SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020 Virtual Event Under the Patronage of H.E. the President of the Hellenic Republic Katerina Sakellaropoulou
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Welcome 5
The Pandemic Was Supposed to Be Great for Strongmen. What Happened? 14
Speakers 17
Mark Zuckerberg Is the Most Powerful Unelected Man in America How Facebook is preparing 30 Are You Willing to Give Up Your Privilege? 48 for the US 2020 election Despotism and Democracy in the Age of the Virus 62 We’ve taken critical steps to better secure our Capitalism and ‘Culturecide’ 78 platforms and provide transparency during the upcoming elections, including: Reform the Police? Guess Who Funds My State’s Officials 92
• Tripled safety and security • Removed billions of Moderators 99 teams to 35,000 people fake accounts Advisory Board 107 • Implemented 5-step • Launching new Our Sponsors 114 ad verification Voting Information Center Our Partners 115 Learn more about our efforts at Important Information fb.com/about/elections 116
athensdemocracyforum.com 3
Paid for by Facebook - about.fb.com @ebrd Welcome
DEAR GUESTS
I bid you a hearty welcome to the 2020 Athens Democracy Forum, which we are proud to convene in association with The New York Times along with our main stakeholders: the Kofi Annan Foundation, the City of Athens and the Greek daily Kathimerini.
Our theme this year, “The New Abnormal: Reimagining Democracy,” reflects both the extraordinary and sometimes frightening times we are living through, and the enormous challenges they pose on a broad range of fronts. The Covid-19 pandemic has precipitously and acutely touched every corner of the world and every human endeavor. But the new abnormal goes beyond that, to the broadest scope implicit in the Greek word πάνδημος: the whole of humanity is being tested by inequality, climate change, fake news, migration shifts and populism to find better ways to govern ourselves and safeguard our planet.
Better governance and citizen engagement – these are the goals that our new Democracy & Culture Foundation, the parent organization of the Athens Democracy Forum, is charged with pursuing. To that end, a stellar and diverse chorus of speakers will convene in Athens on September 30, in person or virtually, to address these issues from differing, sometimes contrarian perspectives, to arm our guests and our Foundation with ideas and inspiration on ways to help our democracies and institutions emerge strong and free from the pandemic crises.
My colleagues, partners and I look forward to greeting you for what promises to be a most productive and consequential Forum.
Achilles Tsaltas President The Democracy & Culture Foundation
@ebrd
athensdemocracyforum.com 5
Democracy & Culture Foundation
MISSION To empower society through citizen engagement and better governance. In this way we contribute to the evolution of democracy to meet today’s challenges.
How we achieve this is through a disruptive fusion of collective intelligence, discussion, culture and action (our ‘Think – Talk – Do’ impact chain) resulting in two key outcomes:
1. Progressive reforms are grafted onto existing institutions to create new models of democracy fit for a changing world; (better governance) and
2. Citizens actively participate in democracy and its evolution (citizen engagement)
Five Core Values underpin our approach: Innovation – enhance democratic process through innovation and technology Dialogue – increase diversity of voices and wider stakeholder representation Truth & transparency – explore solutions to misinformation Sharing & education – educate citizens and government officials on best practices Citizen engagement – increase citizen deliberation in democratic processes
WHAT WE DO DCF’s role is to provoke, curate and convene stakeholders through a series of activities and initiatives that:
• create policy proposals by adding fresh thinking to ancient democratic wisdom; • calibrate and validate them through a thorough process of deliberative democracy, with culture as a key enabler; and • ensure the best ideas are grafted onto existing institutions to create new models of democracy fit for a changing world.
Our stakeholders/audience is a blend of (1) ‘citizens and youth’ with (2) ‘leaders and experts’ and we seek to bring them together in a way that we bridge the gap.
We work with carefully chosen, and closely aligned, partners from civil society, media, government and corporations to deliver these activities and achieve our overall mission.
athensdemocracyforum.com 7 SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS
Think Talk Do (DEVELOPMENT) (CALIBRATION) (ACTION) Actively supporting the search Engaging in constructive Carrying out in and articulation of new and inclusive dialogue cooperation with activist ideas and concepts that and disseminating these partners, conceptually can translate into better innovative ideas and original and practically democratic processes and a concepts through all critical activities related wider understanding of culture possible enablers to the promotion of democracy and culture
Policy idea Citizen Policy Stress Actual Reform Creation Proposals Testing & Finessing approval
Ancient values Co-created by Athens Influencers Via activist and + fresh stakeholders Democracy bridging the government approaches through an Forum and citizen-leader partnerships + benchmarking incubation lab a cluster of gap + and leader supported by a and a series of conferences. Caucus of development curated library seminars Citizens’ parliamentar of knowledge assemblies . ians + case studies Cultural activities
Figure 1 - the DCF Impact Chain
8 @athensforum HOW DO WE MEASURE SUCCESS?
We work to three main strategic KPIs:
1. The number of reforms actually achieved;
2. The number and quality of participants engaged per reform/proposed reform; and
3. The proportion of our participants who believe decision-making is inclusive and responsive, by sex, age, disability and population group.
We are strongly aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 16, to “promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.” Our third KPI allows us to track our contribution to SDG 16.7 which aims to achieve “responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels.”
HOW IS DCF FUNDED? Our funding strategy is divided into two phases:
1.Year 2020 involves DCF set-up. Funding for this phase will come from sponsorships and seed- funding (with a significant portion already committed); and
2. 2021 onward, envisages the scaling up of funding mainly from two sources: Internally, from the conferences and other activities organized by the DCF; and externally from the creation of an endowment, with a minimum target of €10 million from other foundations, UHNWI and institutions. (currently achieved a commitment of 20% of this sum).
Simultaneously, DCF plans to seek additional funding from E.U. subsidies, individual philanthropic contributions, grants from other foundations and sponsorships from companies implementing CSR policies aligned with DCF’s principles and work.
WHO ARE OUR PARTNERS? The key stakeholders of our core events are: The New York Times; Kofi Annan Foundation; Council of Europe; City of Athens; Mishcon de Reya; and McKinsey & Company.
athensdemocracyforum.com 9 ALBANIA ALBANIE ANDORRA ANDORRE ARMENIA ARMÉNIE AUSTRIA AUTRICHE AZERBAIJAN AZERBAÏDJAN BELGIUM BELGIQUE BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA BOSNIE HERZÉGOVINE BULGARIA BULGARIE CROATIA CROATIE CYPRUS CHYPRE CZECH REPUBLIC RÉPUBLIQUE TCHÈQUE DENMARK DANEMARK ESTONIA ESTONIE FINLAND FINLANDE FRANCE FRANCE GEORGIA GÉORGIE GERMANY ALLEMAGNE GREECE GRÈCE HUNGARY HONGRIE ICELAND ISLANDE IRELAND IRLANDE ITALY ITALIE LATVIA LETTONIE LIECHTENSTEIN LIECHTENSTEIN LITHUANIA LITUANIE LUXEMBOURG LUXEMBOURG MALTA MALTE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA RÉPUBLIQUE DE MOLDOVA MONACO MONACO MONTENEGRO MONTÉNÉGRO NETHERLANDS PAYS BAS NORTH MACEDONIA MACÉDOINE DU NORD NORWAY NORVÈGE POLAND POLOGNE PORTUGAL PORTUGAL ROMANIA ROUMANIE RUSSIANSEPTEMBER FEDERATION 30 FÉDÉRATION- OCTOBER DE RUSSIE2, 2020, SAN ATHENSMARINO SAINT MARIN SERBIA SERBIE SLOVAK REPUBLIC RÉPUBLIQUE SLOVAQUE SLOVENIA SLOVÉNIE SPAIN ESPAGNE SWEDEN SUÈDE SWITZERLAND SUISSE TURKEY TURQUIE UKRAINE UKRAINE UNITED KINGDOM ROYAUME UNI ALBANIA ALBANIE ANDORRA ANDORRE ARMENIA ARMÉNIE AUSTRIA AUTRICHE AZERBAIJAN AZERBAÏDJAN BELGIUM BELGIQUE BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA BOSNIE HERZÉGOVINE BULGARIA BULGARIE CROATIA CROATIE CYPRUS CHYPRE CZECH REPUBLIC RÉPUBLIQUE TCHÈQUE DENMARK DANEMARK ESTONIA ESTONIE FINLAND FINLANDE FRANCE FRANCE GEORGIA GÉORGIE GERMANY ALLEMAGNE GREECE GRÈCE HUNGARY HONGRIE ICELAND ISLANDE IRELAND IRLANDE ITALY ITALIE LATVIA LETTONIE LIECHTENSTEIN LIECHTENSTEIN LITHUANIA LITUANIE LUXEMBOURG LUXEMBOURG MALTA MALTE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA RÉPUBLIQUE DE MOLDOVA MONACO MONACO MONTENEGRO MONTÉNÉGRO NETHERLANDS PAYS BAS NORTH MACEDONIA MACÉDOINE DU NORD NORWAY NORVÈGE POLAND POLOGNE PORTUGAL PORTUGAL ROMANIA ROUMANIE RUSSIAN FEDERATION FÉDÉRATION DE RUSSIE SAN MARINO SAINT MARIN SERBIA SERBIE SLOVAK REPUBLIC RÉPUBLIQUE SLOVAQUE SLOVENIA SLOVÉNIE SPAIN ESPAGNE SWEDEN SUÈDE SWITZERLAND SUISSE TURKEY TURQUIE UKRAINE UKRAINE UNITED KINGDOM ROYAUME UNI ALBANIA ALBANIE ANDORRA ANDORRE ARMENIA ARMÉNIE AUSTRIA AUTRICHE AZERBAIJAN AZERBAÏDJAN BELGIUM BELGIQUE BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA BOSNIE HERZÉGOVINE BULGARIA BULGARIE CROATIA CROATIE CYPRUS CHYPRE CZECH REPUBLIC RÉPUBLIQUE TCHÈQUE DENMARK DANEMARK ESTONIA ESTONIE FINLAND FINLANDE FRANCE FRANCE GEORGIA GÉORGIE GERMANY ALLEMAGNE GREECE GRÈCE HUNGARY HONGRIE ICELAND ISLANDE IRELAND IRLANDE ITALY ITALIE LATVIA LETTONIE LIECHTENSTEIN