Virtual Event - Athens Democracy Forum

Virtual Event

SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020

Under the Patronage of H.E. the President of the Hellenic Republic Katerina Sakellaropoulou

In Cooperation With

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Welcome

The Pandemic Was Supposed to Be Great for Strongmen. What Happened?

Speakers

Mark Zuckerberg Is the Most Powerful Unelected Man in America

Are You Willing to Give Up Your Privilege?

Despotism and Democracy in the Age of the Virus

Capitalism and ‘Culturecide’

Reform the Police? Guess Who Funds My State’s Officials

Moderators

Advisory Board

Our Sponsors

Our Partners

Important Information

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Learn more about our efforts at fb.com/about/elections

We’ve taken critical steps to better secure our platforms and provide transparency during the upcoming elections, including:

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Paid Advertisement

• Tripled safety and security

teams to 35,000 people

• Implemented 5-step

ad verification

• Removed billions of

fake accounts

• Launching new

Voting Information Center

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@ebrd


DEAR GUESTS

I bid you a hearty welcome to the 2020 Athens Democracy Forum, which we are proud to convene inassociation 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 andsometimes 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 thatend, 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

Welcome

@ebrd


MISSIONTo 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 practicesCitizen 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.

Democracy & Culture Foundation

@athensforum8

SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020, ATHENS

Policy idea Creation

Citizen PolicyProposals

StressTesting & approval

Actual Finessing

Reform

Ancient values + fresh approaches + benchmarking supported by a curated library of knowledge + case studies

Co-created by stakeholders through an incubation lab and a series of seminars

Athens Democracy Forum and a cluster of conferences. Citizens’ assemblies . Cultural activities

Influencers bridging the citizen-leader gap + Caucus of parliamentar ians

Via activist and government partnerships and leader development

Figure 1 - the DCF Impact Chain

Think(DEVELOPMENT) Actively supporting the search and articulation of new ideas and concepts that can translate into better democratic processes and a wider understanding of culture

Talk (CALIBRATION) Engaging in constructive and inclusive dialogue and disseminating these innovative ideas and concepts through all possible enablers

Do (ACTION) Carrying out in cooperation with activist partners, conceptually original and practically critical activities related to the promotion of democracy and culture


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.

@athensforum10


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GUARDIAN OF HUMAN RIGHTS, DEMOCRACY AND THE RULE OF LAW

www.coe.intwww.coe.int/echr


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

@athensforum12

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:

City of Athens Democracy Award



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

@athensforum14


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

THE STRONG AND THE WEAK


— 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.”


Speakers

Katerina Sakellaropoulou was born on 30 May 1956 in Thessaloniki, Greece. She has roots, from the side of her mother, Aliki Paraskeva, in Stavroupoli (region of Xanthi). Her father, Nikolaos Sakellaropoulos, 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.

H.E. THE PRESIDENT OF THE

HELLENIC REPUBLIC

KATERINA SAKELLAROPOULOU

Kyriakos Mitsotakis has served as Prime Minister of Greece since July 2019. He has been president of Nea Demokratia, the New Democracy Party, since 2016.

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.

KYRIAKOSMITSOTAKISPRIME MINISTER

HELLENIC REPUBLIC


@athensforum20


Jon Alexander is co-founder of the New Citizenship Project, a strategy and innovation company on a mission to support the shift 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.

JON ALEXANDERCO-FOUNDER

NEW CITIZENSHIP PROJECT


Elhadj As Sy was appointed chair of the board of the Kofi Annan Foundation in October 2019. He believes that Kofi Annan was a 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.

ELHADJ AS SYCHAIR OF THE BOARD

KOFI ANNAN FOUNDATION

@athensforum22


Azeem Azhar is the writer behind Exponential View, which explains how society and the political economy are changing under the 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.

AZEEM AZHARFOUNDER

EXPONENTIAL VIEW


Alice Bah Kuhnke is a member of the European Parliament and vice chair of the Greens/European Free Alliance (EFA) political group. She is a full member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and 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.

ALICE BAH KUHNKEMEMBER OF THE

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

EUROPEAN UNION

@athensforum24


Kostas Bakoyannis is mayor of Athens. Previously, he served as governor of central Greece from 2014 to 2019, and as mayor of Karpenissi from 2011 to 2014.

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.

KOSTAS BAKOYANNISMAYOR OF ATHENS

HELLENIC REPUBLIC


Keith Bradsher is the Pulitzer Prize-winning Shanghai bureau chief for The New York Times, having reopened the Shanghai bureau in 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.

KEITH BRADSHERSHANGHAI BUREAU CHIEF

THE NEW YORK TIMES

@athensforum26


Daniel Braun is the deputy head of cabinet of Ms Věra Jourová, vice president of the European Commission for values and transparency. His current portfolio covers the topics of disinformation, human-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.

DANIELBRAUNDEPUTY HEAD OF CABINET

EUROPEAN COMMISSION


Andreas Bummel is founder and executive director of Democracy Without Borders. He is also global coordinator of the Campaign for a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, which he helped establish 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.

ANDREAS BUMMELEXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

DEMOCRACY WITHOUT

BORDERS

@athensforum28


Marija Pejčinovič Burič is the secretary general of the Council of Europe, the pre-eminent Pan-European international organization in the field of human rights, democracy and the rule of law.

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. PejΒčinovič Burič 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.

MARIJA PEJČINOVIČ BURIČSECRETARY GENERAL,

COUNCIL OF EUROPE


Colombe Cahen-Salvador is the co-founder and co-executive director of NOW. Her passion has always been human rights; she believes that wherever we come from in the world and whatever our story is, we have (or should have) those in common. For her, human 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.

COLOMBE CAHEN-SALVADORCO-FOUNDER AND

CO-EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

NOW

@athensforum30


Mark Zuckerberg Is the Most Powerful Unelected Man in AmericaFacebook 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

INFORMATION WARS


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.


European Regional Development FundEuropean Union

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Integrated programme for promoting Athens as a dest inat ion through B2B and B2C act iv i t ies

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Fernando Henrique Cardoso was president of Brazil for two successive mandates between 1995 and 2002.

A doctor of sociology and professor emeritus at the University of 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.

FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSOFORMER PRESIDENT

BRAZIL

@athensforum34


Kevin Casas-Zamora has served as secretary general of International IDEA since August 2019.

Dr. Casas-Zamora brings more than 25 years of experience 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.

KEVIN CASAS-ZAMORASECRETARY GENERAL

INTERNATIONAL IDEA


As the founder and chief executive of international, youth-led organization My Life My Say, Mete Coban is best known for founding the All-Party Parliamentary Group on a Better Brexit for Young 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.

METE COBAN MBEFOUNDER AND CHIEF

EXECUTIVE

MY LIFE MY SAY

@athensforum36


Aron Cramer is recognized globally as a pre-eminent authority on sustainable business. In addition to leading BSR, which has 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.

ARON CRAMERPRESIDENT AND C.E.O.

BSR


As former IT & innovation director at The International New York Times, Kristen Davis has years of practical experience using technology to advance businesses and protect organizations around the world.

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.

KRISTEN DAVISC.E.O. AND FOUNDER,

CINQC

AND ADVISOR

SENTINEL.AI

@athensforum38


Anna Diamantopoulou is the founder and President of DIKTIO Network for Reforms in Greece and Europe, an Athens-based think tank. Her active presence in the Greek and European public spheres spans more than two decades.

