 Your excellencies, distinguished guests, friends of democracy here in Stockholm and joining us from around the world, thank you for joining us for the launch of the 2022 edition of the Global State of Democracy Report. As we consider the state of democracy this year, we have an engaging program of speakers, a panel discussion on social contracts, a presentation of the key findings of the report. As with the audience, some of our speakers have joined us in person and others have minimized their carbon footprint by joining us online. To begin the program this afternoon, Dr. Kevin Cassis Zamora, Secretary General of International Idea will offer some opening remarks. Dr. Cassis Zamora. Good afternoon and welcome to International Idea. Ambassadors, representative of our Council of Member States and Board of Advisors, distinguished guests, colleagues and friends. It is great to see how many of you have made it here to our headquarters in Stockholm and we are equally glad to have many of you joining us online today. I'm Kevin Cassis Zamora, the Secretary General of International Idea, which as you probably know is an intergovernmental organization with 34 member states dedicated to supporting and advancing sustainable democracy worldwide. We pride ourselves in combining policy friendly comparative knowledge production with capacity development efforts while convening political dialogues and engaging in policy advocacy. In this diverse and intersecting capacities, we work in some 60 countries around the world. We have long standing expertise in the areas of electoral and constitution building processes, electoral participation and representation and also increasingly in the assessment of the quality and performance of democracies. Your presence here today is a testament to this last dimension of our work, which has established itself as one of the core contributions and comparative advantages of international idea. This is the fourth edition of the Global State of Democracy report. Since the first report was published in 2017, at that time funded by a grant from our host country, each edition has offered rigorous and nuanced analysis grounded in a comprehensive conceptual framework alongside constructive policy recommendations. By evaluating democratic trends and development in a textured way at global, regional and national levels, the report has become a benchmark product in the field of democracy assessment. This year's report comes at a time when democracy is facing literal and figurative assault globally, from external threats as well as from erosion within. The list of challenges to democracy is long and forbidding. Political polarisation and rotesque inequalities are pulling apart democratic communities. Corruption and its perception have become a constant threat to the credibility of institutions and leaders. Now the political ramifications of the economic fallout from the pandemic and Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine are putting democratic systems under further stress. Add to all this the existential crisis of climate change and you have the makings of a witch's brew. Across these challenges, we see a steady erosion of public trust in the ability of democracy and its institutions to provide key public goods and meet social expectations. And we see this decay in trust aggravated by the rampant spread of misinformation and disinformation. This problematic trends are truly global. They are not to be found only or even primarily in young and underdeveloped democracies as we used to believe. After January 6, 2021, let no one say it cannot happen here. Yet despite the rhetoric of democratic doomsayers, authoritarian and alternative regimes have not proven more successful in meeting the moment. Just look at the protest for women's rights and free expression in Iran. The tide of people fleeing Russia to escape conscription to an autocrat's war or the growing resentment towards endless lockdowns in China. Indeed, this report argues that it is democracy, not alternative models of governance, be it illiberal democracy, market authoritarianism, or imperial revanchism, that provides the tools to solve today's urgent problems. Democracy has the best chance of forging better social contracts for the 21st century. Precisely because of its inherent capacity for self-correction, its ability to adjust policies and procedures in nuanced ways, to meet emerging challenges while protecting fundamental rights. What is needed is more embedded democracy for our time. Most of all, we need to shore up democracy's ability to solve problems for people. We must do this not to win a battle of ideologies, but because democracy still offers the best chance of preserving what is needed for and valuable in human life. I am very proud to present this report today as part of international ideas contribution to the global debate on the state and the fate of democracy. Much of the report focuses on the core place that democracy has in securing a sustainable and just future. And the fact that such a future is not foreordained but must be earned. In many places it is being earned in the hardest of ways by people who are, right now, demanding the rights and freedoms that democracy promises at immense personal risks. Today, as we speak, the people of Ukraine are resisting the brutal Russian invasion. People in Iran are standing up to a 40-year theocratic dictatorship, and the people of Myanmar refuse to accept a return to military rule. They are proving beyond a doubt that self-determination, freedom, and democracy are universal aspirations. Many of them are paying the ultimate price for these aspirations. Many of them will have no other grave but our memory. We owe it to them to remember their struggles every day, to commit our steadfast support to their cause, and to make our work worthy of their sacrifice. