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Ihor Usatenko, is a journalist with the Polish Press Agency and an essayist. He holds a PhD in History. He writes about politics, society, history and intellectual change in Ukraine, Central and Eastern Europe.
Photo: Getty Images
A video recently went viral in Ukrainian meme groups and more serious social media communities. It showed a group of French high school students protesting problems in the education system struggling unsuccessfully to open a child-resistant canister. Some seized on the clip as another opportunity to mock the protesters, sarcastically pointing to the contrast between their sociopolitical grievances and their everyday awkwardness. To outside observers, this only reinforces the image of young people who are not mature enough to articulate their own demands. Others may use the episode to criticise the increasingly confrontational nature of the protests or as ammunition in political disputes over who has suffered most and who is to blame for the situation.
Let us leave the judgments, political interpretations, and “winners and losers” calculations to the French media, which already have plenty to deal with following Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s statements accusing the France Unbowed party (LFI) and its “ultra-left cronies” of manipulating high school students.¹ The debate over how spontaneous the current protests by French high school students really are, and where to draw the line between students’ independent political mobilisation and the influence of adult political forces, has been ongoing since the first reported incidents of street violence.
Our aim is to examine the intellectual frameworks underpinning the protests and, by way of contrast, compare them with the tradition of student protests in independent Ukraine.
The 2026 French protests are already being described as the “third act”, following the mobilisations of 1990 and 1998.² As in previous years, they did not arise in response to a single failed reform or unnecessary change, but against a backdrop of accumulated dissatisfaction with learning conditions — dilapidated schools, a lack of teachers, overcrowded classrooms, and existential uncertainty about the future. In his analysis of recent events in France, sociologist François Dubet speaks of the familiar syndrome of malaise lycéen (discontent among high school students), which boils down to a general feeling of unease among high school students.³
This condition is well captured in a short but seminal article in French social science by Pierre Bourdieu and Patrick Champagne, “The Excluded from Within” (Les exclus de l’intérieur ⁴, 1992). The article set out to demonstrate the paradox of the mass expansion of French education: widening access to schools did not eliminate social inequality, but merely changed how it was reproduced.
A classic theme in left-wing social criticism of the second half of the twentieth century: once again emphasizing that inequality has not disappeared — it has shifted elsewhere or taken on less visible forms.
Bourdieu and Champagne sought to demonstrate the paradox of the democratisation of French education. From the 1950s onwards, children from social groups that had previously been largely excluded from secondary education began entering the system in large numbers: workers, peasants, small traders, and artisans (later, sociologists would also write extensively about immigrants). However, this did not solve the problem, as the system had its own limitations. Previously, the mechanism had been more straightforward: you were simply denied entry to the system, or you dropped out for practical reasons or ended up on the margins. Over time, however, the picture became more complex.
You are let into the system, but ranked and sorted within it. Formally, everyone has access to education, yet students follow different social trajectories that open up different life prospects. This is the paradox that Bourdieu and Champagne describe as the emergence of “the excluded from within”: although an individual is no longer standing outside the school gates, they may still find themselves on the periphery of the education system.
It is worth noting that French media also turned to another concept from Bourdieu’s intellectual toolkit when seeking a conceptual framework for the protests: his notion of the “left hand of the state”.⁵ This concept does not refer to the political left, but to state institutions that deal directly with people. Unlike the “right hand” of the state — the financial, administrative and law-enforcement apparatus that allocates resources, sets rules and ensures compliance — the “left hand” is responsible for schools, social services, healthcare and education.
Not only in the Global North, but in many countries around the world, spending on these areas is the first to be cut during periods of economic turbulence, while elites regard maintaining the administrative and control apparatus as essential.
The fragility of this “left hand” is particularly evident in instances of solidarity that have emerged during the current demonstrations (others will write about instances of its absence and aggression on social media without me having to). Those who teach — namely, school staff, including student supervisors — have joined the protests of those who study. They find themselves on one side of a conflict with the part of the state apparatus that determines budgets, standards and their working conditions.