A civil engineer by training with graduate studies in regional development, Ms. Diamantopoulou has served as a member of the 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.

ANNADIAMANTOPOULOUPRESIDENT

DIKTIO

FOMER EUROPEAN

COMMISSIONER AND

FORMER CABINET MINISTER

HELLENIC REPUBLIC


Stephen Dunbar-Johnson is the president, international of The New York Times Company with responsibility for revenue oversight and the strategic development of the Times Company’s international digital and print business.

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.

STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSONPRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL

THE NEW YORK TIMES

COMPANY

@athensforum40


Orit Farkash-Hacohen has served as Israel’s minister of strategic affairs and public diplomacy and a member of the security cabinet since the formation of Israel’s unity government in May 2020. She is a member of the Knesset representing the Blue and White party.

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.

ORIT FARKASH-HACOHENMINISTER OF STRATEGIC

AFFAIRS AND PUBLIC

DIPLOMACY

ISRAEL


Nathan Gardels is the editor in chief of Noema magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.

Mr. Gardals previously served as editor in chief of The WorldPost, a 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.

NATHAN GARDELSCO-FOUNDER AND

SENIOR ADVISOR

BERGGRUEN INSTITUTE

@athensforum42


Anand Giridharadas is the author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” “The True American: Murder and 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.

ANAND GIRIDHARADASAUTHOR


Juan Guaidó was born in 1983 in Vargas, northern Venezuela. He spent his childhood in Los Corales, a small town on the outskirts of La Guaira, a coastal city that has both the main maritime port and 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.

JUAN GUAIDÓPRESIDENT OF THE

VENEZUELAN

NATIONAL ASSEMBLY

15,24x20,32cm


Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and the bestselling 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.

YUVAL NOAH HARARIHISTORIAN AND PROFESSOR

@athensforum46


Katie Harbath is a global public policy director at Facebook, where she has led the company’s efforts in elections around the world since 2014.

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.

KATIE HARBATHGLOBAL PUBLIC POLICY

DIRECTOR

FACEBOOK


Clover Hogan is a 21-year-old climate activist, researcher on eco-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.

CLOVER HOGANCLIMATE ACTIVIST

@athensforum48


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

CAPITALISM IN A POST-COVID WORLD


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.


@athensforum50


Beata Javorcik is chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in London. She is on leave from the University of Oxford, where she is the first woman to hold a statutory professorship in economics.

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.

BEATA JAVORCIKCHIEF ECONOMIST

EUROPEAN BANK

FOR RECONSTRUCTION

AND DEVELOPMENT


Katherine Kelaidis is resident scholar at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago. She holds a B.A. in classical languages from the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in classics from the University of London.

Dr. Kelaidis is currently completing a diplôme d’études supérieures in biblical studies at the Institut Catholique de Paris.

KATHERINE KELAIDISRESIDENT SCHOLAR

NATIONAL HELLENIC

MUSEUM, CHICAGO

@athensforum52


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IMAGINE Co-Founder and C.E.O. Valerie Keller helps leaders to use their power for good. With deep expertise in transformation, she 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.

VALERIE KELLERCO-FOUNDER AND C.E.O.

IMAGINE

@athensforum54


Chaker Khazaal is a Palestinian-Canadian author, reporter, and speaker. He is the former editor in chief of digital publishing platform 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.

CHAKER KHAZAALAUTHOR, REPORTER

AND SPEAKER


Sofia Kouvelaki is the C.E.O. of The Home Project. She was the program manager of the Bodossaki Foundation program for 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.

SOFIA KOUVELAKIC.E.O.

THE HOME PROJECT

@athensforum56


Nathan Law was a student leader during the 2014 pro-democracy 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.

NATHAN LAWPOLITICIAN AND ACTIVIST


As an engagement manager at My Life My Say, Tele Lawal communicates and connects with external stakeholders through My Life My Say’s youth initiatives. Her role primarily focuses on coordinating and designing programs across the UK, with the aim of engaging young people in political and social affairs. Prior to My Life My Say she worked in Parliament as an advisor.

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.

TELE LAWALLABOUR PARTY

COUNCILOR

LONDON BOROUGH OF

HAVERING COUNCIL

AND ENGAGEMENT

MANAGER

MY LIFE MY SAY

@athensforum58


Ian O. Lesser is vice president of the German Marshall Fund (GMF) of the United States. He also serves as executive director of the Transatlantic Center, GMF’s Brussels office, and leads GMF’s work in the Mediterranean, Turkey and the wider Atlantic. Prior to joining 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.

IAN LESSERVICE PRESIDENT

GERMAN MARSHALL

FUND OF THE UNITED

STATES


Antigone Lyberaki is the general manager of SolidarityNow, an N.G.O. active in social inclusion and refugee protection. She is also 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.

ANTIGONE LYBERAKIGENERAL MANAGER

SOLIDARITYNOW

@athensforum60


A veteran diplomat, professor of philosophy and author, Kishore Mahbubani is currently a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. His careers in diplomacy and academia have taken him from Singapore’s chargé d’affaires to 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.

KISHORE MAHBUBANIDISTINGUISHED FELLOW,

ASIA RESEARCH INSTITUTE

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

OF SINGAPORE


After graduating in law and management, Marion Maréchal became the youngest deputy in the history of the French Republic following her election in 2012.

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.

MARION MARÉCHALFORMER MEMBER OF THE

FRENCH PARLIAMENT AND

MANAGING DIRECTOR

ISSEP

62 @athensdemocracy


Despotism and Democracy in the Age of the VirusThe 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.

DEMOCRACY IN A TIME OF CRISIS


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

@athensforum64


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With over three decades of international banking experience, Costas Michaelides has served in a number of prominent executive 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.

COSTAS MICHAELIDESCHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD

NATIONAL BANK OF GREECE

@athensforum66


Farida Nabourema is a writer and political activist. She has been a fearless advocate for democracy and human rights in Togo since she was a teenager. Through more than 400 articles on her blog 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.

FARIDA NABOUREMAWRITER, POLITICAL ACTIVIST

AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

TOGOLESE CIVIL LEAGUE


Nikitas Lulias was elected Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Great Britain in June 2019 by the Sacred and Holy Synod of the 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.

ARCHBISHOP NIKITASGREEK ORTHODOX ARCHBISHOP

OF GREAT BRITAIN

@athensforum68


KHALIL OSIRISFOUNDER

TRUTH & RECONCILIATION

CONVERSATIONS

Khalil Osiris is an international speaker whose inspiring talks teach people to break free from their self-imposed limitations.

Mr. Osiris spent 20 years in prison and earned his bachelor’s and 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.


Frédéric Pierucci worked for almost 20 years at Alstom, a French multinational energy and transport group. In 2013, while he was the director of the company’s boiler division, he was arrested in the United States on charges of corruption.

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.

FRÉDÉRIC PIERUCCIAUTHOR, FORMER SENIOR

EXECUTIVE AT ALSTOM,

AND FOUNDING PARTNER

IKARIAN

@athensforum70


Business | Dispute Resolution | Real Estate | Mishcon Private

No higher power

Accountability is the law of tomorrowThe rules of business and society have changed.