LIECHTENSTEIN LITHUANIA LITUANIE LUXEMBOURG LUXEMBOURG MALTA MALTE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA RÉPUBLIQUE DE MOLDOVA MONACO MONACO MONTENEGRO MONTÉNÉGRO NETHERLANDS PAYS BAS NORTH MACEDONIA MACÉDOINE DUGUARDIAN NORD NORWAY NORVÈGE POLAND POLOGNE OF PORTUGAL HUMAN PORTUGAL ROMANIA ROUMANIE RIGHTS, RUSSIAN FEDERATION FÉDÉRATION DE RUSSIE SAN MARINO SAINT MARIN SERBIA SERBIE SLOVAK REPUBLIC RÉPUBLIQUE SLOVAQUE SLOVENIA SLOVÉNIE SPAIN ESPAGNE SWEDEN SUÈDE SWITZERLAND SUISSE TURKEY TURQUIE UKRAINE DEMOCRACYUKRAINE UNITED KINGDOM ROYAUME UNI ALBANIA AND ALBANIE ANDORRA THE ANDORRE ARMENIARULE ARMÉNIE AUSTRIA OF AUTRICHE LAW AZERBAIJAN AZERBAÏDJAN BELGIUM BELGIQUE BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA BOSNIE HERZÉGOVINE BULGARIA BULGARIE CROATIA CROATIE CYPRUS CHYPRE CZECH REPUBLIC RÉPUBLIQUE TCHÈQUE DENMARK DANEMARK ESTONIA ESTONIE FINLAND FINLANDE FRANCE FRANCE GEORGIA GÉORGIE GERMANY ALLEMAGNE GREECE GRÈCE HUNGARY HONGRIE ICELAND ISLANDE IRELAND IRLANDE ITALY ITALIE LATVIA LETTONIE LIECHTENSTEIN LIECHTENSTEIN LITHUANIA LITUANIE LUXEMBOURG LUXEMBOURG MALTA MALTE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA RÉPUBLIQUE DE MOLDOVA MONACO MONACO MONTENEGRO MONTÉNÉGRO NETHERLANDS PAYS BAS NORTH MACEDONIA MACÉDOINE DU NORD NORWAY NORVÈGE POLAND POLOGNE PORTUGAL PORTUGAL ROMANIA ROUMANIE RUSSIAN FEDERATION FÉDÉRATION DE RUSSIE SAN MARINO SAINT MARIN SERBIA SERBIE SLOVAK REPUBLIC RÉPUBLIQUE SLOVAQUE SLOVENIA SLOVÉNIE SPAIN ESPAGNE SWEDEN SUÈDE SWITZERLAND SUISSE TURKEY TURQUIE UKRAINE UKRAINE UNITED KINGDOM ROYAUME UNI ALBANIA ALBANIE ANDORRA ANDORRE ARMENIA ARMÉNIE AUSTRIA AUTRICHE AZERBAIJAN AZERBAÏDJAN BELGIUM BELGIQUE BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA BOSNIE HERZÉGOVINE BULGARIA BULGARIE CROATIA CROATIE CYPRUS CHYPRE CZECH REPUBLIC RÉPUBLIQUE TCHÈQUE DENMARK DANEMARK ESTONIA ESTONIE FINLAND FINLANDE FRANCE FRANCE GEORGIA GÉORGIE GERMANY ALLEMAGNE GREECE GRÈCE HUNGARY HONGRIE ICELAND ISLANDE IRELAND IRLANDE ITALY ITALIE LATVIA LETTONIE LIECHTENSTEIN LIECHTENSTEIN LITHUANIA LITUANIE LUXEMBOURG LUXEMBOURG MALTA MALTE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA RÉPUBLIQUE DE MOLDOVA MONACO MONACO MONTENEGRO MONTÉNÉGRO NETHERLANDS PAYS BAS NORTH MACEDONIA MACÉDOINE DU NORD NORWAY NORVÈGE POLAND POLOGNE PORTUGAL PORTUGAL ROMANIA ROUMANIE RUSSIAN FEDERATION FÉDÉRATION DE RUSSIE SAN MARINO SAINT MARIN SERBIA SERBIE SLOVAK REPUBLIC RÉPUBLIQUE SLOVAQUE SLOVENIA SLOVÉNIE SPAIN ESPAGNE SWEDEN SUÈDE SWITZERLAND SUISSE TURKEY TURQUIE UKRAINE UKRAINE UNITED KINGDOM ROYAUME UNI ALBANIA ALBANIE ANDORRA ANDORRE ARMENIA ARMÉNIE AUSTRIA AUTRICHE AZERBAIJAN AZERBAÏDJAN BELGIUM BELGIQUE BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA BOSNIE HERZÉGOVINE BULGARIA BULGARIE CROATIA CROATIE CYPRUS CHYPRE CZECH REPUBLIC RÉPUBLIQUE TCHÈQUE DENMARK DANEMARK ESTONIA ESTONIE FINLAND FINLANDE FRANCE FRANCE GEORGIA GÉORGIE GERMANY ALLEMAGNE GREECE GRÈCE HUNGARYwww.coe.int HONGRIE ICELAND ISLANDE IRELAND IRLANDE ITALY ITALIE LATVIA LETTONIE LIECHTENSTEIN LIECHTENSTEIN LITHUANIA LITUANIE LUXEMBOURG LUXEMBOURG MALTA MALTE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA RÉPUBLIQUE DE MOLDOVA MONACO MONACO MONTENEGRO MONTÉNÉGRO NETHERLANDS PAYS BAS NORTH MACEDONIAwww.coe.int/echr MACÉDOINE DU NORD NORWAY NORVÈGE POLAND POLOGNE PORTUGAL PORTUGAL ROMANIA ROUMANIE RUSSIAN FEDERATION FÉDÉRATION10 DE RUSSIE SAN MARINO SAINT MARIN SERBIA SERBIE SLOVAK REPUBLIC RÉPUBLIQUE SLOVAQUE SLOVENIA@athensforum SLOVÉNIE SPAIN ESPAGNE SWEDEN SUÈDE SWITZERLAND SUISSE TURKEY TURQUIE UKRAINE UKRAINE UNITED KINGDOM ROYAUME UNI ALBANIA ALBANIE ANDORRA ANDORRE ARMENIA ARMÉNIE AUSTRIA AUTRICHE AZERBAIJAN AZERBAÏDJAN BELGIUM BELGIQUE BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA BOSNIE HERZÉGOVINE BULGARIA BULGARIE CROATIA CROATIE CYPRUS CHYPRE CZECH REPUBLIC RÉPUBLIQUE TCHÈQUE DENMARK DANEMARK ESTONIA ESTONIE FINLAND FINLANDE FRANCE FRANCE GEORGIA GÉORGIE GERMANY ALLEMAGNE GREECE GRÈCE HUNGARY HONGRIE ICELAND ISLANDE IRELAND IRLANDE ITALY ITALIE LATVIA LETTONIE LIECHTENSTEIN LIECHTENSTEIN LITHUANIA LITUANIE LUXEMBOURG LUXEMBOURG MALTA MALTE REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA RÉPUBLIQUE DE MOLDOVA MONACO MONACO MONTENEGRO MONTÉNÉGRO NETHERLANDS PAYS BAS NORTH MACEDONIA MACÉDOINE DU NORD NORWAY NORVÈGE POLAND POLOGNE PORTUGAL PORTUGAL ROMANIA ROUMANIE RUSSIAN FEDERATION FÉDÉRATION DE Welcome Note from the Mayor of Athens
Every year, we convene this Forum thinking that we must be living in the most unusual times. This year, however, there is no doubt that these are also the most unfamiliar conditions for such a gathering in recent memory.
Together, we find ourselves face to face with a virus that has no specific ideology. It cannot discriminate by color, origin, or personal beliefs. We are all in this fight together.
Yet the pandemic has not impacted all of us equally. There are people who suffer more for their color, origin, and personal beliefs. And it is not only because of the virus, but because of political choices.
Our democratic institutions are called into question when we only manage to protect some of us. We risk destroying faith in democracy if our losses are concentrated in certain communities. When we do not trust our political representatives to make decisions using expert advice – based on science – we lose the ability to deliberate in an inclusive and open manner.
Let’s keep our eyes on the horizon. Democracy, with the clear reference to its origin in ancient Greece and particularly in Athens, is very often an “ideal fruit” that requires everybody’s effort in order to become real and to thrive, because it only ripens where measure and moderation appear, and when there is respect not only for our own freedom but also for the freedom of others.
Therefore, what we are seeking is not that only good people acquire the majority. But that we demonstrate, all of us, our best qualities. This is called political culture. Political ethos. And the ethos of politics becomes, in a prospective way, the ethos of society.
This year, we present the City of Athens Democracy Award to someone who is cultivating this political ethos. Someone whose life and work promote the continued growth of democracy as an enduring symbol and as a way of life. Someone who recognizes our limits as moral and social individuals, helping us to transcend them through common effort.
We are pleased to present this award to President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil. As president of Latin America’s most populous democracy, he demonstrated his commitment to democratic principles and the defense of human rights. As an eminent scholar and internationally recognized sociologist, he has made lasting contributions to the conversation on liberal democracy and the concepts of demos and citizenship, and has challenged us to imagine inclusive polities, societies, and economies.
It is an honor to welcome President Cardoso to the 8th Athens Democracy Forum, and to begin this very important conversation with all of you reimagining democracy.
Kostas Bakoyannis Mayor of Athens Hellenic Republic athensdemocracyforum.com 11 SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS
City of Athens Democracy Award
Previous Recipients List 2016 Mr. Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch 2017 H.E. Felipe González Márquez, Former Prime Minister of Spain 2018 H.E. Joaquim Alberto Chissano, Former President of Mozambique 2019 Pawel Adamowicz, Former Mayor of the City of Gdánsk
Selection Procedure
The Mayor of Athens established the City of Athens Democracy Award to be presented annually during the Athens Democracy Forum around September 15, the U.N. International Day of Democracy. The award will be bestowed on an individual or organization in recognition of globally acknowledged achievements, which demonstrate a lasting and compelling commitment to the advancement of democracy and to the enhancement of its quality on an international scale. The City of Athens also wishes to honor all democratically active citizens, who not only defend democratic principles, but substantively contribute to the continuous promotion of democracy as a system of ethical values.
The concept of democracy in the contemporary world should be defined in terms of three distinct elements, which can be described as inextricably linked and mutually reinforcing:
(a) Free and fair elections held periodically and contested by some alternative political parties,
(b) Adherence to the rule of law, and
(c) Respect for human rights.
The recipient of the City of Athens Democracy Award should be an individual or organization of indisputable international authority, having demonstrably contributed to the promotion of democracy as outlined above by fulfilling one of the following criteria:
12 @athensforum Academic criterion - through original scholarly work which has substantively advanced our understanding of democracy in the contemporary world, as well as actively and demonstrably contributed to the enhancement and deepening of democracy in a global context.
Practitioner criterion - through significant contribution to the promotion of democratic principles at the national or supranational level. This includes established democracies at one end of the spectrum, alongside initiatives aimed at strengthening democratic principles in weak democracies or promoting the conditions for regime change where democracy is still absent.
The Mayor of Athens has established an Advisory Committee to oversee the award process and work with him in selecting the eventual recipient. The selection procedure consists of two parts. Initially, the Committee reviews potential recipients and shortlists those candidates from each category deemed to fulfill the above criteria.
