Connectivity and Consciousness: Quantifying Digital Mobilisation in Bangladesh’s 2024 Uprising

The July 2024 uprising in Bangladesh highlighted the growing importance of social media in transforming widespread grievances into coordinated civic mobilisation, yet empirical understanding of how grievances, access to platforms, networked connectivity, and global consciousness jointly shape mobilisation remains limited, particularly in Global South contexts. This study addresses this gap by systematically examining the mechanisms through which these factors interact to influence digital mobilisation during the Bangladeshi uprising. Using survey data collected from 260 university students who constituted a central mobilisation cohort, the study operationalises grievances, access, connectivity, global consciousness, and digital mobilisation as composite constructs and analyses them through an integrated quantitative framework. Reliability analysis confirms internal consistency of the constructs, while principal component analysis validates their latent structure. Standardised regression modelling demonstrates that connectivity within online communities and global consciousness are the most influential predictors of mobilisation, together explaining approximately 45% of the variance in mobilisation outcomes, whereas access to platforms and grievances play smaller enabling roles. Unsupervised clustering further reveals two graded mobilisation profiles rather than a sharply polarised divide. Substantively, a one standard deviation increase in connectivity and global consciousness is associated with an average increase of approximately 0.6 on a 5-point mobilisation scale, corresponding to a marked shift from passive to active participation. By quantifying how network embeddedness and transnational framing amplify mobilisation, this study advances theories of connective action and provides empirically grounded insight into the dynamics of digitally mediated collective action in contemporary protest movements.