We are witnessing the increasingly muscular exercise of executive power. But no one is above the law, not least

governments and law makers.

Discover what you can do with the law of tomorrow, today at mishcon.com

MischonBrand_Law_of_Tomorrow_15x20cm.indd 2 21/09/2020 16:44:56


Paul Polman is co-founder and chair of IMAGINE, a new organization that mobilizes business leaders around tackling climate change and global inequality.

Mr. Polman is chair of the International Chamber of Commerce, the B Team, and the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, and vice chair of the United Nations Global Compact. A leading proponent of business as a force for good, he has been described by The Financial Times as “a standout C.E.O. of the past decade.” As chief executive of Unilever from 2009 until 2019, he demonstrated that a long-term, multistakeholder model goes hand in hand with excellent financial performance.

Mr. Polman was a member of the U.N. Secretary General’s High-Level Panel that developed the Sustainable Development Goals and, as an active SDG advocate, he continues to work with global organizations across industries to push the 2030 development agenda.

PAUL POLMANCO-FOUNDER AND CHAIR

IMAGINE

@athensforum72


Wietse Van Ransbeeck is the co-founder and C.E.O. of CitizenLab, an e-democracy platform that allows governments to give their citizens a direct say on the topics that matter to them. Today, the citizen engagement platform is used by more than a hundred local governments around the world, from national governments and big cities to the smallest municipalities.

Mr. Van Ransbeeck was named by Forbes among its 2018 cohort of the 30 Under 30 Europe in law and policy for his work on bringing local democracies into the digital age.

WIETSE VAN RANSBEECKCO-FOUNDER AND C.E.O.

CITIZENLAB


Alexander Rhodes is head of Mishcon Purpose at Mishcon de Reya. He provides strategic environmental, social and governance (ESG) advice, alongside purpose-driven insights to help clients navigate the opportunities and risks presented by a rapidly changing world.

With more than 15 years of legal and global consultancy experience, Mr. Rhodes is a trusted advisor to a predominantly international client base. He acts on behalf of families in relation to their personal, business and philanthropic interests, as well as businesses seeking to transition to more sustainable and resilient ways of working. He is privileged to have worked closely with governments and global leaders in their efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

A seasoned litigator, Mr. Rhodes has particular expertise in the resolution of complex multi-jurisdictional disputes and public affairs. As a trustee and advisor, his long-term preoccupation has been balancing the imperatives of environmental conservation and human development.

Mr. Rhodes was the founding C.E.O. of the charity Stop Ivory and head of the secretariat to the intergovernmental Elephant Protection Initiative. He is currently a trustee and co-chair of the Strategic Projects Committee of the Tusk Trust. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a conservation fellow of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). In 2018, the ZSL named him Conservationist of the Year in recognition of his work to support African governments in their efforts to combat the illegal ivory trade and in elephant conservation.

ALEXANDER RHODESHEAD OF MISHCON PURPOSE

MISHCON DE REYA

@athensdemocracy74


Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also director of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations secretaries general, and currently serves as a Sustainable Development Goals advocate under Secretary General António Guterres.

Professor Sachs spent over 20 years as a professor at Harvard University, where he received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees. He has authored numerous best-selling books. His most recent is “Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions,” published in June 2020.

Professor Sachs was twice named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders, and was ranked by The Economist in the top three most influential living economists.

JEFFREY D. SACHSDIRECTOR, CENTER FOR

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY


David E. Sanger is a national security correspondent and a senior writer for The New York Times. In a 38-year reporting career for The New York Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book, “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age,’’ is the basis for an HBO documentary this fall that examines the emergence of cyberconflict as the primary way large and small states are competing and undercutting each other, changing the nature of global power.

DAVID SANGERNATIONAL SECURITY

CORRESPONDENT

THE NEW YORK TIMES

@athensforum76


MARGARITIS SCHINASVICE PRESIDENT

EUROPEAN COMMISSION

Born in Greece in 1962, Margaritis Schinas holds an M.Sc. in public administration and public policy from the London School of Economics, a diploma of advanced European studies in European administration from the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium and a degree in law from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Mr. Schinas has worked for the European Commission since 1990 in various positions of responsibility, principally in the private offices of commissioners.

Mr. Schinas was elected a member of the European Parliament in September 2007. Upon completion of his parliamentary term of office, he returned to the Commission and was appointed by President Barroso as deputy head of the Bureau of European Policy Advisers in February 2010. He then served as resident director and head of the Athens office of the Commission’s Directorate General of Economic and Financial Affairs.

In November 2014, President Juncker appointed Mr. Schinas chief European Commission spokesperson. He was subsequently appointed vice president of the European Commission in charge of promoting our European way of life in December 2019.


Born in Denmark, Dan Shefet is a Paris-based lawyer specializing in European and human rights law, and information technology law in particular.

Mr. Shefet is an individual specialist to Unesco and author of the “Policy options and regulatory mechanisms for managing radicalization on the Internet” report for Unesco’s 2016 conference in Québec.

Mr. Shefet is also an advisor to the Council of Europe on the establishment of an internet ombudsman. In 2014, he founded the Association for Accountability and Internet Democracy (AAID), with the objective of introducing a general principle of accountability on the internet in order to secure the protection of human integrity. He currently serves as AAID’s president.

Mr. Shefet holds degrees in philosophy and law from the University of Copenhagen, in addition to studying French law at the Sorbonne. He is a frequent speaker at international conferences on IT law, data privacy and content regulation.

DAN SHEFET ATTORNEY

PARIS COURT OF APPEAL

78 @athensforum


THE POWER OF BELIEF

Capitalism and ‘Culturecide’The idea of ‘cultural differences’ has been used as a justification for some of humanity’s worst crimes.

BY AI WEIWEI

MR. AI IS AN ARTIST AND

AUTHOR WHO WAS IMPRISONED

BY THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT.

BERLIN — Lu Xun, the greatest Chinese writer of the 20th century, created a character named Ah Q who became both adored and feared among Chinese for his wicked display of flaws in China’s “national character.” When Ah Q grew scabies on his head, he forbade people in his presence from pronouncing the word “scabies” — or any other word that sounded like it or might conjure it. Such words were taboo. “Verboten.”

A few weeks ago, here in Berlin, I received notice of a lawsuit that had been filed against me by a casino clerk. The complaint said I had called him a Nazi and a racist without any factual basis. I had two weeks to present a written response, failing which I would be subject to punishment. The notice came as I was about to set out for England. I passed the matter to a lawyer and departed.

But the complaint led me to prod my memory. Yes, about a year ago I had played cards at the Berlin Casino in Potsdamer Platz and at the end of play had put my chips on the counter of the cashier’s window for redemption. The clerk, who may have been in his 50s, was leaning back in his chair. He looked at me but made no move. Then, enunciating each word distinctly, he said in English, “You should say please.”

I was put off. “What happens if I don’t?”

“You’re in Europe, you know,” the clerk said. “You should learn some manners.”

I found the comment irritating but not wholly strange. Immigrants to Germany do hear such things.

I pressed on: “Fine, but you’re not a person who can teach me manners.”

That caused him to lean forward. He fixed me with a gaze and said, “Don’t forget that I’m feeding you!”

The ante was raised. Behind his almost comical facade, I sensed a truly powerful disdain and resentment.