VOTING PROCEDURE
A numerical value is assigned to each candidate from lowest to highest in accordance with the preferences of each individual committee member. The values assigned to each candidate are then consolidated and the highest-scoring candidate is selected to receive the award.
MEMBERS OF THE CITY OF ATHENS DEMOCRACY AWARD COMMITTEE
Mr. Kostas Bakoyannis, ex officio Mayor of Athens, Hellenic Republic
Dr. Nikiforos Diamandouros Academic and Chairman of the City of Athens Democracy Award Committee
Ms. Annika Savill Executive Head, UN Democracy Fund, United Nations
Mr. Serge Schmemann Member of the Editorial Board, Athens Democracy Forum Chairman and Program Director, The New York Times
Mr. Nikos Konstandaras Journalist, Kathimerini and The New York Times
athensdemocracyforum.com 13 SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS
THE STRONG AND THE WEAK
The Pandemic Was Supposed to Be Great for Strongmen. What Happened? From Trump to Lukashenko, authoritarians are discovering that this isn’t their kind of crisis.
BY IVAN KRASTEV CONTRIBUTING OPINION WRITER
VIENNA — For an East European of my generation, watching the current protests in Belarus is like going through an old photo album. The scenes of striking workers call forth the shipyards of Gdansk, Poland, and the Solidarity movement of the 1980s. Moscow’s dilemma whether to offer President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko’s regime “friendly” support reminds me of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when Soviet troops entered the Czech capital to scotch the popular Prague Spring. And the West’s striking incapacity to support civil society in Belarus screams of 1989 — though not in Eastern Europe but in China. The question of the moment is whether Mr. Lukashenko will repeat the tragedy of Tiananmen. What I have been thinking most about is not a protest movement of my youth, but a natural disaster. The uprising in Belarus stands in the shadow of Chernobyl, the worst nuclear catastrophe in human history, which took place in the neighboring Soviet republic of Ukraine. Thirty-four years later, citizens have realized that nothing has changed in their country, and that they are ruled by a government ready to sacrifice its people in order to hide the regime’s decay. This spring, when all of Europe was in lockdown to combat the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Lukashenko informed Belarusians that there is nothing to fear. The best thing they could do, he said, was ignore the global hysteria, head to football stadiums and cheer on their favorite clubs. Many did so; many also got infected with the virus and died. We can only speculate how many Belarusians would have taken to the streets were it not for Covid-19. But it is clear that the government’s feckless response to the pandemic was a turning point. The protests in Belarus should force us to rethink the relationship between the pandemic and authoritarianism. Does the virus infect our societies with authoritarian governance or, alternatively, can it strengthen democratic immunity? Some fear that more than any other crisis, a public health emergency like this one will impel people to accept restrictions on their liberties in the hope of improving personal security. The pandemic has increased tolerance of invasive surveillance and bans on freedom of assembly. In several Western countries
14 @athensforum — including the United States and Germany — there were public protests against mask mandates and lockdowns. At the same time, the pandemic has eroded the power of authoritarians and the authoritarian-inclined. The instinctive reaction of leaders like Mr. Lukashenko in Belarus, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States was not to take advantage of the state of emergency to expand their authority — it was to play down the seriousness of the pandemic. Why are authoritarian leaders who thrive on crises and who are fluent in the politics of fear reluctant to embrace the opportunity? Why do they seem to hate a crisis that they should love? The answer is straightforward: Authoritarians only enjoy those crises they have manufactured themselves. They need enemies to defeat, not problems to solve. The freedom authoritarian leaders cherish most is the freedom to choose which crises merit a response. It is this capacity that allows them to project an image of Godlike power. In pre-Covid-19 Russia, Mr. Putin could “solve” one crisis by ginning up another. He reversed the decline of his popularity after the protest movement of 2011-12 by dramatically annexing Crimea. Mr. Trump could once claim that migrant caravans from Mexico are the greatest threat his country is facing, and disregard the civilizational threat of climate change. In the age of coronavirus, this is no longer possible. There is just this one crisis, here and now: the pandemic. And governments are being judged by how they manage it. Authoritarian actors not only loathe crises they have not freely chosen, they also dislike “exceptional situations” that force them to respond with standardized rules and protocols rather than with ad hoc, discretionary moves. Mundane behaviors like physical distancing, self-isolation and handwashing are the best ways to halt the spread of the virus. A leader’s bold stroke of genius will be of no help. Following rules is not the same as obeying orders. Even more threatening for authoritarian elites in the Covid-19 world is that they lack the key advantage all democratic leaders enjoy: The luxury to survive even when appearing weak. Imagine that Mr. Putin orders all Russian citizens to wear masks and half of the population elect not to. For a democratic leader, this would be an embarrassment; for an authoritarian it is a direct challenge to his power. The ubiquity of the disease also poses challenges for authoritarians. Because the pandemic affects every country in the world, citizens can compare the actions of their governments with those of others. Success or failure at flattening the curve provides a common metric, making cross-national comparisons possible and putting pressure on governments that had previously succeeded in insulating themselves from public criticism. In this context, Covid-19 has become deadly dangerous for ossifying authoritarian regimes like Mr. Lukashenko’s in Belarus. It is still possible that the patient will survive if it is put in an artificial coma in Mr. Putin’s emergency room. But it is now clear that the virus is a curse rather than a blessing for authoritarians like him. In 1986, the Chernobyl tragedy made the people of the Soviet Union see the reality of the Communist system hidden behind the state propaganda: It wasn’t all powerful. In fact, it wasn’t even competent. The regime lasted only a few more years.
(Reprinted from NYT Opinion pages published on 2020/09/08)
Ivan Krastev is a contributing opinion writer, the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies, a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and the author of the forthcoming “Is It Tomorrow Yet?: Paradoxes of the Pandemic.” athensdemocracyforum.com 15
Speakers
athensdemocracyforum.com 1717 H.E. THE PRESIDENT OF THE Katerina Sakellaropoulou was born on 30 May 1956 in Thessaloniki, HELLENIC REPUBLIC Greece. She has roots, from the side of her mother, Aliki Paraskeva, KATERINA in Stavroupoli (region of Xanthi). Her father, Nikolaos Sakellaropoulos, SAKELLAROPOULOU served as Vice-President of Areios Pagos, the Supreme Civil and Criminal Court of Greece. She lived in Thessaloniki for the first eight years of her life. In 1964, she moved to Athens with her family. She graduated from the Arsakeio School, Psychiko, in 1974 and studied law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, completing successfully her studies in 1978. In 1982, she was appointed Assistant Judge at the Council of State, the Supreme Administrative Court of Greece. In 1988, she was promoted to the rank of Associate Councillor and served at the 3rd Chamber, where she mostly worked on cases regarding education, civil service and local government. In 2000, she was promoted to Councillor of State and served at the 5th Chamber, which deals with environmental law cases. On 23 October 2015, she was promoted to Vice-President and was assigned to the 3rd Chamber. On 17 October 2018 she was appointed President of the Council of State and remained in that position until 11 February 2020. She has authored several articles and essays on matters of constitutional and environmental law. She has a daughter, Niovi, and lives with her partner, Pavlos Kotsonis, who joined the Council of State as Assistant Judge in 1981, resigned as Councillor in 2010 and worked thereafter as legal counsel for a law firm in Brussels until 15 January 2020. On 22 January 2020, she was elected first female President of the Hellenic Republic by the Parliament, securing 261 votes out of a total of 300. She took the oath before the Parliament on 13 March 2020 and assumed office the following day. KYRIAKOS Kyriakos Mitsotakis has served as Prime Minister of Greece since July MITSOTAKIS 2019. He has been president of Nea Demokratia, the New Democracy PRIME MINISTER Party, since 2016. HELLENIC REPUBLIC Mr. Mitsotakis has been a member of Parliament since 2004 and served as minister of administrative reform and e-governance from 2013 to 2015. Prior to his career in politics, Mr. Mitsotakis spent a decade in the private sector, serving as C.E.O. of NBG Venture Capital (part of the National Bank of Greece), a financial analyst with Chase Investment Bank, a consultant with McKinsey & Company, and a senior investment officer with Alpha Ventures. Mr. Mitsotakis is a graduate of Harvard University, and has a graduate degree in international relations from Stanford University. He also holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
athensdemocracyforum.com 19 SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS
JON ALEXANDER Jon Alexander is co-founder of the New Citizenship Project, a CO-FOUNDER strategy and innovation company on a mission to support the shift NEW CITIZENSHIP PROJECT in the dominant story of the individual in society from consumer to citizen. The company’s client list includes The Guardian, the European Central Bank and the European Journalism Centre.
Mr. Alexander is a fellow of the Young Foundation and the Royal Society of Arts, and a member of the O.E.C.D.’s Future of Democracy network. Having started his career in the advertising industry working for a decade at agencies including BBDO and Fallon, he is a proud former winner of Brand Republic’s 2011 Big Idea of the Year award, for creating the concept of MyFarm: handing over decision making on a real, working farm to the public by online vote and debate as a way of engaging people with sustainable food production.
Mr. Alexander holds three master’s degrees in disciplines spanning humanities and business. He has won several essay awards including the inaugural Ashridge Sustainable Innovation Award, and the Young Foundation’s Beyond Meritocracy Prize. He was a major contributor to the recent best seller “New Power” (shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year 2018) by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms. Along the way, he has also represented Britain in two different sports.
20 @athensforum ELHADJ AS SY Elhadj As Sy was appointed chair of the board of the Kofi Annan CHAIR OF THE BOARD Foundation in October 2019. He believes that Kofi Annan was a KOFI ANNAN FOUNDATION towering figure who made a difference to the lives of people all around the world, and that the foundation’s job now is to take his vision forward to ensure that his values are reflected in its ambition to achieve a fairer and more peaceful world.
Previously, Mr. Sy served as secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Prior to this, he was Unicef’s director of partnerships and resource development in New York. He also served as Unicef regional director for Eastern and Southern Africa and global emergency coordinator for the Horn of Africa.
Mr. Sy held leadership positions with the United Nations Development Program in New York, with the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and with the U.N.AIDS agency.
Before joining the United Nations, Mr. Sy served as director of health and development programs with Environment and Development Action in the Third World in Dakar, Senegal.
Mr. Sy holds a bachelor’s degree in arts and human sciences from the University of Dakar. He then pursued master’s studies in arts and German studies at the University of Graz, Austria, and graduated from the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. He was also awarded a postgraduate diploma in education from the École normale supérieure de Dakar. He speaks English, French and German, and is a national of Senegal.
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AZEEM AZHAR Azeem Azhar is the writer behind Exponential View, which explains FOUNDER how society and the political economy are changing under the EXPONENTIAL VIEW force of technology. With a unique background, he explains the intersection of breakthrough technologies and the economies and societies in which we live. Subscribers include investors, academics and journalists around the world. Mr. Azhar sits on the board of the Ada Lovelace Institute, the leading independent research institute focused on the ethics of A.I. He is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Digital Economy and Society. An award-winning entrepreneur and an investor in many technology start-ups, especially in the A.I. sector, Mr. Azhar speaks regularly in the media, including the BBC, Sky and CNN, among others, and is frequently invited to speak at prestigious events worldwide.
