous. International law, once written for states and spoken by ministries, now finds itself read by teenagers with Wi-Fi.

Acting Without Borders

What does it mean for international law when millions feel themselves to be actors? The question leads us to Cornelius Castoriadis, who argued that societies are not merely governed by institutions; they are created by imaginaries. The social imaginary is the collective capacity to invent meanings, norms, and expectations. Institutions survive only when people act as if they are real. International law has always depended on imagination. The idea that a state can be bound by a treaty, that crimes against humanity can be prosecuted beyond borders, that refugees have rights independent of governments—these are fictions sustained by belief. For centuries, that belief was confined to elites: diplomats, judges, scholars. Gen Z disrupts that enclosure. They act within the law’s imagination without waiting for permission.

They crowdsource evidence. They map atrocities. They pressure corporations. They mobilize petitions that cross continents in hours. They create moral weather systems that institutions cannot ignore. Their activism is messy, impulsive, sometimes naive. Yet it transforms the meaning of agency. Castoriadis taught that autonomy begins when people recognize themselves as creators of their norms. Gen Z does exactly that. They treat international law not as a distant cathedral but as an unfinished project.

A recent episode illustrates the mechanism with particular clarity. In recent weeks, medical students at University of Tehran refused to sit for their examinations after a classmate was killed during protests, gathering at the gates of the campus to demand accountability. The act was local in cause yet transnational in intelligibility. Students at Columbia University, who months earlier had organized encampments and teach-ins over distant wars, immediately recognized the grammar of the gesture: the suspension of routine, the conversion of academic ritual into public testimony, the insistence that a university is a moral space as well as an intellectual one. Such parallels do not arise from coordination or ideological uniformity. They emerge from what might be called a shared grammar of protest, learned not through ideology but through sustained digital exposure. Students today resemble one another not because they have become identical, but because they have seen more of humanity than any generation before them, and in that sustained exposure have learned how strikingly similar human vulnerability, grief, and aspiration appear across borders. Their protests thus function as a kind of aesthetic repetition: different contexts, similar forms, each transforming a campus into a stage where private loss becomes a universal claim for justice.

The information revolution accelerates resemblance. Teenagers in Lagos, Seoul, São Paulo, and Tehran watch the same court rulings on TikTok, read the same UN statements, remix the same slogans. They are not identical, but they are synchronized. Their expectations of justice converge: accountability for war crimes, dignity for migrants, climate responsibility, gender equality. This convergence is not imposed; it emerges from shared attention. Resemblance reshapes law’s geography. When expectations align across borders, legal norms begin to feel borderless. A viral video of police violence in one country sparks protests in another. A landmark climate ruling inspires lawsuits elsewhere. The law travels through imitation. Gen Z becomes a vector of legal diffusion, a network of observers who refuse to let injustice remain local.

al-Farabi and the City That Speaks

Centuries before hashtags, al-Farabi imagined the virtuous city, where human perfection arises through cooperation and communication. In his treatise Fusul al-Muntaza’a, he wrote that humans possess the readiness for all crafts and virtues, yet these qualities appear only through repetition, interaction, and shared habit. The ruler of the virtuous city is not merely a sovereign; he is a guide who harmonizes knowledge and community, bringing people into proximity so they can recognize their potential. al-Farabi’s insight is strangely modern. Communication creates resemblance. When people exchange stories, they discover common needs. When they listen, they become neighbors in imagination before geography allows it. Gen Z inhabits the largest communicative city in history: the digital commons. Their daily interactions echo al-Farabi’s belief that virtue grows through connection. In this new city, the king is not a person but a protocol: the network itself. Its authority is diffuse, unstable, contested—yet it echoes something al-Farabi imagined in concentrated form. Fusul al-Muntaza’a wrote of a ruler whose wisdom transcended any single city:

Once the first type is realized, its rank and station stand higher than that of a mere statesman whose only function is to administer individual cities. Rather, he governs all cities through his wisdom and sets the whole commonwealth in order; in truth, he is a king.

Yet it produces something remarkable. Young people learn to speak across borders. They translate experiences, adopt causes, borrow legal vocabularies. They begin to think in terms of international law before they learn national constitutions. They grow up knowing that their voice can reach foreign courts, global audiences, distant allies. The resemblance born of communication does not erase difference. It reveals it. al-Farabi’s virtuous city was not uniform; it was ordered toward shared flourishing. Likewise, Gen Z’s world is not identical; it is entangled. Similarity here means mutual intelligibility. It means a protest in Tehran can be understood in Manchester, a climate strike in Stockholm can echo in Nairobi. This is why Gen Z is the generation of international law. Not because they study it more, but because they live inside its logic of interdependence. Their friendships, fears, and ambitions cross borders daily. They experience the world as a system of responsibilities. When a bomb falls in Gaza or Kyiv, they feel implicated. When a court rules in The Hague, they feel addressed.

The Law After Zedification

International law was born from treaties between princes. It matured through wars and charters. Today, it encounters a generation that refuses to be merely governed by rules written elsewhere and long ago. Gen Z watches, questions, documents, and imitates. Their global synchronicity reshapes the law, and their shared exposure produces new expectations of justice. They make the law sensible, visible, audible—not as spectators but as participants who insist that law be lived, felt, and contested. This Zedification does not promise justice automatically. It can amplify misinformation, moral panic, or shallow outrage. Yet it does something equally profound: it establishes a horizon of expectation that no institution can entirely ignore. Every viral video, every shared testimony, every collective call for accountability stretches the boundaries of what law must address. Judges are compelled to speak clearly. Diplomats must justify their positions. States are held accountable not only in capitals, but across a digital commons where millions of eyes follow every decision.

When I think back to Sheffield, I remember the quiet after the lecture. A student told me, “I never thought someone from your country would sound like me.” I told him he was wrong. We did not sound alike because we were identical. We sounded alike because we had listened long enough to share a horizon. That horizon is the same one Gen Z brings to law itself—a horizon where distance no longer excuses neglect, and where shared attention becomes a force of change. Gen Z is incomplete, like Didi-Huberman’s people. It is imaginative, like Castoriadis’s society. It seeks connection, like al-Farabi’s city. And in its restless resemblance, international law discovers a new terrain: a borderless expectation of justice carried by millions who refuse to be strangers. The law is no longer only text or treaty; it is a process, a conversation, a network of witnesses and actors. Its authority emerges from collective recognition, not coercion alone.

This is the promise of Zedification: not a utopia, not an end to disagreement, but a law that is plural, alive, and accountable to the very people it was long imagined to serve from afar. It is confident enough to be reshaped, humble enough to be questioned, and bold enough to imagine a future in which suffering anywhere resonates everywhere. In the hands of a generation that understands both immediacy and interdependence, international law is no longer distant. It listens. And, at last, it can be heard—in words that Paul Laurence Dunbar, writing more than a century ago, gave to the very ideal Gen Z now carries forward:

Enthroned upon the mighty truth,

Within the confines of the laws,

True Justice seeth not the man,

But only hears his cause.

Unconscious of his creed or race,

She cannot see, but only weighs;

For Justice with unbandaged eyes

Would be oppression in disguise.