“That’s a Nazi attitude,” I said, “and a racist comment.”

I gave up arguing and went to the casino manager. After a bit of investigating, the manager offered me a detailed apology, and that was that — or so I thought until the notice of the lawsuit arrived. I don’t know what will come of that complaint, but it is a small matter compared with the issue that I now want to raise.

The casino clerk had cloaked his ethnic prejudice as a question of culture: Immigrants (whom we Germans are “saving”) should be learning European civilization. This made me reflect on where else “cultural difference” has


been a euphemism under which bias, slavery and genocide have all had their ways. Hitler’s Germany? Apartheid? Bosnia? The American South? Too often! But indeed these are cultural matters. Is Nazi thinking merely a tumor that can be cut from the body politic and discarded? I doubt it. For good or ill, cultures last for years.

In today’s world, authoritarian politics and predatory commerce cooperate to exploit “cultural differences.” Nowhere is this point clearer than in the symbiosis in recent decades between Western corporations and the Communist elite in China. The West offers capital and much-needed technology, while China’s rulers supply a vast, captive, hard-working, low-paid and unprotected labor force. Western politicians, as if trying to justify the unholy collusion, for years argued that rising living standards in China would produce a middle class who would demand freedom and democracy. It is clear by now that that has not happened. The Chinese elite, now far wealthier than before and as in control as ever, can laugh up its sleeve at the Westerners and their visions of inevitable democracy. Instead the West’s own hard-won democracy has become vulnerable.

But does the West know it? Look at Hong Kong. Courageous protesters have persisted for more than six months in confronting the world’s mightiest dictatorship, a regime with a record of ironclad rejection of both reason and compromise when it deals with protesters or rivals. Hong Kong’s young democrats have looked for support from the world’s democracies. They stand at today’s edge of what may well be the greatest confrontation of the 21st century. Can the Western world see that helping them is not charity but self-defense?

When protesters in Hong Kong look to the vast northwest area in China called Xinjiang, they can see what happens when Beijing-engineered change reaches full throttle. In recent years (at first barely noted in the West), an annihilation of the language, religion and culture of Muslim Uighurs has proceeded systematically. About a million people have been sent to “re-education camps,” where they have been forced to denounce their religion and to swear fealty to the Communist Party of China.

When The New York Times published 400 pages of internal government documents on the rationale and techniques of this culturecide, an irate Beijing flatly denied the existence of the camps. But it did not (it could not) claim that the documents were inauthentic. It announced that the “trainees” in its re-education centers had all “graduated.” But the following facts were not announced: the number of graduates, where they are now living and whether they have been reunited with family.

I feel a personal bond with that distant, rustic Xinjiang, because I lived there from the early 1960s until 1977 with my father, the poet Ai Qing, who was banished there for nearly 20 years. He had expressed himself too freely through his poetry.

Westerners may think of Xinjiang as a distant and mysterious place, but in some ways it is not very exotic. Multinational corporations including Volkswagen, Siemens, Unilever and Nestlé have factories there. Supply chains for Muji and Uniqlo depend on Xinjiang, and companies such as H & M, Esprit and Adidas use Xinjiang cotton. We might ask: What is it about this remote place, to which the emperors of old banished criminals in lieu of sending them to prison, that makes it so attractive?

Might a “culturally different” nonwhite labor force play a role? People in no need of control because a harsh Communist government is already doing that work? In Xinjiang, as elsewhere in China, bosses from East and West have exchanged benefits, formed common interests and have even come to share some values. The chief executive of Volkswagen, which leads China in car sales, was recently asked for the company’s comment on the concentration camps in Xinjiang. He answered that VW knew nothing of such things, but the recent Xinjiang papers show otherwise. VW not only knew of the camps but signaled its readiness to go along. International diplomacy has facilitated the partnering of foreign business and Chinese Communism, and the German government has done especially well in that role.

We need to remember that extraction of profit from slave labor is not new to Germany. The Nazis used corvée labor. The main difference today is that the extraction is happening in distant countries. The scale, if anything, is larger. VW builds its cars in China, including the Audi, SEAT, Skoda, Bentley and Lamborghini brands under

@athensforum80


its umbrella. It has shown that it sees the future of German industry to be in China. Piggybacking on “cultural difference” is still viable there.

China and Russia have shown how legacies of Communist authoritarianism can combine with predatory capitalism to build new political structures of daunting power. The world’s democracies have not figured out what to do about this even as they sense themselves falling behind or, worse, beginning to fit in. Traditional democratic values have begun to slip away. Economic and political trends reach beyond national borders, seem large and unstoppable, and are destroying values and ideals that human societies have evolved over centuries.

I am well aware that the word “Nazi” is taboo in Germany, but when I used it with the casino clerk, I meant it not as an expletive but as a general analytic term: A culture asserts its superiority, an ethnicity its purity, and the horde below is not only different but inferior, in need of being guided and, if necessary, ruled by force. Hence slavery is justified. Hence it is all right that hundreds of thousands of people are pulled from their homes. Rulers and slave masters get halos.

In the 1930s and 1940s this was called Nazism. Today in Germany, the taboo on the term is electric — stronger by far than Ah Q’s rejection of “scabies.” Could German supersensitivity be rooted in awareness, deep down, that the idea does remain alive?

The great challenge facing German and other Western governments is whether they can find a way to exit the carnival of profit making with their moral integrity intact. So far we have seen little on this score other than craven diffidence. The crux of the matter is not ignorance of the moral alternatives but a failure of will. Pursue greed? Do what is right? We shyly select the former. When Western governments come to realize that liberal democracy itself is at stake, this balance might tip the other way.


Ai Weiwei is an artist and the author of the book “Humanity.” This essay was translated by Perry Link from the Chinese.

81 @athensdemocracy


As Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith leads a team of more than 1,400 business, legal and corporate affairs professionals working in 56 countries. He plays a key role in spearheading the company’s work on critical issues involving the intersection of technology and society, including cybersecurity, privacy, artificial intelligence, human rights, immigration, philanthropy and environmental sustainability.

In his recent book, “Tools and Weapons: The Promise and Peril of the Digital Age,” co-authored with Carol Ann Browne, Mr. Smith showcases his deep thinking on these issues and how technology can serve humanity, rather than be weaponized to inflict harm.

Mr. Smith was described by The Australian Financial Review as “one of the technology industry’s most respected figures,” and by The New York Times as “a de facto ambassador for the technology industry at large.”

BRAD SMITHPRESIDENT

MICROSOFT



DRAHOSLAV ŠTEFÁNEKSPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE ON

MIGRATION AND REFUGEES

COUNCIL OF EUROPE

In January 2020, Drahoslav Štefánek took up his role as the special representative on migration and refugees, appointed by Council of Europe Secretary General Marija Pejčinović Burić.

A lawyer by training and a career diplomat, Ambassador Štefánek was previously the head of the Council of Europe Office in Sarajevo, and ambassador and permanent representative of the Slovak Republic to the Council of Europe. At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Slovakia, he was the director general for the U.N., international organizations, E.U. affairs and human rights. He also chaired the U.N. working group on an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

His diplomatic career includes posts responsible for human rights and political affairs at the Slovak Permanent Mission to the U.N. and other international organizations in Geneva, as well as at the Permanent Mission of Slovakia to the U.N. in New York. Prior to that, he served as the agent of Slovakia and as a member of the delegation representing Slovakia before the International Court of Justice.