22 @athensforum ALICE BAH KUHNKE Alice Bah Kuhnke is a member of the European Parliament and vice MEMBER OF THE chair of the Greens/European Free Alliance (EFA) political group. EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT She is a full member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and EUROPEAN UNION Home Affairs, and is the Greens/EFA’s coordinator for the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality. She is also co-chair of the European Parliament’s intergroup on the Green New Deal. Before being elected to the European Parliament, she served as Sweden’s minister for culture and democracy.
Ms. Bah Kuhnke has been vocal on issues related to gender equality, sexual and reproductive rights, refugee rights and poverty during her time as a politician. As a feminist, she works every day for a more equal society where women have better access to resources and opportunities. She is deeply concerned about the backlash against women’s rights happening all over the world.
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KOSTAS Kostas Bakoyannis is mayor of Athens. Previously, he served as BAKOYANNIS governor of central Greece from 2014 to 2019, and as mayor of MAYOR OF ATHENS Karpenissi from 2011 to 2014. HELLENIC REPUBLIC ΒBorn in 1978, Mr. Bakoyannis graduated from Millfield School, England in 1996 before studying history and international relations at Brown University in the United States. He continued with postgraduate studies in the field of public policy with a specialization in macroeconomics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is currently working on his Ph.D. in political science and international relations at the University of Oxford.
Mr. Bakoyannis has worked at the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs and as executive manager in an investor relations and corporate communications company in Athens. He has also held positions at the European Parliament in Brussels and the World Bank in Kosovo.
Mr. Bakoyannis is vice president of the Hellenic Agency for Local Development and Local Government, a council member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and a Greek Leadership Council member of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
24 @athensforum KEITH BRADSHER Keith Bradsher is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Shanghai bureau chief SHANGHAI BUREAU CHIEF for The New York Times, having reopened the Shanghai bureau in THE NEW YORK TIMES 2016. He has previously served as the Hong Kong bureau chief for 14 years and the Detroit bureau chief for nearly six years for The Times. Before those postings, he was a Washington correspondent for The Times covering the Federal Reserve and international trade. He joined The Times in New York in 1989, reporting on transportation and then telecommunications.
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DANIEL Daniel Braun is the deputy head of cabinet of Ms Věra Jourová, vice BRAUN president of the European Commission for values and transparency. DEPUTY HEAD OF CABINET His current portfolio covers the topics of disinformation, human- EUROPEAN COMMISSION centric and ethical approaches to A.I., as well as economic and monetary affairs.
In the continuous effort to tackle racism, xenophobia and illegal hate speech, Mr. Braun was instrumental in initiating and conducting deliberations between the European Commission and four major IT platforms, which resulted in the signing of the Code of Conduct on countering illegal hate speech online in May 2016.
Previously, Mr. Braun served as the first deputy minister of regional development in charge of E.U. policy. He led the team preparing the strategy for European funds in the 2014 to 2020 programming period for the Czech Republic. Simultaneously he was head of the Czech negotiation team with the European Commission. His tenure culminated when the Czech Partnership Agreement was adopted by the European Commission in August 2014.
Mr. Braun is a graduate of the University of Economics, Prague and the Central European University in Budapest.
26 @athensforum ANDREAS BUMMEL Andreas Bummel is founder and executive director of Democracy EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Without Borders. He is also global coordinator of the Campaign for DEMOCRACY WITHOUT a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, which he helped establish BORDERS in 2007. Since 2019, he has been involved in promoting the instrument of a UN World Citizens’ Initiative. Mr. Bummel’s 2018 book “A World Parliament: Governance and Democracy in the 21st Century,” co-written with Jo Leinen, provides an overview of the challenges and prospects of democratic world governance, and was praised by international experts. In recognition of his work, Mr. Bummel was elected as a fellow of the World Academy of Art & Science. In addition, the Society for Threatened Peoples awarded him the association’s honorary membership. Mr. Bummel studied law and started his career as an analyst at a consultancy firm. Since 2006, he has worked as a full-time activist devoted to the cause of global democracy. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa.
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MARIJA Marija Pejčinovič Burič is the secretary general of the Council of PEJČINOVIČ BURIČ Europe, the pre-eminent Pan-European international organization in SECRETARY GENERAL, the field of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. COUNCIL OF EUROPE Prior to being elected to her current position in 2019, Ms. Pejčinovič Burič was deputy prime minister and minister for foreign and European affairs of the Republic of Croatia, having served on two previous occasions as state secretary for E.U. affairs.
During her tenure as a deputy in the Croatian Parliament, she chaired the delegation of the Croatia-E.U. Joint Parliamentary Committee, headed the delegation of the Croatian Parliament to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and served on a range of foreign and European-themed committees, including as substitute member of the Croatian Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
Earlier in her career, Ms. Pejččinovi čBurič held a number of senior positions relating to Croatia’s E.U. accession process. She went on to be a negotiator on several chapters in the context of Croatia’s E.U. accession negotiations.
She has written, lectured and consulted widely on European affairs. She has served as a president and board member for a number of organizations, and is a former secretary general of Europe House in Zagreb.
Ms. Pejčinovič Burič holds a bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Zagreb, and a master’s degree in European studies from the College of Europe.
28 @athensforum COLOMBE Colombe Cahen-Salvador is the co-founder and co-executive CAHEN-SALVADOR director of NOW. Her passion has always been human rights; she CO-FOUNDER AND believes that wherever we come from in the world and whatever our CO-EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR story is, we have (or should have) those in common. For her, human NOW rights are a powerful tool and the basis for people all over the world to unite and fight for a better future for all.
Ms. Cahen-Salvador previously co-founded Volt Europa, where she was the policy lead. In that capacity, she oversaw the full policy stack of the movement, as well as the first Pan-European electoral program. Before that, she worked in various human rights and humanitarian organizations, including Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Ms. Cahen-Salvador holds a Master of Laws from the Duke University School of Law, as well as a law degree from the University of Warwick.
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INFORMATION WARS
Mark Zuckerberg Is the Most Powerful Unelected Man in America Facebook is too big for democracy.
BY CHARLIE WARZEL OPINION WRITER AT LARGE.
On Thursday, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, announced the company’s “New Steps to Protect the U.S. Elections.” They include blocking new political ads in the week leading up to Election Day and attaching labels to posts containing misinformation, specifically related to the coronavirus and posts from politicians declaring victory before all the results are counted. One can — and many will — debate just how effective these measures will be at preventing election night chaos during a pandemic. (So far Facebook’s “misleading post” labels are vague to the point of causing additional confusion for voters. Similarly, blocking new political ads one week out from the vote ignores the vast amounts of disinformation Americans are subjected to year after year.) But what seems beyond debate is just how deeply Facebook has woven itself into the fabric of democracy. Reading Mr. Zuckerberg’s election security blog post reminded me of a line from a seminal 2017 article by the journalist Max Read. Three years ago, Mr. Read was struck by a similar pledge from Mr. Zuckerberg to “ensure the integrity” of the German elections. The commitment was admirable, he wrote, but also a tacit admission of Facebook’s immense power. “It’s a declaration that Facebook is assuming a level of power at once of the state and beyond it, as a sovereign, self-regulating, suprastate entity within which states themselves operate.” That power is consolidated in the decisions of its chief executive, who has voting control over the company. Here’s how Facebook’s co-founder Chris Hughes described Mr. Zuckerberg’s iron grip on the company in The Times last year: Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — that billions of people use every day. Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it. If Mr. Hughes’s description feels hyperbolic, it may be because such a consolidation of power is actually hard to comprehend. “I think we underestimate Facebook’s power constantly,” Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, told me. “It’s really hard for human beings to picture in their head the actual
30 @athensforum size and influence of the platform. Something like one out of three people use the thing — it’s like nothing we’ve encountered in human history. And I’m not sure Mark Zuckerberg is even willing to contemplate his influence. I’m not sure he’d ever sleep if he ever thought about how much power he has.” Facebook’s power is now self perpetuating. This week provided a great example. On Tuesday, Facebook and other platforms revealed a covert operation run by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency to sow division ahead of the presidential election by setting up a network of fake user accounts and websites. This time, though, the agency hired unwitting American freelance journalists to create the content. There’s a grim circle-of-life quality to this news. Facebook’s unprecedented growth and commandeering of the digital advertising market — alongside Google and others — helped accelerate the collapse of journalism’s broken business models. This led to consolidation, publications shuttering and layoffs of journalists everywhere. Facebook’s news dominance and mercurial distribution algorithms led to a rise of hyperpartisan pages and websites to fill the gaps and capitalize on the platform’s ability to monetize engagement, which in turn led to a glut of viral misinformation and disinformation that Facebook has been unable (or perhaps unwilling) to adequately police. This free-for-all has made Facebook the platform of choice for political manipulation. Those bad actors are now hiring and exploiting the very freelance journalists displaced by the collapse of the media industry that Facebook helped accelerate. Eventually, Facebook takes action to remove the bad actors, assuring the country of its commitment to democracy and cementing its role as a protector of free and fair elections. Facebook wins in every direction. Its size and power creates instability, the answer to which, according to Facebook, is to give the company additional authority. This cycle is unsustainable. This summer has shown that the platform has been a prime vector for the most destabilizing forces in American life. It has helped supercharge conspiracies around the dangerous QAnon movement. It has provided organization for, and amplified calls to action from, militia movements, which have been linked to deaths in U.S. cities at protests. Its moderation policies have failed to catch blatant rule violations around voter disenfranchisement, and the conspiracy theories that go viral on the platform have found their way, time and again, to President Trump’s mouth. Facebook employees seem to understand the situation is untenable and are speaking out internally against Mr. Zuckerberg’s leadership. “He seems truly incapable of taking personal responsibility for decisions and actions at Facebook,” one Facebook employee told BuzzFeed News last week after a company meeting in response to the violence in Kenosha, Wis. With just two months to go before the election, the nation’s focus is on the integrity of the electoral process. With the president threatening to undermine the results of the election, the stakes could not be higher. As Mr. Zuckerberg wrote on Thursday, “We all have a responsibility to protect our democracy.” But what does it say that one of those institutions charged with protecting democracy is, itself, structured more like a dictatorship? “Facebook had grown too big, and its users too complacent, for democracy,” Mr. Read concluded at the end of his 2017 piece. His words feel prescient today as Facebook, unchecked and unregulated by governments, positions itself as a primary line of defense to protect those institutions. At first, Mr. Zuckerberg’s recent election pledge might feel comforting (Somebody! Doing something!). But his plan is an admission of a great power that should make Americans uncomfortable. In our quest to fend off a would-be strongman’s power grab in one realm, we ought not allow a stronger man’s power grab in another. (Reprinted from NYT Opinion pages published on 2020/09/03)
athensdemocracyforum.com 31 booklet_4.pdf 1 22/09/2020 13:39
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co-founded by Greece and the European Union FERNANDO HENRIQUE Fernando Henrique Cardoso was president of Brazil for two CARDOSO successive mandates between 1995 and 2002. FORMER PRESIDENT A doctor of sociology and professor emeritus at the University of BRAZIL São Paulo, Mr. Cardoso is an eminent public intellectual whose work spans the fields of sociology, political science and economics.