Another sociological classic who would be hard to leave out of any debate on street unrest in general, and protests in high schools in particular, is, of course, Michel Foucault. There is little point in rehashing the key arguments about institutions designed to “observe” and “punish”, oversimplifying the argument and reducing it to truisms. Especially since French commentators have gone a step further, no longer characterising educational institutions solely as instruments of surveillance, normalisation, classification and assessment. Of course, all these themes feature prominently in the French press. It is no coincidence that, in an article⁶ about high school blockades, Le Monde recalled the slogan on a banner: “8 h–19 h, on est au lycée ou en garde à vue?” — which could be translated as “Studying from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. — are we still at high school, or are we already in police custody?”
However, in the debate over proposed changes to Parcoursup — the French state platform through which students apply to higher education institutions after finishing high school — different arguments were put forward.
A study⁷ published by Politis in May 2026 describes this quite literally as an “obsession nouvelle: celle du dossier parfait” — in other words, students’ obsession with having a perfect application file. Many other authors also write about the opacity of the selection system, anxiety and a sense of uncertainty. Yet once again, the criticism comes down to two elements.
But there is also a second element — Foucauldian-Benthamite. Hubert Guillaud describes Parcoursup as a “depersonalised system”⁸ in which the applicant becomes a “data profile”, a kind of collection of rounded numerical values and characteristics. This is no longer merely a matter of conventional surveillance, or even of turning people into data and ranking them. In the eyes of many underage protesters, it is something like a panoptic carousel of social selection, in which a person optimises not themselves, but their image and metrics, knowing that they may be watched. And what can be the result of prolonged coercion that a still-developing individual imposes on themselves against their own will? Self-alienation, burnout, fears of exclusion and neuroses.
The first — already largely explained in Bourdieusian terms — emphasises the distinction between “equality of access” and “equality of outcomes”. Since much of school life can become potentially relevant to future selection, and therefore to social mobility, wealthier families begin preparing their children’s application files earlier, paying for tutors and career guidance consultants, transferring their children to private schools, and so on.
But there is also a second element — Foucauldian-Benthamite. Hubert Guillaud describes Parcoursup as a “depersonalised system”⁸ in which the applicant becomes a “data profile”, a kind of collection of rounded numerical values and characteristics. This is no longer merely a matter of conventional surveillance, or even of turning people into data and ranking them. In the eyes of many underage protesters, it is something like a panoptic carousel of social selection, in which a person optimises not themselves, but their image and metrics, knowing that they may be watched. And what can be the result of prolonged coercion that a still-developing individual imposes on themselves against their own will? Self-alienation, burnout, fears of exclusion and neuroses.
Here we approach the third of the “conceptual pillars” without which discussions of protests in educational institutions would lack a point of reference. That reference point, or rather the framework, is the phenomenon of “victimhood culture”. It is explored in the book The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars⁹ (2018). Its authors, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, are well-known American sociologists who have gained international recognition for their research into contemporary social conflicts and their description of three types of moral systems: honour culture, dignity culture and victimhood culture.
Although the article is already conceptually dense, it is worth briefly explaining the distinction between the three. In honour culture, status depends on one’s public reputation, and insults are met with force or revenge. In dignity culture, status is inherent rather than dependent on others’ opinions, so minor insults are brushed off, while serious disputes are settled through an impartial legal system. In victimhood culture, by contrast, vulnerability and suffering become sources of status and moral authority. This makes people acutely sensitive to even minor slights and more likely to seek outside intervention — by administrators, for example, or by bringing the matter into the public eye — to hold those responsible to account.
People who subscribe to these three different moral imperatives can inhabit the same world. Will Smith, Conor McGregor and, in an even more telling example, Ramzan Kadyrov (for whom we might need to coin a term like “dishonour culture”) coexist in a world with Barack Obama and J. K. Rowling, who do not seek to track down and annihilate everyone who personally offends them. Then there are Greta Thunberg and Jussie Smollett, the American actor who fabricated an attack on himself for the sake of likes.
Protests on Ivy League campuses following harsh financial and administrative measures may seem like a recent phenomenon that has now disappeared, at least for a while. But this impression is misleading: protest has not disappeared; it has changed form (this left-wing trick of declaring that something has merely changed form is quite something!). From mass demonstrations and encampments, it has shifted to legal battles and institutional conflicts.