Ambassador Štefánek holds a JUDr doctoral degree in law from Matej Bel University, and law degrees from Comenius University in Bratislava and Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

@athensforum84


Veteran British journalist Alison Smale was a senior manager, editor and correspondent at The New York Times, focusing on international affairs, from 1998 to 2017. She served as under secretary general for global communications at the United Nations from 2017 to 2019.

A British citizen, Ms. Smale graduated from the University of Bristol in 1977 and received a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford University in 1978. She was based in Bonn, West Germany, for The Associated Press from 1978 to 1983 and in Moscow from 1983 to 1986, chronicling the transitions in Soviet leadership from Andropov to Chernenko to Gorbachev. Then, as Vienna bureau chief for The Associated Press, she reported extensively from Central Europe, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the post-Communist transitions in Romania and Bulgaria and the war in the Balkans in the 1990s. She is fluent in French, Russian and German.

Ms. Smale joined The New York Times in 1998 as weekend foreign editor, and became deputy foreign editor in 2002. She was in New York on Sept. 11, and organized much of The Times’s prize-winning coverage of the war in Afghanistan and then Iraq. In 2004, she became managing editor of The International Herald Tribune – now The New York Times International Edition – and was elevated to executive editor in 2009.

In 2013, Ms. Smale was named Berlin bureau chief for The New York Times, and covered, among many stories, the refugee and migration crises in Europe.

In 2017, the United Nations announced Ms. Smale’s appointment as under secretary general for global communications, a position she held until 2019.

ALISON SMALEJOURNALIST AND FORMER

UNDER SECRETARY GENERAL

FOR GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS

UNITED NATIONS

athensdemocracyforum.com 8585 @athensforum


Dubravka Šuica was appointed vice president of the European Commission in charge of Democracy and Demography in December 2019. A Croatian politician from Dubrovnik, she previously served as the city’s first female mayor between 2001 and 2009 and was awarded the 2006 World Mayor Award.

Ms. Šuica entered politics in the 1990s as a member of the Croatian Democratic Union party. She served as a member of the Croatian Parliament and vice chair of the E.U. Integration Committee. Between 2004 and 2009, she was a board member of the Union of the Association of Towns and Municipalities of the Republic of Croatia. During her decade-long tenure, she was president of the Croatian Delegation to the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe.

From 2013 to 2019, Ms. Šuica served as a member of the European Parliament. In June 2019, she was elected as first vice chair of the European People’s Party group in the European Parliament.

DUBRAVKA ŠUICAVICE PRESIDENT

FOR DEMOCRACY

AND DEMOGRAPHY

EUROPEAN COMMISSION

@athensforum86



Audrey Tang is Taiwan’s digital minister in charge of social innovation.

Ms. Tang is known for revitalizing the Perl and Haskell computer languages, as well as building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin.

In the public sector, Ms. Tang served on the Taiwanese National Development Council’s Open Data Committee and K-12 Curriculum Committee, and also led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project.

In the private sector, she has worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design.

In the social sector, she actively contributes to g0v (“gov zero”), a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for civil society, with the call to “fork the government.”

AUDREY TANGMEMBER

EXECUTIVE YUAN COUNCIL


Mark Thompson became president and chief executive officer of The New York Times Company in November 2012. He has directed the company’s strategy and presided over an expansion of its digital and global operations. Under his leadership, digital subscriptions have grown from 500,000 to nearly four million, and the company set a goal to reach 10 million subscriptions by 2025. The Times has successfully expanded into other digital products like cooking and crosswords, has launched one of the world’s most successful podcasts and recently premiered “The Weekly,” a new TV news program for FX and Hulu.

Before joining the Times Company, Mr. Thompson served as director general of the BBC from 2004, where he reshaped the organization to meet the challenge of the digital age, ensuring that it remained a leading innovator with the launch of services such as the BBC iPlayer. He also oversaw a transformation of the BBC itself, driving productivity and efficiency through the introduction of new technologies and bold organizational redesign.

Mr. Thompson joined the BBC in 1979 as a production trainee. He helped launch “Watchdog” and “Breakfast Time,” was an output editor on “Newsnight,” and was appointed editor of the “BBC Nine O’Clock News” in 1988 and “Panorama” in 1990. He became controller (programming and scheduling chief) for the BBC2 TV network and director of television for the BBC, before leaving in 2002 to become C.E.O. of Channel 4 Television in the United Kingdom.

His book, “Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics?” based on lectures he gave as a visiting professor at Oxford University, was published in the U.K. and U.S. in September 2016.

Mr. Thompson was educated at Stonyhurst College and Merton College, Oxford.

MARK THOMPSONPRESIDENT AND

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

THE NEW YORK TIMES

COMPANY

@athensforum88


Achilles Tsaltas is president of the Democracy & Culture Foundation, the independent, nonprofit entity that organizes the Athens Democracy Forum in association with The New York Times and other related activities.

With over 30 years of experience in media, Mr. Tsaltas has been responsible for creating and managing strategic partnerships with some of the world’s most renowned corporations.

Born in Australia of Greek origin, Mr. Tsaltas started his media career in 1989 in the advertising department at News Corporation. During his tenure, he launched the business magazine Business Asia, and relaunched the paper’s The Australian Magazine.

Mr. Tsaltas moved to Hong Kong in 1999 to join The International Herald Tribune as deputy managing director, successfully launching print sites and publishing partnerships throughout Asia. In 2004, he moved to Paris as vice president, international circulation and served in a number of executive roles in his two decades of service with The New York Times Company, ultimately relocating to London to become vice president, international conferences in 2014.

In 2019, Mr. Tsaltas established the Democracy & Culture Foundation. With a mission to empower society through citizen engagement and better governance, the Foundation develops, programs and convenes the two conferences he conceived at The Times – the Athens Democracy Forum and Art for Tomorrow.

He has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Sydney and a master’s degree in sociology from the University of New South Wales. He also completed the Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program at the Columbia School of Journalism.

ACHILLES TSALTASPRESIDENT

ATHENS DEMOCRACY FORUM


Oleksandra Ustinova is a member of the Ukrainian Parliament representing the Holos Party and serves as a member of the Parliamentary Committee on Law Enforcement. She is also a civil activist.

With over 15 years of experience in mass communications and advocacy, Ms. Ustinova helped to set up one of the biggest grassroots organizations for medical patients in Ukraine. She is the former head of communications and projects for anticorruption in health care at the Anticorruption Action Center (AntAC), one of the leading Ukrainian watchdog organizations in anticorruption reform.

Together with the team, Ms. Ustinova successfully advocated the adoption of more than 20 bills by the national Parliament. She also played a pivotal role in the founding of various new anticorruption institutions, such as the National Anticorruption Bureau, the Specialized Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office, and the Anticorruption Court of Ukraine. In addition, she was a key advocate of the country’s drug procurement and health care reform bills.

OLEKSANDRA USTINOVAMEMBER OF PARLIAMENT

UKRAINE

90 @athensforum


Miltiadis Varvitsiotis was born in Athens in 1969. He is a Supreme Court lawyer. He is a graduate of Athens College and the University of Athens School of Law. He also holds a postgraduate degree in international relations from Harvard University. He speaks English, French and Italian.