A former president of the International Sociological Association, he has written or co-authored more than 23 scholarly books and 116 articles. His most influential work, “Dependency and Development in Latin America” (1969), a landmark in development studies, anticipated the concept of ‘globalization’.
In the seventies, Mr. Cardoso played a leading role in Brazil’s democratic resistance to authoritarian rule. Exiled for his opposition to Brazil’s military dictatorship, he was was deputy director at the U.N. Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning in Santiago, Chile, and a university professor in Europe and the US.
With the restoration of democracy in Brazil, Mr. Cardoso was elected senator for the state of São Paulo in 1982. As one of the founders of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, he served as minister of foreign relations from 1992 to 1993 before being appointed minister of finance. In 1995, he assumed the presidency of an unequal country with an unstable economy, and transformed Brazil into an open and prosperous nation.
He has taught as a professor at the University of Santiago in Chile, at Stanford, Berkeley and Brown in the U.S., at Cambridge in the U.K., and in France at Paris Nanterre, L’École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Collège de France. He has been awarded more than 20 honoris causa degrees for his academic work, and was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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KEVIN Kevin Casas-Zamora has served as secretary general of International CASAS-ZAMORA IDEA since August 2019. SECRETARY GENERAL Dr. Casas-Zamora brings more than 25 years of experience INTERNATIONAL IDEA in democratic governance as a researcher, analyst, educator, consultant and public official. He embodies the rare combination of a distinguished academic career – strongly focused on electoral systems and democratic institutions – with practical experience as a high-level public official in his home country as well as multilateral organizations.
Dr. Casas-Zamora is senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington, D.C.-based policy research centre. Until recently, he was a member of Costa Rica’s Presidential Commission for State Reform, and managing director at Analitica Consulting.
Previously, Dr. Casas-Zamora served as Costa Rica’s second vice president and minister of national planning, secretary for political affairs at the Organization of American States, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and national coordinator of the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Report.
He has taught at Georgetown University, George Washington University, and the University of Texas at Dallas, among many higher-education institutions.
Dr. Casas-Zamora holds a law degree from the University of Costa Rica, a master’s degree in government from the University of Essex, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Oxford. He has authored several studies on campaign finance, elections, democratization, citizen security and civil-military relations in Latin America. His doctoral thesis, entitled “Paying for Democracy in Latin America: Political Finance and State Subsidies for Parties in Costa Rica and Uruguay,” won the 2004 Jean Blondel PhD Prize awarded by the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), and was published in 2005 by the ECPR Press. He was selected among the class of Young Global Leaders by the World Economic Forum in 2007, and became a member of the Bretton Woods Committee in 2013.
34 @athensforum METE COBAN MBE As the founder and chief executive of international, youth-led FOUNDER AND CHIEF organization My Life My Say, Mete Coban is best known for founding EXECUTIVE the All-Party Parliamentary Group on a Better Brexit for Young MY LIFE MY SAY People and for contributing to the increased turnout of young people at the 2017 and 2019 U.K. general elections.
The youngest councilor ever elected to Hackney London Borough Council in 2014 at the age of 21, Mr. Coban is also chair of the Skills, Economy and Growth Commission. He previously worked on the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s election campaign, leading on youth engagement.
In the New Year 2020 honors list, Mr. Coban received an MBE for services to young people, in recognition of his efforts to make politics more accessible for the younger generation. He received the U.K. government’s National Democracy Week Changemaker of the Year Award in 2018. He was also shortlisted for the One Young World Politician of the Year Award in 2019, which celebrates the most impressive, impactful young politicians around the world.
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ARON CRAMER Aron Cramer is recognized globally as a pre-eminent authority PRESIDENT AND C.E.O. on sustainable business. In addition to leading BSR, which has BSR grown substantially throughout his tenure as president and C.E.O., he advises senior executives at BSR’s more than 250 member companies and other global businesses on the full spectrum of social and environmental issues.
Mr. Cramer joined BSR in 1995 as the founding director of its Business and Human Rights program and later opened BSR’s Paris office in 2002, where he worked until becoming president and C.E.O. in 2004. He serves on advisory boards to C.E.O.s at Barrick Gold, Marks & Spencer and SAP, and previously for AXA, Shell, and Nike. He is also a director of the Natural Capital Coalition, the International Integrated Reporting Council and We Mean Business, and serves as a member of the Steering Council of the Stewardship Board for the World Economic Forum’s Future of Consumption initiative.
Mr. Cramer speaks frequently at leading business forums and is widely quoted in top-tier media such as The Financial Times, Le Figaro, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He is co- author of the book “Sustainable Excellence: The Future of Business in a Fast-Changing World,” which spotlights innovative sustainability strategies that enable business success.
Prior to joining BSR, Mr. Cramer practiced law in San Francisco and worked as a journalist at ABC News in New York. He holds a B.A. from Tufts University and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
36 @athensforum KRISTEN DAVIS As former IT & innovation director at The International New York C.E.O. AND FOUNDER, Times, Kristen Davis has years of practical experience using CINQC technology to advance businesses and protect organizations around AND ADVISOR the world. SENTINEL.AI In 2016 she founded CinqC.co, where her work spans the technology ecosystem, from multinational organizations and innovation labs to start-ups, using technology to help enterprises and societies evolve.
Based in Paris, Ms. Davis regularly works in Estonia, one of the most digitally advanced nations in the world, where she is an advisor to Sentinel.ai, specialists in detecting deepfakes to protect media and democracy.
Ms. Davis is also chairwoman of the U.S. board of Apopo, a global nonprofit using scent detection animal technology to detect landmines and tuberculosis to save lives.
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ANNA Anna Diamantopoulou is the founder and President of DIKTIO DIAMANTOPOULOU Network for Reforms in Greece and Europe, an Athens-based think PRESIDENT tank. Her active presence in the Greek and European public spheres DIKTIO spans more than two decades. FOMER EUROPEAN COMMISSIONER AND A civil engineer by training with graduate studies in regional FORMER CABINET MINISTER development, Ms. Diamantopoulou has served as a member of the HELLENIC REPUBLIC Greek Parliament for 11 years and held ministerial appointments in the Ministry of Education, Lifelong Learning and Religious Affairs from 2009 to 2012, and the Ministry of Development, Competitiveness and Shipping from March to May 2012. During her tenure as education minister, the most instrumental legislation on educational reform in Greece was passed with a record parliamentary majority.
Ms. Diamantopoulou served as European commissioner for employment, social affairs and equal opportunities under the Prodi Commission between 1999 and 2004. A staunch pro-European public figure, she has devoted her career to lecturing, giving interviews, authoring books and publishing opinion pieces and contributions for the Greek and international media. She was a Fisher Family fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2012, a distinguished scholar at Singapore’s Lee Kuan School of Public Policy in 2015, and Richard von Weizsäcker fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy from 2016 to 2018.
Ms. Diamantopoulou was awarded the title of Officer of the Legion d’Honneur by the president of the French Republic in recognition of her contribution in the social realm, especially lifelong learning and combating youth unemployment. She has also been honored by the Confederation of Danish Industrialists for the creation of the white paper and program on corporate social responsibility.
38 @athensforum STEPHEN Stephen Dunbar-Johnson is the president, international of The New DUNBAR-JOHNSON York Times Company with responsibility for revenue oversight and PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL the strategic development of the Times Company’s international THE NEW YORK TIMES digital and print business. COMPANY Mr. Dunbar-Johnson was appointed president, international of The New York Times Company in October 2013 to lead its global expansion. Previously, he was publisher of The International Herald Tribune (IHT), a position he assumed in January 2008. Prior to that, he was executive vice president of the IHT with responsibility for worldwide commercial operations and strategic development. He oversaw the IHT’s expansion in Asia, the growth of its advertising revenue streams, the development of its conference business, new product development and the restructure of the newspaper’s cost base.
Before that, he held the position of senior vice president and commercial director, with primary responsibility for newspaper revenue streams. He also played a key role in the integration of advertising and other aspects of the IHT’s commercial operations when The New York Times took full ownership of the IHT in 2003.
Before joining the IHT, Mr. Dunbar-Johnson was U.K. advertising director of The Financial Times for 12 years, holding various positions in the paper’s advertising department, including manager in France and vice president of advertising in the Americas, based in New York.
Mr. Dunbar-Johnson was educated at Worth School and Kent University in England. He has completed an executive management program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Sulzberger program at the Columbia School of Journalism.
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ORIT Orit Farkash-Hacohen has served as Israel’s minister of strategic FARKASH-HACOHEN affairs and public diplomacy and a member of the security cabinet MINISTER OF STRATEGIC since the formation of Israel’s unity government in May 2020. She is AFFAIRS AND PUBLIC a member of the Knesset representing the Blue and White party. DIPLOMACY ISRAEL Ms. Farkash-Hacohen is a graduate of the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Dalia Dorner. She began working for a leading law firm in the private sector, and then moved to the public sector as head of litigation at Israel’s Antitrust Authority.
In 2003, Ms. Farkah-Hacohen served as the legal advisor to the Israel Public Utility Authority for Electricity and was later appointed as the first woman to serve as its chairperson and director general, a position she held for five years from 2011 to 2016. During her tenure as chairperson, she pushed for opening up Israel’s energy production market to competition and encouraged the creation of a renewable energy industry.
Until being appointed as a member of the Knesset, Ms. Farkash- Hacohen was a partner at a leading law firm in Israel, where she directed its energy and infrastructure practice.
Ms. Farkash-Hacohen attended Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, earning her master’s degree in public administration. She is a visiting fellow at the Consortium for Energy Policy Research at Harvard, as well as the Harvard Electricity Policy Group at Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Business and Government.
40 @athensforum NATHAN GARDELS Nathan Gardels is the editor in chief of Noema magazine. He is also CO-FOUNDER AND the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute. SENIOR ADVISOR Mr. Gardals previously served as editor in chief of The WorldPost, a BERGGRUEN INSTITUTE partnership with The Washington Post, as well as editor in chief of Global Viewpoint Network and Nobel Laureates Plus, both services of the the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media.
From 1985 to 2014 he also was editor of New Perspectives Quarterly, the journal of social and political thought published by Blackwell/Oxford.