However, this ethos has not entirely faded away. We should not, however, mechanically transpose the American experience onto France, or, conversely, set the two experiences against each other. In both cases, there is a sense of having been wronged and abandoned to one’s own devices, but the ways of talking about inequality and harm differ. American public discourse on identity and vulnerability largely describes a person as a member of a group that has suffered injustice. The French tradition frames its grievances within a different conceptual framework: that of universalism, citizenship (citoyenneté) and the (non-)observance of the social contract. It is expressed not only as “I have been treated unfairly”, but also as “the system has broken its promise of equality, the very promise it proclaims itself”.
Against this backdrop of contrasting traditions, Ukraine offers an even more striking case, particularly given how its experience continues to evolve under extreme conditions. Ukrainian youth find themselves caught between perceptions and realities. On the one hand, despite living in circumstances that some have described elsewhere as a security, economic and social collapse, young Ukrainians have the audacity to act not as a generation simply entering an established social order, but as one helping to shape it. A host of intellectuals, both prominent and less well known, wrote about this over the summer.
Perhaps the clearest formulation of the broader theme of renegotiating the social contract came in an article by military ombudsman Olha Reshetylova.¹⁰ She argued that the unwritten understanding between the authorities and society — whereby the latter supports not only the army but also the leaders who chose to fight for the state — had run its course. A new understanding, she wrote, would require a rethink and each side to acknowledge its own sphere of responsibility. Pavlo Kazarin, meanwhile, argued that, since elections cannot be held, the authorities retain their legitimacy only so long as their decisions meet society’s demand for justice.¹¹
Overall, Ukrainian students have traditionally demonstrated a high degree of political agency, particularly in times of uncertainty. For generations who grew up in independent Ukraine, instability has been more the norm than the exception. The Revolution on Granite, the two Maidan revolutions and the Cardboard Protest have all demonstrated young people’s readiness not merely to react to change, but to take the initiative and shape it.
Unlike the current protests in France, Ukrainian student movements have consistently sought to remain independent of political parties. For a long time, French student movements maintained the same distance from party politics, though recent events suggest this may be changing.¹² In Ukraine, however, staying clear of political parties never meant staying out of politics. Since the 1990 Revolution on Granite, student protests have regularly taken up issues far beyond students’ immediate concerns. The demand for Vitaliy Masol’s resignation was one early example. Calls for democratic change, a change in government and a “right” choice of the country’s geopolitical and civilisational course have since become a natural part of student activism.
Clearly, Ukrainian protest culture has been shaped by a different intellectual tradition. There is much that could be said about this, particularly through comparative research into the decolonial lens through which youth protests are viewed, and how it shapes understandings of political agency, national dignity and the right to disobey. For now, however, one point is worth making: in France, the political nature of a protest requires far less justification. A French high school student may take to the streets, clash with the police, blockade a school and make demands of the state, and these actions will be seen as long-established forms of civic engagement. Mass mobilisation itself, then, is not a revolutionary act. In Ukraine, the situation is different. Young people taking to the streets quickly face questions such as “Who’s really behind this?”, “Who do you think would run the country better?” or admonitions along the lines of “Don’t rock the boat”.
Ukrainian youth, however, are guided by a principle of moral legitimacy, which makes the language of protest more pointed and more explicitly value-driven. In the West, by contrast, the accusation that the elites are hypocritical has traditionally been a powerful theme.
The latest student mobilisation in defence of Minister Fedorov prompted sharply differing reactions: some dismissed it as “infantilism”, while others saw it as entirely normal political behaviour for young people. This divergence revealed an interesting paradox. Young Ukrainians may be told that they are mature enough to take to the Maidan, challenge the authorities, volunteer, fight, save lives or effectively take on some of the state’s responsibilities. Yet the very same people may still be treated as “children” when it comes to their right to determine their own life paths.
We millennials laugh at French high school students who can’t open a child-resistant canister. And yes, it really is quite funny. But when we think back to our own experience of entering the era of the early Ukrainian external independent testing system (ZNO), or even the period before it, we find far less to laugh about in our own situation. Back then, at sixteen or seventeen, we were often expected to choose our future profession, university and life path correctly.
Perhaps this is one of the most interesting dividing lines between the two models of youth: the Western and the Ukrainian. French teenagers are largely allowed to exercise political agency while remaining personally immature. Young Ukrainians, by contrast, are far more often expected to prove their maturity first, and only then may their right to political agency be recognised.