His political activity began in O.N.NE.D., the Youth Organization of the New Democracy Party. He was elected a member of Parliament on the New Democracy ticket in the Athens B constituency in the elections of 2000, 2004, 2007, 2009, May and June 2012, and January and September 2015. In the July 2019 election, he was elected M.P. for the Athens B2 (West) constituency.

Mr. Varvitsiotis served as deputy minister of foreign affairs for economic diplomacy and development assistance from January 2009 to October of that year, when the government changed. He also served as minister for shipping, maritime affairs and the Aegean from June 2013 to January 2015. From September 2007 to January 2009 and from July 2012 to June 2013, he served as chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defense and Foreign Affairs, and he has sat on many other parliamentary committees.

MILTIADIS VARVITSIOTISALTERNATE MINISTER OF

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

HELLENIC REPUBLIC


Andrea Venzon is the co-founder and co-executive director of NOW. He believes that it is fundamental to bring people together across borders, as it is the only way to fight for a better future.

Mr. Venzon previously co-founded Volt Europa and was elected its first president.

Mr. Venzon graduated with a Master of Public Administration from Columbia University and worked for two years as a consultant for McKinsey & Company. He also holds a master’s degree from the London Business School and a degree in management from Bocconi University.

ANDREA VENZONCO-FOUNDER AND

CO-EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

NOW

92 @athensforum


Reform the Police? Guess Who Funds My State’s Officials If the protests are to translate into laws, contributions for politicians from law enforcement must be-come toxic rather than coveted.

BY MIRIAM PAWEL

CONTRIBUTING OPINION WRITER

LOS ANGELES — In late August, Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies shot a Black man, Dijon Kizzee, whom they had stopped for a suspected traffic violation as he rode his bicycle. He became the seventh man killed by deputies in Los Angeles since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day weekend.

On the same afternoon, state legislators in Sacramento raced to the end of their 2020 session. The most significant police reform measure, heralded in the days of the Black Lives Matter marches that filled the streets, did not even come up for a vote.

A centerpiece of the agenda would have set up a process for yanking the badge of any officer found to have committed serious misconduct. California is one of only five states that has no process for decertifying police officers, which among other things enables bad cops to move from department to department with impunity.

Democrats hold supermajorities in both houses. Major newspapers in California editorialized in favor of a slew of police reform bills. Polls showed support. In one of the bluest states in the country, all indications pointed toward action on reform.

But in the end, even here, it was essentially business as usual in a State Capitol where police unions have long wielded enormous power. The measures that passed this year were either noncontroversial or so diluted as to have little if any immediate impact.

“The culture has not even begun to change,” said John Crew, a retired attorney who spent decades working on police accountability issues in California for the A.C.L.U. “Their political analysis seems to be that the world has not changed as much as a lot of us think it has. I hope it has.”

If the marches that brought so much hope for profound change are to translate into laws, hope will have to overcome fear: The movement will have to exert enough pressure to overcome politicians’ fear of crossing the unions.

The culture will not change until enough elected officials are unafraid to risk the wrath of police unions, until financial support from law enforcement becomes toxic rather than coveted, until “defund the politicians” becomes as much a rallying cry as “defund the police.”

There have been baby steps. Even amid the legislative defeats, the Black Lives Matter movement generated

FROM PROTESTS TO POLITICS


greater transparency, not of the police themselves — those bills largely failed as well — but of the political process. When it became evident the decertification bill did not have support to pass the Assembly, advocates shifted their public campaign to lobby for a vote anyway, angry that lawmakers could evade taking a stand.

Unions have sensed the pressure. Of course they support certification, union officials said. This is just not the way to do it. The pandemic shortened the session and made negotiation difficult. These are complicated issues, they said; this bill is dangerous; the process cannot be rushed; this is an act that will have consequences. “Unknown impacts,” they warned, to public safety.

There is another not particularly subtle subtext about the consequences — the ones that might befall lawmakers. “It’s not really about substance, it’s about power,” Mr. Crew said. “It’s about the implicit threat of what they could do with their money.”

Since 2017, the Peace Officers Research Association, one of the major statewide law enforcement groups, has spent more than $2.6 million to influence elections. One analysis found police unions and associations gave $5.5 million to legislative candidates between 2011 and 2018.

Even before the disappointing finish in Sacramento, some reform advocates had started campaigns to demand that politicians pledge to refuse law enforcement money and support. “Assembly leaders turned their backs on CA’s communities by refusing to vote on SB 731 [police decertification] and choosing to protect abusive cops,” the A.C.L.U. of California wrote. “If you want change, demand lawmakers stop taking political contributions from police.”

A handful of lawmakers have agreed. Two state senators have said they will donate money previously received from law enforcement to community groups. Leaders of several progressive Democratic caucuses have called on the state party to stop accepting contributions from law enforcement unions. Three district attorneys and one candidate in Los Angeles have asked the state bar association to adopt a rule barring lawyers running for district attorney from accepting contributions from law enforcement.

The unions will not easily cede their clout. Politicians will not jettison comfortable habits unless there are consequences. It will take victories by insurgents who stress their independence from police unions and defeats of those who cling to the old paradigms. Unlike New York, California has not yet seen many serious challenges from the left to veteran incumbents. But there are likely to be more, along with generational change as term limits open up new seats.

The shootings, the marches, the protests and the vigils will continue. One of Mr. Kizzee’s lawyers said his client was shot between 15 and 20 times in the back. The sheriff’s department said Mr. Kizzee ran away, dropped a bundle of clothing that included a gun and punched an officer. They will not release the names of the deputies who shot him. They have not even said what traffic violation he might have been committing, other than being a Black man riding a bicycle.


Miriam Pawel (@miriampawel) is the author of “The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty That Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation” and a contributing opinion writer.

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Solidaritythe value we share

SolidarityNow was established in 2013. Through our initiatives and the services provided to the most vulnerable populations in Greece, we seek

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Solidaritythe value we share

SolidarityNow was established in 2013. Through our initiatives and the services provided to the most vulnerable populations in Greece, we seek

to improve people’s lives and empower them for long term socioeconomic well-being and self-reliance. We seek to restore the vision of a strong Europe

based on solidarity and create just and open societies.

320,000beneficiaries

595,000free services

97,000beneficiaries of our Solidarity Centers

20,000non-formaleducation activities

What We Have Achieved:

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Kent Walker is senior vice president for global affairs at Google, where he oversees the teams responsible for legal matters, government affairs, content policy and philanthropy.

For nearly 30 years, Mr. Walker has focused on the intersection of technology, law and policy. Since joining Google in 2006, he has led the company’s advocacy on competition, content, copyright and privacy. He has worked with government leaders and regulators around the world and served as the first chair of the Global Internet Forum to Combat Terrorism. After overseeing the creation of Google’s A.I. principles in 2018, he became chair of the company’s Advanced Technology Review Council.

Mr. Walker was born in Silicon Valley when it was still called “the Valley of Heart’s Delight” and known more for its fruit orchards than its tech start-ups. The son of a Navy officer and a public health nurse, he grew up next to Stanford’s campus and learned to code using mainframe punch cards before going on to graduate with honors from Harvard College.