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ANAND Anand Giridharadas is the author of “Winners Take All: The Elite GIRIDHARADAS Charade of Changing the World,” “The True American: Murder and AUTHOR Mercy in Texas,” and “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking.”
Mr. Giridharadas is an editor at large for Time magazine and was a foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times from 2005 to 2016. He has also written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. He is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and a former McKinsey analyst. He has also spoken on the main stage of TED.
His writing has been honored by the Society of Publishers in Asia and the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale. He is the recipient of the 2018 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year, Harvard University’s 2019 Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s 2015 Helen Bernstein Book Award.
He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
42 @athensforum JUAN GUAIDÓ Juan Guaidó was born in 1983 in Vargas, northern Venezuela. He PRESIDENT OF THE spent his childhood in Los Corales, a small town on the outskirts of VENEZUELAN La Guaira, a coastal city that has both the main maritime port and NATIONAL ASSEMBLY largest international airport in the country. His father is a former airline pilot, and his mother is a high school teacher.
Mr. Guaidó lived through the 1999 Vargas tragedy, a natural disaster that killed many of his closest friends and destroyed his school and home, leaving his family homeless. According to colleagues, the tragedy influenced his political views, especially the ineffective response to the disaster from the newly elected government of Hugo Chávez.
Mr. Guaidó studied industrial engineering at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, where he was one of the founders of the Venezuelan Student Movement and an avid athlete. After the 2007 Venezuelan protests, in which he played an important role, he helped found the Voluntad Popular party in 2009. During this time, he met his wife and mother of his child Fabiana Rosales, an activist from Mérida, Venezuela.
On January 10, 2019, Mr. Guaidó was chosen as president of the National Assembly of Venezuela, and sworn in on January 23. Due to the lack of a legitimate presidency as stated in Articles 233 and 333 of the national Constitution, he declared himself interim president of Venezuela shortly after assuming the presidency of the legislature, with the objective of forming a transitional government and calling for free and fair elections. He is recognized as the legitimate leader of Venezuela by 60 countries and the Organization of American States.
athensdemocracyforum.com 43 15,24x20,32cm YUVAL NOAH HARARI Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and the bestselling HISTORIAN AND PROFESSOR author of “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” “21 Lessons for the 21st Century,” and “Sapiens: A Graphic History.” His books have sold 27.5 million copies in 60 languages, and he is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today.
Born in Haifa, Israel, in 1976, Professor Harari received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 2002, and is currently a lecturer in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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KATIE HARBATH Katie Harbath is a global public policy director at Facebook, where GLOBAL PUBLIC POLICY she has led the company’s efforts in elections around the world DIRECTOR since 2014. FACEBOOK Prior to Facebook, Ms. Harbath was chief digital strategist at the National Republican Senatorial Committee during the 2010 cycle. She previously led digital strategy in positions at DCI Group, the 2008 Rudy Giuliani presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee.
Ms. Harbath sits on the board of the Atlantic Council, and was named among the top 50 people to watch in politics by Politico in 2014 and the 2009 Rising Stars by Campaigns and Elections magazine. She holds a B.A. in journalism and political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
46 @athensforum CLOVER HOGAN Clover Hogan is a 21-year-old climate activist, researcher on eco- CLIMATE ACTIVIST anxiety, and the founder of Force of Nature, a youth-led organization empowering Gen Z to step up, rather than shut down, in the face of the climate crisis.
At 16, Ms. Hogan was lobbying decision makers at the Paris climate meeting when she realized that the threat greater even than climate change was the universal feeling of powerlessness in the face of it. She made it her mission to mobilize mind-sets. After graduating from the Green School in Indonesia, she worked with Impossible Foods founder and C.E.O. Pat O. Brown on national youth strategy and consulted with multinationals alongside John Elkington, a global authority on business as a force for good, before launching Force of Nature. Her team helps young people turn anxiety into agency. Through virtual classrooms and campaigns, their 2020 ambition is to motivate a global network of young activists ready to inspire change from their living rooms.
In June 2020, Ms. Hogan launched the Force of Nature podcast, a nine-part series featuring ordinary people doing extraordinary things to save the planet, from the woman who started a global movement out of her backyard to the lawyer responsible for the world’s most historic climate agreement and a three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee.
Ms. Hogan is also campaign strategist for #MyEcoResolution, serves as a trustee to Global Action Plan, and is on the Advisory Board of the National Lottery’s Climate Action Fund.
athensdemocracyforum.com 47 SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS
CAPITALISM IN A POST-COVID WORLD
Are You Willing to Give Up Your Privilege? Philanthropy alone won’t save the American dream.
BY DARREN WALKER MR. WALKER IS PRESIDENT OF THE FORD FOUNDATION.
I have lived on both sides of American inequality. I began life in the bottom 1 percent but found my way to the top. And I know, all too personally, that the distance between the two never has been greater. Last winter, at a black-tie gala — the kind of event where guests pay $100,000 for a table — I joined some of New York’s wealthiest philanthropists in an opulently decorated ballroom. I had the ominous sense that we were eating lobster on the Titanic. That evening, a billionaire who made his money in private equity delivered a soliloquy to me about America’s dazzling economic growth and record low unemployment among African-Americans in particular. I reminded him that many of these jobs are low-wage and dead-end, and that the proliferation of these very jobs is one reason that inequality is growing worse. He simply looked past me, over my shoulder. No chief executive, investor or rich person wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and says, “Today, I want to go out and create more inequality in America.” And yet, all too often, that is exactly what happens. Even before the coronavirus, before the lockdowns, and before the murder of George Floyd — during the longest sustained economic expansion in American history — income inequality in America had reached staggering levels. Social mobility, the ability for a person to climb from poverty to security as I did, had all but disappeared. This contributes to a hopelessness and cynicism that undermines our shared ideals and institutions, pits us against one another, and drives communities further apart. That’s why I am worried about our democracy, deeply and for the first time in my life. I still believe in the American idea and in the values to which we have always aspired. Our nation’s generosity of spirit made my life’s journey possible. It was expressed through the public schools I attended, and government programs like Head Start and Pell grants that helped me, along with private philanthropy. Without them, I might have been ensnared in poverty or a structurally racist policing and criminal-justice system. So I feel a profound obligation to state what has become clearer every day: If we are to keep the American dream alive, our democratic values flourishing, and our market system strong, then we must redesign and rebuild the engine that drives them. Inequality in America was not born of the market’s invisible hand. It was not some unavoidable destiny. It was created by the hands and sustained effort of people who engineered benefits for themselves, to the detriment of everyone else. American inequality was decades in the making, one expensive lobbyist and policy change at a time. It will take a concerted effort to reverse all of this, and to remake America in the process. In recent weeks, I have been invited to join dozens of conversations with many well-intentioned chief executives and generous philanthropists to talk about what they should be doing during an upheaval that feels like 1918, 1932 and 1968 all at once. The irony is not lost on me: Many of those who are eagerly extending Zoom invitations are complicit in a system that desperately needs changing. I do see progress. I see business leaders like Marc Benioff, Ursula Burns, Ray Dalio, Paul Polman and others acknowledge that we conduct our daily work in a system built on unfair incentives. This system puts the
48 @athensforum interests of capital over labor, while it compounds privilege at the expense of opportunity. The boardroom elite are beginning to recognize that these unfairly structured incentives have grossly distorted our economy. I see an evolving understanding that our twisted economy is an existential threat that has pushed our republic to a breaking point. This awareness is necessary. But it is not sufficient. The old playbook — giving back through philanthropy as a way of ameliorating the effects of inequality — cannot heal what ails our nation. It cannot address the root causes of this inequality — what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.” Instead, those of us with power and privilege must grapple with a more profound question: What are we willing to give up? If we, the beneficiaries of a system that perpetuates inequality, are trying to reform this system that favors us, we will have to give up something. Here are a few of the special privileges and benefits we should be willing to surrender: the intricate web of tax policies that bolster our wealth; the entrenched system in American colleges of legacy admissions, which gives a leg up to our children; and above all, the expectation that, because of our money, we are entitled to a place at the front of the line. I spent the first part of my career on Wall Street, and I believe that capitalism is the best means of organizing an economy. But capitalism must be reformed if we are to save our democracy. This will require rejecting Milton Friedman’s outmoded ideology: the dogma that a company must put shareholder value above all other objectives. It will require that corporations operate, in the words of the Business Roundtable, “for the benefit of all stakeholders — customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders.” Reforming capitalism also requires policymakers to transform a financial system that favors short-term returns, gives companies incentives to take on huge amounts of debt, and protects the special tax treatment for carried interest, a gift for private equity. We must further ask: How can we create new policies that advance long-term, sustainable investment? How do we encourage investment in people and their skills, not just in automation and robotics? What does it mean to write a tax code that reduces inequality? Too often, public policy does just the opposite: In 1982, a Securities and Exchange Commission rule allowed corporations to repurchase their stock. This created an environment in which companies accelerated their use of stock options and equity as forms of executive compensation, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. This has encouraged companies to increase share prices, at the expense of wages and benefits for workers, and created perverse incentives for companies to authorize buybacks. In 2018 alone, American companies spent more than $1 trillion repurchasing their own stock. Our economy is unbalanced because conscious choices, in the aggregate, amount to a conscienceless capitalism. These choices erode democracy and foment distrust. We, the people, can make different choices. And we, the wealthy and privileged, should lean in to our discomfort. This is the most pressing work of our time, and it will be difficult. Our present is deeply rooted in historical inequalities that must methodically be rectified. But difficulty is not an excuse to allow American capitalism to grow more distorted, corrupt and unjust. It does not relieve us of our duty to strengthen and improve a system that, if rebalanced, could once again make America a beacon for upward mobility. Without hope, American dreams deferred or denied will continue, as the poet Langston Hughes wrote, to explode. With hope, and through it, we can reimagine the dream and invite many millions more to share in its promise. (Reprinted from NYT Opinion pages published on 2020/06/25) athensdemocracyforum.com 49 SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS
BEATA JAVORCIK Beata Javorcik is chief economist of the European Bank for CHIEF ECONOMIST Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in London. She is on EUROPEAN BANK leave from the University of Oxford, where she is the first woman to FOR RECONSTRUCTION hold a statutory professorship in economics. AND DEVELOPMENT She is also a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, a member of the Royal Economic Society’s Executive Committee, and a director of the International Trade Program at the Center for Economic Policy Research in London.
Before taking up her position at Oxford, she worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., where she focused on research, lending operations and policy advice.
She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Yale and a B.A. in economics (summa cum laude) from the University of Rochester.
50 @athensforum KATHERINE KELAIDIS Katherine Kelaidis is resident scholar at the National Hellenic RESIDENT SCHOLAR Museum in Chicago. She holds a B.A. in classical languages from NATIONAL HELLENIC the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in classics from MUSEUM, CHICAGO the University of London.