Mr. Walker’s interest in technology deepened at Stanford Law School, where he earned his JD degree in 1987 and co-founded Stanford’s Law & Technology Association. He served as an assistant U.S. attorney in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., starting one of the first “computer crime” units in the country and later advising the U.S. attorney general on technology policy issues.

He went on to hold executive positions at Netscape, AOL, and eBay, as they navigated the rise of the web, online communities and e-commerce.

Over the years, Mr. Walkerhas been involved with several nonprofits, community organizations and industry associations. Currently, he serves on Harvard’s Board of Overseers and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Kent and his wife Diana, a former journalist, have three grown children.

KENT WALKER SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT

FOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS

GOOGLE

@athensforum96


Huiyao (Henry) Wang is the founder and president of the Center for China and Globalization, the leading Chinese nongovernment think tank that ranks among the top 100 think tanks in the world. He was appointed a councilor of the State Council of China, the Chinese cabinet, by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in 2015.

Dr. Wang is vice chairman of the China International Association for Economic Cooperation and the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China, and chairman of the China Global Talent Society of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security. In addition, he serves as dean of the Institute of Development Studies at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu. He is also a vice chairman of the Western Returned Scholars Association, and sits on the Advisory Board of the Global Migration Group of the United Nations International Organization of Migration.

Dr. Wang earned his Ph.D. in international business at the Western University, Ontario, Canada and the University of Manchester, England. He was a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He has written and edited over 70 books in both Chinese and English on global trade, governance and migration, as well as Chinese outbound and inbound investment, diasporas and think tanks.

HUIYAO WANG FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT

CENTER FOR CHINA

AND GLOBALIZATION


Fatima Zaman is currently an advocate at the Kofi Annan Foundation, working on building peace, security and overcoming extreme violence in conflict. Her work previously involved advising the seventh secretary general of the United Nations and working with key stakeholders to enhance and uphold human rights. She has extensive knowledge and experience of working in this field at the local and international level.

Ms. Zaman is also a member of the inaugural cohort of Obama Foundation scholars, selected by President and Mrs. Obama to receive a prestigious, one-of-a-kind leadership scholarship.

In 2017, Ms. Zaman was honored at the Asian Women of Achievement Awards. She received the highest accolade, the Chairman’s Award, with judges commending her internationally groundbreaking work on bringing improvements to peace, security and countering violent extremism in conflict countries. They highlighted her potential as a future Nobel Prize winner. She is also a One Young World ambassador.

FATIMA ZAMANADVOCATE


Hind Ziane is the founder and C.E.O. of Génération politique, a political strategy, public relations and lobbying agency based in Paris. Génération politique specializes in citizen participation methods such as community organizing and grassroots lobbying. The agency’s goal is to start from citizens in order to transform politics and business.

Before creating the agency, Ms. Ziane spent over three years working on political and international business issues with an American politician from Barack Obama’s circle. She collaborated with several institutions, such as the Department of Energy at the White House, U.S.A.I.D. and Unesco. She later deepened her knowledge of American politics working with a congresswoman’s office in 2016 to increase the number of co-sponsorships on a specific bill. Combined, these two experiences built an important basis for what would subsequently become Génération politique.

Ms. Ziane also worked with the Department of International and European Relations at Air Liquide, where she primarily focused on lobbying work with European institutions. She is currently an advisor to the President of ICC-Hellas, Nicolas A. Vernicos.

Ms. Ziane received her university education at Sciences Po, Paris, where she specialized in public affairs and political strategy.

HIND ZIANE FOUNDER AND C.E.O.

GÉNÉRATION POLITIQUE


Moderators

@athensforum100


Roger Cohen has worked for The New York Times for 25 years as a foreign correspondent, foreign editor, and columnist. Prior to that he worked for The Wall Street Journal and Reuters.

Mr. Cohen is the author of four books. The latest, a family memoir entitled “The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family,” was published by Alfred A. Knopf in January 2015.

Raised in South Africa and England and a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, he is a naturalized American.

Mr. Cohen also serves on the Athens Democracy Forum Advisory Board.

ROGER COHENATHENS DEMOCRACY

FORUM HOST AND

OP-ED COLUMNIST

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Serge Schmemann is a member of the editorial board of The New York Times focusing on international issues. Before that he was the editorial page editor of The International Herald Tribune in Paris for 10 years, joining shortly after the IHT became a part of The New York Times.

Mr. Schmemann joined The Times in December 1980 after eight years with The Associated Press, and worked for many years as a correspondent and bureau chief in Johannesburg, Moscow, Bonn, Jerusalem and the United Nations. He was deputy foreign editor of The New York Times from 1999 to 2001.

Mr. Schmemann was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for his coverage of the reunification of Germany, and an Emmy in 2003 for his work on a television documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is a graduate of Harvard College and holds an M.A. from Columbia University, as well as an honorary doctorate from Middlebury College, Vermont.

Mr. Schmemann is the author of “Echoes of a Native Land: Two Centuries of a Russian Village,” and another, intended for high school students, “When the Wall Came Down: The Berlin Wall and the Fall of Communism,” as well as numerous articles and reviews.

Mr. Schmemann resides with his wife in Paris.

SERGE SCHMEMANNMEMBER OF THE EDITORIAL

BOARD, ATHENS DEMOCRACY

FORUM CHAIRMAN AND

PROGRAM DIRECTOR

THE NEW YORK TIMES


Liz Alderman is the Paris-based chief European business correspondent for The New York Times, covering economic and inequality challenges around Europe. From Greece to Sweden, she chronicles the hit to societies from weak growth and joblessness, and reports on emerging innovations to address inequality. Her coverage has included Europe’s refugee crisis and the Paris terrorist attacks. Along the way, she has profiled numerous European movers and shakers in policy making and business.

In 2013, Ms. Alderman received The Times’s Nathaniel Nash Award for her “excellence in business and economics journalism.” She was part of a team honored by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) for international breaking news coverage of the financial crisis in Cyprus in 2013.

From 2008 to 2010, Ms. Alderman was an assistant business editor for The Times in New York, editing coverage of Wall Street and the financial crisis. Before that, she spent five years as the business editor of what was then The International Herald Tribune, overseeing European economic, policy and business news.

Ms. Alderman was previously the Paris bureau chief of financial news agency BridgeNews, directing coverage of the birth of the euro and the European Central Bank, and reporting on the European economy. She was the chief Federal Reserve correspondent from 1995 to 1999 in Washington, D.C., covering the U.S. economy and monetary policy.

LIZ ALDERMANCHIEF EUROPEAN BUSINESS

CORRESPONDENT

THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Steven Erlanger became chief diplomatic correspondent, Europe, of The New York Times in September 2017, after four years as the newspaper’s London bureau chief. Before that, he spent five years as bureau chief in Paris and four years as bureau chief in Jerusalem. He has served as Berlin bureau chief, bureau chief for Central Europe and the Balkans, based in Prague, and chief diplomatic correspondent, based in Washington, D.C. From 1991 to 1995, he was posted in Moscow, after being Bangkok bureau chief and Southeast Asia correspondent from 1988 to 1991. In New York, he was culture editor from 2002 to 2004.

Previously, Mr. Erlanger worked for The Boston Globe. He was European correspondent, based in London, from 1983 to 1987, and deputy national and foreign editor. He reported from Eastern Europe, Moscow and revolutionary Iran. He shared a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for a series on Russia in 2017, and for explanatory reporting for a series on Al Qaeda in 2002.

Mr. Erlanger won ASNE’s 2001 Jesse Laventhol Prize for deadline reporting for his work in the former Yugoslavia, and the German Marshall Fund’s Peter Weitz Prize in 2000. He was awarded the 2005 Eliav-Sartawi Award for Middle East journalism, and the 2017 Karl-Klassen Journalist’s Prize.

STEVEN ERLANGERCHIEF DIPLOMATIC

CORRESPONDENT, EUROPE

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sébastien Brack leads the team of the Kofi Annan Foundation shoring up the integrity of elections around the world through a combination of policy development, advocacy and select country engagements.

The Foundation has been involved in preventing and resolving electoral crises since Kofi Annan mediated the Kenyan crisis of 2008. Mr. Brack was Kofi Annan’s senior political advisor until his death in 2018.

Prior to joining the Foundation in 2012, Mr. Brack was an election campaign director. He had previously been a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross, undertaking eight field missions in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

Mr. Brack is a graduate of Oxford University and the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. He grew up in Europe, the Caribbean, the Maghreb and Southeast Asia, and has dual French/Swiss citizenship, as well as English antecedents. He is married and has three children.

SÉBASTIENBRACKHEAD OF THE ELECTIONS AND

DEMOCRACY PROGRAM



Daniel Höltgen has served as director of communications and spokesperson for the secretary general at the Council of Europe since 2010. He previously worked as head of external relations at the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and as national expert at the European Commission’s Enlargement Directorate, as well as in several positions in the German government, including spokesperson for the Interior Ministry.

Mr. Höltgen is British and German, and speaks French fluently. He holds a Ph.D. in economic geography from the University of Cambridge and a diploma in journalism.

DANIEL HÖLTGENDIRECTOR OF

COMMUNICATIONS AND

SPOKESPERSON FOR

THE SECRETARY GENERAL

COUNCIL OF EUROPE

Farah Nayeri writes on culture for The New York Times. Based in London, she was previously the arts correspondent for Bloomberg, covering visual arts, architecture and film. She has also written for the arts pages of The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.

Originally from Iran, Ms. Nayeri began her journalism career as a reporter for Time in Paris. She subsequently became a Paris correspondent for Bloomberg, then the Rome bureau chief. In 2003, she was sent to Baghdad to report on the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Ms. Nayeri has been invited to speak at Sciences Po in Paris, and moderated panel discussions for the World Economic Forum. She is a classical pianist and a member of the U.K. Critics’ Circle.

FARAH NAYERICULTURE CORRESPONDENT

THE NEW YORK TIMES

@athensforum104



Veteran British journalist Alison Smale was a senior manager, editor and correspondent at The New York Times, focusing on international affairs, from 1998 to 2017. She served as under secretary general for global communications at the United Nations from 2017 to 2019.

A British citizen, Ms. Smale graduated from the University of Bristol in 1977 and received a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford University in 1978. She was based in Bonn, West Germany, for The Associated Press from 1978 to 1983 and in Moscow from 1983 to 1986, chronicling the transitions in Soviet leadership from Andropov to Chernenko to Gorbachev. Then, as Vienna bureau chief for The Associated Press, she reported extensively from Central Europe, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the post-Communist transitions in Romania and Bulgaria and the war in the Balkans in the 1990s. She is fluent in French, Russian and German.

Ms. Smale joined The New York Times in 1998 as weekend foreign editor, and became deputy foreign editor in 2002. She was in New York on Sept. 11, and organized much of The Times’s prize-winning coverage of the war in Afghanistan and then Iraq. In 2004, she became managing editor of The International Herald Tribune – now The New York Times International Edition – and was elevated to executive editor in 2009.

In 2013, Ms. Smale was named Berlin bureau chief for The New York Times, and covered, among many stories, the refugee and migration crises in Europe.

In 2017, the United Nations announced Ms. Smale’s appointment as under secretary general for global communications, a position she held until 2019.

ALISON SMALEJOURNALIST AND FORMER

UNDER SECRETARY GENERAL

FOR GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS

UNITED NATIONS

Advisory Board

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SERGE SCHMEMANNMEMBER OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD, ATHENS DEMOCRACY FORUM

CHAIRMAN AND PROGRAM DIRECTOR

THE NEW YORK TIMES

KISHORE MAHBUBANIDISTINGUISHED FELLOW, ASIA RESEARCH INSTITUTE

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

CORINNE MOMAL-VANIANEXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

KOFI ANNAN FOUDATION

IVAN KRASTEVPOLITICAL SCIENTIST AND CHAIRMAN

CENTER FOR LIBERAL STRATEGIES, SOFIA

KHALIL OSIRISFOUNDER

TRUTH & RECONCILIATION CONVERSATIONS

JANE BORNEMEIEREDITOR, SPECIAL SECTIONS

THE NEW YORK TIMES

ALEXIS PAPAHELASEXECUTIVE EDITOR

KATHIMERINI

ALEXANDRA PASCALIDOUJOURNALIST, AUTHOR, TV AND RADIO HOST,

SPEAKER, MODERATOR

JONATHAN CHARLESMANAGING DIRECTOR, COMMUNICATIONS

EUROPEAN BANK FOR RECONSTRUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT


ALEXANDER RHODESHEAD OF MISHCON PURPOSE

MISHCON DE REYA

KEVIN RUDDPRESIDENT ASIA SOCIETY POLICY INSTITUTE

FORMER PRIME MINISTER AUSTRALIA

MONIQUE VILLASPECIAL ADVISOR TO C.E.O.

THOMSON REUTERS

JAYATHMA WICKRAMANAYAKEUNITED NATIONS SECRETARY GENERAL’S ENVOY ON YOUTH

UNITED NATIONS

IAIN WALKEREXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

NEW DEMOCRACY FOUNDATION

ANITA PATILEDITORIAL DIRECTOR

THE NEW YORK TIMES LICENSING GROUP

LEX PAULSONDIRECTOR

SCHOOL OF COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE, UM6P, MOROCCO

CRYSTAL PATTERSONGLOBAL CIVIC PARTNERSHIPS

FACEBOOK

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THE DIPLOMAT

The Diplomat is the premier international current-affairs magazine for the Asia-Pacific region.

Since its launch in 2002, The Diplomat (thediplomat.com) has been dedicated to quality analysis and commentary on events occurring in Asia and around the world. The Diplomat reaches an influential audience of commentators, policymakers and academics with its in-depth treatment of regional issues.

The Diplomat provides expert coverage on:

• Geo-political trends throughout the Asia-Pacific

• Defense and intelligence

• Environment, human security and development

• Arts, social trends and popular culture

EUOBSERVER

Influential. Investigative. Independent.

EUobserver is a not-for-profit, independent online newspaper established in Brussels in 2000. We value free thinking and plain speech and aim to support European democracy by reflecting the voice of people and by giving people the information they need to hold the EU establishment to account

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SPECIAL REPORTSSelect findings from the Athens Democracy Forum will be featured in the special report of The New York Times International Edition on October 10, 2020.

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Notes

Virtual Event

SEPTEMBER 30 - OCTOBER 2, 2020

Virtual Event - Athens Democracy Forum

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