Dr. Kelaidis is currently completing a diplôme d’études supérieures in biblical studies at the Institut Catholique de Paris.
athensdemocracyforum.com 51 SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS
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52 @athensforum VALERIE KELLER IMAGINE Co-Founder and C.E.O. Valerie Keller helps leaders to use CO-FOUNDER AND C.E.O. their power for good. With deep expertise in transformation, she IMAGINE helps global corporations become purpose led and future fit, and convenes cross-sector coalitions to accelerate tipping points for humanity’s global goals.
Prior to IMAGINE, Ms. Keller founded the EY Beacon Institute to redefine 21st-century business with executives and entrepreneurs pioneering conscious capitalism. As global markets executive director at EY, she designed the purpose-led transformation initiative to help corporations making the shift from being short- term profit-maximization machines to multistakeholder responsible businesses. She has advised U.S. Congressional Committees and facilitated public-private partnerships across businesses, government agencies and N.G.O.s.
Ms. Keller is also an associate fellow of the University of Oxford Saïd Business School, where she directs executive education programs. She was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and serves on the Harvard Kennedy School Women’s Leadership Board.
athensdemocracyforum.com 53 SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS
CHAKER KHAZAAL Chaker Khazaal is a Palestinian-Canadian author, reporter, and AUTHOR, REPORTER speaker. He is the former editor in chief of digital publishing platform AND SPEAKER StepFeed and a HuffPost contributor.
Born in 1987 as a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, Mr. Khazaal grew up in the Bourj el Barajneh camp in Beirut. At a young age, he participated in several local plays and starred in the Palestinian film “Sugar of Jaffa.” He later immigrated to Canada. As one of four recipients of the Global Leader of Tomorrow Award in 2005, he studied at York University in Toronto, graduating in 2009 with a B.A. in international development studies.
Mr. Khazaal worked as a public speaker and web show host before publishing his first novel, “Confessions of a War Child (Part One)” in March 2013; followed by part two, subtitled “Lia,” in 2014; and the third novel in the trilogy, subtitled “Sahara,” in 2015. In 2017, he released his fourth novel, “Tale of Tala.”
Mr. Khazaal is an advocate for refugees and aspiring young writers. A savvy communicator, he has spoken via a number of platforms and at events worldwide.
In 2015, Esquire Middle East named him Man of the Year, and in 2016, he was ranked first by Arabian Business magazine in the 100 Most Powerful Arabs Under 40.
54 @athensforum SOFIA KOUVELAKI Sofia Kouvelaki is the C.E.O. of The Home Project. She was C.E.O. the program manager of the Bodossaki Foundation program for THE HOME PROJECT unaccompanied minors and, inter alia, in charge of projects on social welfare provision to socially vulnerable groups. She has worked at the United Nations and at Unicef in the economic analysis and social policy division, and as an adviser and researcher for the public and private sector in Greece. She holds a Master of Science degree in international political economy from the London School of Economics and a master’s degree in international economics from Sciences Po, Paris. She has completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and international relations at Brown University in the United States and a certificate from the Harvard program on refugee trauma and recovery.
Ms. Kouvelaki has given talks and participated in panel discussions on unaccompanied minors and the refugee crisis in Greece at the U.S. Congress, Harvard University, Brown University, the University of London, TEDx Athens, the Building Bridges Film Festival, and many other institutions in Europe and the U.S.
Previously, Ms. Kouvelaki worked as a researcher and producer on the Greek Mega TV network’s “War Zone” documentary series, and was a contributing author at HuffPost’s Greek edition.
She is currently based in Athens.
athensdemocracyforum.com 55 SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS
NATHAN LAW Nathan Law was a student leader during the 2014 pro-democracy POLITICIAN AND ACTIVIST Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. He was also one of the five student representatives who later took part in a televised debate with government officials to discuss political reform.
Two years after the demonstrations, Mr. Law and other pro- democracy leaders founded Demosistõ, a pro-democracy political party advocating autonomy for Hong Kong, as enshrined in the 50-year “one country, two systems” framework agreed in 1997 when the British government handed sovereignty over Hong Kong to China. He also co-founded the Network of Young Democratic Asians to promote exchanges among social activists in Japan, Taiwan, Myanmar, Thailand and other East Asian countries.
Mr. Law ran in the 2016 Hong Kong Legislative Council elections. He received 50,818 votes to take one of six available seats in the Hong Kong Island constituency, becoming the youngest-ever legislative councilor in Hong Kong’s history. His appointment was later overturned following Beijing’s constitutional reinterpretation of the laws governing the oath-taking ceremony at the Council’s inaugural meeting.
In 2017, Mr. Law and other prominent pro-democracy leaders were jailed for their participation in the 2014 protests, sparking widespread global concern over Beijing’s crackdown on human rights and political freedom in Hong Kong. Later released on bail, he was barred from running for public office for five years under the terms of his sentence.
In 2018, Mr. Law, fellow student activists Joshua Wong and Alex Chow, and the entire Umbrella Movement were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by members of the U.S. Congress. The nomination was also supported by members of the British Parliament.
Mr. Law is currently studying for a master’s degree in East Asian studies at Yale University.
56 @athensforum TELE LAWAL As an engagement manager at My Life My Say, Tele Lawal LABOUR PARTY communicates and connects with external stakeholders through COUNCILOR My Life My Say’s youth initiatives. Her role primarily focuses on LONDON BOROUGH OF coordinating and designing programs across the UK, with the aim of HAVERING COUNCIL engaging young people in political and social affairs. Prior to My Life AND ENGAGEMENT My Say she worked in Parliament as an advisor. MANAGER MY LIFE MY SAY In 2018, Ms. Lawal became the first Black councilor to be elected to the London Borough of Havering Council, as well as the youngest. She is a member of Havering Council’s Crime and Disorder Committee, as well as the Children and Learning Committee. She also uses her specialist expertise to serve on police advisory boards, such as the MOPAC (Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime) Independent Advisory Group and the Stop and Search Monitoring Group.
Ms. Lawal is passionate about tackling discrimination. She founded a diversity network with a national bank in the UK, which has over 3,000 members.
athensdemocracyforum.com 57 SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS
IAN LESSER Ian O. Lesser is vice president of the German Marshall Fund (GMF) VICE PRESIDENT of the United States. He also serves as executive director of the GERMAN MARSHALL Transatlantic Center, GMF’s Brussels office, and leads GMF’s work FUND OF THE UNITED in the Mediterranean, Turkey and the wider Atlantic. Prior to joining STATES GMF, he was vice president and director of studies at the Pacific Council on International Policy, the western partner of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Dr. Lesser came to the Pacific Council from RAND, where he spent over a decade as a senior analyst and research manager specializing in strategic studies. From 1994 to 1995, he was a member of the secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, responsible for Turkey, Southern Europe, North Africa, and the multilateral track of the Middle East peace process.
A frequent commentator for international media, Dr. Lesser has written extensively on international policy issues. His books and reports include “Morocco’s New Geopolitics: A Wider Atlantic Perspective” (2012), “Beyond Suspicion: Rethinking US- Turkish Relations” (2007), “Security and Strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean” (2006), “Turkish Foreign Policy in an Age of Uncertainty” (2003), “Greece’s New Geopolitics” (2001), and “Countering the New Terrorism” (1999).
Dr. Lesser is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. He serves on the advisory boards of the NATO Defense College Foundation, the International Spectator, Turkish Policy Quarterly, and Insight Turkey. He was a senior fellow of the Onassis Foundation and the Luso-American Foundation, and a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. He also serves as a senior adviser to the Commander, United States European Command.
Dr. Lesser was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, the London School of Economics, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and received his D.Phil from Oxford University.
58 @athensforum ANTIGONE LYBERAKI Antigone Lyberaki is the general manager of SolidarityNow, an GENERAL MANAGER N.G.O. active in social inclusion and refugee protection. She is also SOLIDARITYNOW a professor of economics at Panteion University in Athens. She studied at Athens University and holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University.
She has also taught in New York, Paris and London. Her research interests focus on the interplay between social structures and economic performance, as evidenced in gender, migration and aging and small family enterprises. She has published extensively and has participated in civil society initiatives related to women’s rights, migration, and development.
She previously served as a member of the Greek Parliament for a small party of the liberal center between 2015 and 2019.
athensdemocracyforum.com 59 SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS
KISHORE MAHBUBANI A veteran diplomat, professor of philosophy and author, Kishore DISTINGUISHED FELLOW, Mahbubani is currently a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research ASIA RESEARCH INSTITUTE Institute, National University of Singapore. His careers in diplomacy NATIONAL UNIVERSITY and academia have taken him from Singapore’s chargé d’affaires to OF SINGAPORE wartime Cambodia in the mid-‘70s and being appointed president of the United Nations Security Council from January 2001 until May 2002, to serving as the founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy from 2004 to 2017.
Mr. Mahbubani writes and speaks widely on the rise of Asia, geopolitics and global governance. He is also a prolific author, having published eight books: “Can Asians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East and West”, “Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the West,” “The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East,” “The Great Convergence: Asia, the West, and the Logic of One World,” “Can Singapore Survive?”, “The ASEAN Miracle: A Catalyst for Peace” (co-authored with Jeffery Sng), “Has the West Lost It?: A Provocation”, and “Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy,” which was released in March 2020.
Mr. Mahbubani’s articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times and Foreign Affairs have earned him global recognition as “the muse of the Asian century.” Throughout his career, he has consistently challenged conventional wisdom on the big questions of our time.
Mr. Mahbubani has been listed among the world’s top 100 public intellectuals by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine, and named among the Top 50 individuals who will shape the debate on the future of capitalism by The Financial Times. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in October 2019.
60 @athensforum MARION MARÉCHAL After graduating in law and management, Marion Maréchal became FORMER MEMBER OF THE the youngest deputy in the history of the French Republic following FRENCH PARLIAMENT AND her election in 2012. MANAGING DIRECTOR ISSEP A member of the Rassemblement National party, Ms. Maréchal also led the opposition at the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Regional Council.
In 2017, Ms. Maréchal decided to leave politics to found a private school of political science and management in Lyon, L’Institut des sciences sociales, économiques et politiques, known as ISSEP.
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DEMOCRACY IN A TIME OF CRISIS
Despotism and Democracy in the Age of the Virus
The battle for humanity and solidarity in the post-American world.
BY ROGER COHEN OPINION COLUMNIST
The first major crisis of the post-American world is ugly and is going to get worse. A pandemic required a pan-planet reaction. Instead it found Pangloss in the White House blowing smoke and insisting, as disaster loomed, that it was still the best of all possible worlds in America. “There’s not been even a hint of an aspiration of American leadership,” Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, told me. “That is fundamentally new.” It is. The world’s American reference point has vanished. The prize for greatest disappearing act of the coronavirus crisis goes to Mike Pompeo, the American secretary of state. Into the global vacuum has stepped, well, nobody. No amount of flag-waving Chinese officials disembarking from planes onto European soil with offers of masks and ventilators can obscure the fact that all this began with a biological Chernobyl in Wuhan, covered up for weeks as a result of the terror that is the currency of dictatorships. The Asian powers that have emerged best from this disaster are the medium-size democracies of South Korea and Taiwan. The great competition of despots and democrats for the upper hand in the 21st century is still open. The Great Depression that began in 1929 produced two distinct results on either side of the Atlantic. In the United States, it led, beginning in 1933, to Roosevelt’s New Deal. In Europe, it led to Hitler’s rise to power in the same year, the spread of fascism, and eventually devastation on an unimaginable scale. This time, as the coronavirus stops production and leaves more than 26 million Americans newly unemployed while in Europe it causes salaries to be “nationalized,” in the words of Emmanuel Macron, the French president, the effects of an economic collapse not seen in almost a century may be flipped. Donald Trump’s United States, which the German magazine Der Spiegel now calls “the American patient,” is ripe for an authoritarian lurch. Awash in Trump’s lies, battered by the virus, buried in incompetence, lacerated by division and ruled by a lunatic unbound, the country approaches an election in November whose theft, subversion or postponement are credible scenarios. Nothing in Trump’s psyche allows him to conceive of defeat, his family’s prospects out of power are dim and crisis is the perfect pretext for a power grab. War — and this pandemic has similarities to one — fosters “executive aggrandizement,” as James Madison warned.
Trump embodies the personal and societal collapse he is so skilled in exploiting. Insult the press. Discredit independent judges. Remove the checks. Upend the balances. Abolish truth. Pocket the system step by step. Mainline Lysol. Dictatorship 101.
62 @athensdemocracy Europe is a different story. Its division between the prosperous north and the poorer south sharpened by the pandemic, and its fracture line between the democracies of Western Europe and the illiberal or authoritarian systems of Poland and Hungary further exposed, the continent faces a severe test of its capacity for unity and solidarity. It has underperformed, but I would not write it off. The initial European reaction to the pandemic was weak — Lombardy will not soon forget its abandonment — and the European Union’s response to the March 30 assertion of near-total autocratic power by the Hungarian leader, Viktor Orban, was pathetic, equivalent to appeasement. For the Union to commit to providing billions of dollars in aid to Hungary through the Corona Response Investment Initiative on the very day Orban began ruling by decree for an indefinite period was “mad, bad and dangerous,” as Jacques Rupnik, a French political scientist, told me. Orban is a politician Trump admires. But in Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, Europe has again discovered a leader inspiring in her candor and sanity and steadiness. Cometh the hour, cometh the woman. European societies, with their buffering welfare states that are covering the wages of laid-off workers and providing universal health care, are better prepared than the United States for a disaster on this scale. Governments and the European Central Bank have now mobilized massive resources. Macron, in an interview with The Financial Times, has made the argument that the virus should ultimately reinforce multilateralism and herald the return of the “human” over the “economic” — or, roughly interpreted, European solidarity over American unfettered capitalism. Certainly, the underpaid first responders, garbage collectors, farm workers, truckers, supermarket cashiers, delivery people and the rest who have kept people alive and fed while the affluent took to the hills or the beaches have delivered a powerful lesson in the need for greater equity and a different form of globalization. People suffocate from Covid-19. They may also suffocate one day, as Macron pointed out, from an overheated, overexploited planet. Whether the lesson will be heeded through a radical rebalancing, both personal and corporate, is another story. What is clear is that if the European Union does not stand up for liberal democratic values, those values will be orphaned in the menacing world of Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping. I said the great 21st century democracy-dictatorship battle is far from over. Emergencies serve autocrats but can also demonstrate the failings of their systems and provoke radical rethinking. The pivotal date in the struggle is now Nov. 3. If Trump wins, assuming the election is held, and Pangloss continues his assault on truth, the Merkel-Macron democratic camp will struggle. If Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, wins, the United States will not recover an American-led world, because that world is gone forever, but the return of American decency and principle will make an enormous difference. To begin with, autocrats will no longer have an American carte blanche. “The virus is attacking an incoherent, deglobalized world,” Bildt said. “And as long as that is the case, the virus wins.”
Roger Cohen has been a columnist for The Times since 2009. His columns appear Wednesday and Saturday. He joined The Times in 1990, and has served as a foreign correspondent and foreign editor. @NYTimesCohen
athensdemocracyforum.com 63 SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS
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64 @athensforum COSTAS MICHAELIDES With over three decades of international banking experience, CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD Costas Michaelides has served in a number of prominent executive NATIONAL BANK OF GREECE positions in international credit and financial organizations.
He was appointed nonexecutive chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Bank of Greece in December 2017.
From 2013, he served as global head of strategic change at UBS for two years. Previously he spent eight years as regional chief operating officer at Credit Suisse. Prior to that, he served as chief operating officer, managing director and head of European finance, administration and operations at Credit Suisse First Boston from 2000 to 2005; chief operating officer and managing director at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette from 1999 to 2000; and spent over a decade at Merrill Lynch as chief financial officer and chief administrative officer. Previously, he was treasurer at Salomon Brothers U.K. and served in various positions at ExxonMobil, including treasurer and financial analyst.
Mr. Michaelides holds an M.B.A. in finance from Columbia Business School, a doctorate in economics and international affairs from the University of Denver, Colorado, and a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from Ripon College.
athensdemocracyforum.com 65 SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS
FARIDA NABOUREMA Farida Nabourema is a writer and political activist. She has been WRITER, POLITICAL ACTIVIST a fearless advocate for democracy and human rights in Togo since AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR she was a teenager. Through more than 400 articles on her blog TOGOLESE CIVIL LEAGUE and other sites, she denounces corruption and dictatorship and promotes a form of progressive Pan-Africanism. In 2014, she published “La Pression de l’Oppression,” in which she discusses the different forms of oppression that people face throughout Africa, highlighting the need for oppressed people to fight back.
Ms. Nabourema co-founded the Togolese Civil League, an N.G.O. that promotes democracy and the rule of law, and has served as its executive director since 2017. Prior to this, she founded the Faure Must Go movement at the age of 20 in 2011, supporting and organizing with Togolese youths to stand against the dictatorial regime of Faure Gnassingbé.
Faure Must Go has become the slogan for the civil resistance movement in Togo, of which Ms. Nabourema is one of the most well-known leaders. She was awarded the Young Advocate of the Year and the Female African Youth of the Year in 2017 by Africa Youth Awards for her contribution to raising awareness on the oldest military regime in Africa. In 2018, she was named as one of four crusaders keeping the dream of democracy alive in an article by Time magazine and, in 2019, she featured among Avance Media’s inaugural list of the 100 Most Influential African Women.
66 @athensforum ARCHBISHOP NIKITAS Nikitas Lulias was elected Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Great GREEK ORTHODOX ARCHBISHOP Britain in June 2019 by the Sacred and Holy Synod of the OF GREAT BRITAIN Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. As head of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain, his jurisdiction covers over 100 parishes and monasteries in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland.
Prior to his appointment, Archbishop Nikitas served as Metropolitan bishop of Dardanelles and director of the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute, affiliated with the Graduate Theological Union at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2007. Previously, he spent over a decade as the first Metropolitan of Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, covering China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore. He previously led parishes in Chicago, Illinois, and Merrillville, Indiana, and served as chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Diocese of Chicago for eight years. He was also a legislative assistant to Congressman Michael Bilirakis for two years.
Archbishop Nikitas earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida and a master’s degree in divinity from the Hellenic College and Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Massachusetts. He has also undertaken graduate studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy.
Archbishop Nikitas has lectured on Orthodox theology at Loyola University Chicago and the Holy Spirit Seminary College of Theology & Philosophy in Hong Kong. He serves as chairman of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Task Force on Modern Slavery and its Committee on Youth. He is also a co-chair of the Elijah Interfaith Institute’s Steering Committee. Among myriad community service activities and initiatives to promote education and interfaith dialogue, he has undertaken development work on behalf of International Orthodox Christian Charities.
Archbishop Nikitas is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades. He speaks fluent English, Greek and Russian, and has a working knowledge of Latin, Church Slavonic and Spanish.
athensdemocracyforum.com 67 SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS
KHALIL OSIRIS Khalil Osiris is an international speaker whose inspiring talks teach FOUNDER people to break free from their self-imposed limitations. TRUTH & RECONCILIATION Mr. Osiris spent 20 years in prison and earned his bachelor’s and CONVERSATIONS master’s degrees from Boston University during his incarceration. He transformed his life and emerged from prison with a deep understanding of how to use personal crises and challenges as opportunities for self-improvement.
Mr. Osiris is the founder of Reflecting Freedom Network (RFN), a nonprofit organization started with a community of individuals committed to building public/private sector partnerships to promote economic and social justice through education, career development and innovative skills training. RFN’s mission is to provide accessible, affordable pathways for people to build freedom and opportunities for success together.
A passion for restorative justice has inspired his 30 years of experience developing programs used in prisons and communities in America and South Africa. His re-entry program, “Psychology of Incarceration,” has been used in over 70 prisons across America. He moved to South Africa in 2011, and for the next seven years worked as a consultant in schools and prisons. He hosted a popular TV show, “Each One, Teach One,” which won the 2016 South African Film and Television Award (SAFTA) for best factual educational program.
In July 2019, Mr. Osiris organized the first citywide Nelson Mandela International Day observances in Jacksonville and St. Augustine, Florida. Supported by the Jacksonville Jaguars football team, this historic event celebrated the outstanding contributions to social justice by individuals who are leaders in education, business, criminal justice reform and re-entry services for returning citizens.
Mr. Osiris is an advisor and board member for the House of Mandela Family Foundation. He is also on the Advisory Board of the Athens Democracy Forum.
Mr. Osiris conducts thought-provoking talks on a range of urgent social and criminal justice issues, including democracy and justice, hiring returning citizens and the psychology of incarceration.
68 @athensforum FRÉDÉRIC PIERUCCI Frédéric Pierucci worked for almost 20 years at Alstom, a French AUTHOR, FORMER SENIOR multinational energy and transport group. In 2013, while he was EXECUTIVE AT ALSTOM, the director of the company’s boiler division, he was arrested in the AND FOUNDING PARTNER United States on charges of corruption. IKARIAN In “The American Trap: My Battle to Expose America’s Secret Economic War Against the Rest of the World,” written with French journalist Matthieu Aron, Mr. Pierucci tells of his arrest, imprisonment for more than two years in the U.S., and trial. He also investigates behind the scenes of this case in relation to the takeover of Alstom by General Electric, and the use of U.S. law as an economic weapon. “The American Trap” received the 2019 New Human Rights Literary Prize.
In 2015, Mr. Pierucci created IKARIAN, a consulting firm specializing in operational and strategic compliance, and bringing together experts on compliance and business strategy. Today, IKARIAN counts among its clients multiple CAC 40 companies and international banks.
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