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Secretary General, for that sobering introduction to the weighty and current matters that we have to discuss today. We're honored to launch this report with keynote addresses from Ms. Yuta Erpelainen, Commissioner for International Partnerships at the European Union, and from Mr. Michael O'Flaherty, Director of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Commissioner Erpelainen joins us by video. Dear friends, democracy is under attack. The European Union invests to advance and show the value of democracy, both at home and abroad. Together with EU member states, we are increasing our collective impact to support democracy through Team Europe initiative on democracy. We continue to partner with democracy champions, civil society, and youth, as well as organizations like IDEA. Today, you hear about two valuable tools, the Global State of Democracy 2022 report, and the EU-funded Democracy Tracker. The 2022 report highlights the need for better social contracts to advance democracy. The Democracy Tracker allows civil society and policymakers to monitor the pulse of quality of democracy almost in real time. Both tools support global efforts to strengthen democracy, and the EU will remain a key player in this fight. Dear friends, despite the global decline in democracy, brave activists around the world are fighting for everyone's fundamental freedoms. Many of those are young women and men. This month, the EU launched the first-ever Youth Action Plan for External Action. Co-created with young people, it will increase their impact in policymaking. EU also launched a €40 million Youth and Women in Democracy initiative. This flagship helps youth-led organizations push for electoral and democratic reforms. And it will increase the influence of youth, including young women, in politics. We are very grateful to Commissioner Erpelainen for that challenging reflection on the state of democracy and for the EU's support for democracy promotion. Secretary-General, your Excellencies, dear friends, thank you very much for inviting me to join you for the launching of the 2022 Global State of Democracy report. I very much appreciate the invitation and am sorry that I cannot be with you in person. I acknowledge that the 2022 report raises a red flag regarding the state of our democracies across the world, as well as here in Europe, where of course my focus is. But I acknowledge also with deep appreciation the extent to which you identify respect for human rights, the promotion of equality, the pursuit of social justice as integral to a healthy democracy. However, I would have to say in that context that we are on shaky ground today. Human rights have rarely been under more threat. Not only do we see unacceptable levels of abuse, just think of what's happening to the people of Ukraine right now, but not just abuse in and of itself, but also a repudiation of the values, a repudiation of the human rights standards themselves. It has become commonplace, unfortunately, for governments to treat human rights like a buffet. You choose what you find useful, you leave on the shelf those things that are inconvenient. As well as this sense of the human rights buffet, the levels of human rights abuse, we also, as a further contribution to why I say we're on shaky ground today, we have the sense that human rights is no longer strongly alive on our streets. It isn't something that gets people passionate. In the way, I think that people were very passionate about the human rights project some decades ago. There's a sense out there very commonly that human rights maybe matter, but they're about somebody else. They're not for me. They're not for my family. All of this leads to a situation where some argue that if we're not very careful indeed, we could lose everything that has been established in terms of the human rights protection system put in place since the Second World War. The great French intellectual, Stefan Hasell, was so concerned that a few years ago, just before his death, he published an essay called Andigné Voux. Get indignant, wake up, fight back to save this vital, precious achievement of modernity. So how do we push back? How do we re-establish human rights at the heart of our societies for thriving democracies? Let me just suggest three things right now. The first is that we have to give breath to the full extent of human rights. This means we have to invest not only in civil and political rights, but also in promoting and delivering social and economic rights. We have to frame our great claims using the language and the standards of human rights, invoking the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights, the European Social Charter, the European Convention on Human Rights, and that's just to take the European context, but framing our claims as demands for respect for human rights, recalling that delivering on these claims is the duty of states, not some kind of favor. A second dimension of restoring the place of human rights at the center of our societies is investing anew in human rights education. It used to be commonplace in schools that a child would gain some exposure to the basics of human rights. That's rare today, and I think it's very important. We're not training children to be lawyers, but we need to get the basic elements of human rights and why they matter back in our schoolrooms. The third and the final dimension I would mention today is about building fresh or new partnerships for the promotion and the protection of human rights. Take the need, for example, of close cooperation between the business world and human rights actors. Just think, for example, of the context of the power of the social media platforms, the extent to which artificial intelligence is being driven by the private sector. Building and ensuring respect for human rights in those contexts requires a greatly intensified partnership between those two worlds. But partnership is also about bringing together those different parts of our societies who care about justice and well-being, and giving them a common language around which they can bond and do their activism. And here I suggest human rights can be that shared language. Human rights can be the shared language, for instance, between the young and the older members of our societies. They can unite around the values captured in the instruments, working intergenerationally for social change. We can also build bridges with the cultural world, using human rights as our language, again in that shared pursuit of fairer and better societies. Secretary-General, dear friends, next year we will mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It will be a moment of stock-taking. It will be a moment of renewal. Let's make it a moment when we put human rights right back there at the beating heart of strong, stable and thriving democracies. I thank you for your attention. I'm grateful also to Director O'Flaherty for those comments on the state of democracy in the world and that call to action for a holistic defense of fundamental rights. We turn now to the substance of the Global State of Democracy 2022 report. And Dr. Sima Shaw, the head of the Democracy Assessment Unit here at International Idea, will present the key findings from the report. Dr. Shaw. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for being here and for allowing us to share the latest findings of our Global State of Democracy report and for allowing us to introduce our brand-new tool, the Democracy Tracker, generously co-funded by the European Union, the Bosch Foundation, and BMZ. I'm going to start today by providing an overview of the report. At International Idea, we understand democracy to be a broad concept and one that can have very many different manifestations depending on a particular society's history, culture, and set of priorities. Although there are, of course, core tenets of democracy, the way they are operationalized can vary widely. There is no such thing as a perfect democracy. Overall, at International Idea, we measure the extent to which a country has realized various aspects of democratic ideals along five main attributes, which we consider integral to democratic growth. These are representative government, fundamental rights, checks on government, impartial administration, and participatory engagement. As you can see on this slide, each of these attributes has a number of accompanying sub-attributes and then a number of individual indicators. In total, we cover 116 individual indicators across 173 countries around the world from 1975 through December 2021, and this dataset is updated every year. And now for the findings. First, democracy is in clear decline. Over the last six years, we see that the number of countries moving in the direction of authoritarianism is more than double the number of countries moving in the direction of democracy. We count a country as moving toward democracy when it transitions from authoritarianism to hybridity or from either of these categories to democracy. Conversely, we count a country as moving away from democracy when it suffers a democratic breakdown or transitions from a hybrid status to authoritarian status. Second, even in existing democracies, there is a worrying drop in quality. This slide shows you the number of eroding democracies over time. A decade ago, that number was 12. Today it is 52, representing an increase of more than 300%. And what do we mean when we say erosion? Erosion refers to a statistically significant drop in at least one of our measures of democracy. While most eroding countries were struggling with one or two measures, there were a handful that were struggling with as many as seven aspects of democracy. Even more worrying is that backsliding is at its peak. Backsliding refers to a more severe form of erosion. At IDEA, we define backsliding as a statistically significant decline in civil liberties, checks on government, and clean elections over a five-year period. Backsliding today impacts some of the oldest and largest democracies in the world. Take the United States, for example. The declines there have been most acute in effective parliament, judicial independence, and civil liberties. When you think about effective parliament in the US, the problems that Congress has had in effectively investigating former President Trump is a good illustration. This will be important to watch as Trump continues to disobey congressional subpoenas and because such subpoenas will likely become non-issues with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The dips and judicial independence were driven by declines in the independence of the lower courts as well as the Supreme Court. And civic space also contracted, driven by declines in freedom of expression and freedom of association and assembly. Given the context in which all this took place, which was marked by toxic polarization and the January 6th insurrection, it is easy to see why there is concern about the future path of American democracy. A third noteworthy point is that where there isn't decline, there is worrying stagnation. On the left, you can see here that the number of democracies has remained the same over the last decade, 104. On the right, you can see that global average scores are decidedly mid-range since about 2000. Looking at impartial administration, you can see that it stands out for staying at the lower end of mid-range performance. This pattern is worrying because our context has changed dramatically over the last two decades. In addition to obvious alterations like our increased reliance on the internet and digital space for completing the most basic of tasks, we can think about things like increased mobility. We can work from mostly anywhere, depending on our job, which means we can be increasingly mobile, which begs questions about citizenship and larger aspects of democracy. There are public health concerns now that shape our decision making, a renewed threat of nuclear warfare and an impending climate disaster. Protests over the last few years have also highlighted people's concerns about long-standing inequalities, discrimination and racism. Trends in democracy do not appear to have kept up. Fourth, there is an increasing support for authoritarian values. In 2009, only 38% of respondents to the World Values Survey said that it was fairly good or very good to have strong leaders who don't have to bother with parliaments or elections. In 2021, that percentage had risen to 52%. At the same time, while more than half of all respondents to the World Values Survey said that democracy was important in 2017, that number has now dropped to 47%. Still, there are signs of hope. You can see here on the left a spider plot showing the Gambia's performance on all our 16 sub-attributes of democracy. Since the Yayaya Jame regime was defeated in 2016, the country has improved dramatically. You can see growth by looking here at the pink line which represents 2021 and the blue line representing 2016. Growth is evident in judicial independence, civil liberties, clean elections, predictable enforcement. These advances reflect the country's new national development plan, a new social contract for Gambians that aims to deliver good governance, national reconciliation, improved social cohesion, and an inclusive economy. Its implementation has involved important transitional justice processes, security sector reform, and a constitutional review. In the middle, you can see the Dominican Republic which has also grown. It has experienced improvements in things like impartial administration, civil society participation, and this change has been driven largely by the alternation in political power and youth mobilization and the development of open dialogue formats for decision making, especially related to anti-corruption. And then finally on the right you can see a graph showing improvements in Moldova, which has meant that performance in this country since 2017 means now that Moldova is now among the 25% of countries globally in terms of representative government, social rights inequality, and gender equality. That is the top 25% in the world. But these three cases are not the sum total of good news. As we lay out in the report, there are signs of change and a push for democratic innovation in all regions of the world, from citizens assemblies in Europe to constitutional redrafting in Chile, to peer-to-peer learning in Africa and West Asia. It is clear that people are not giving up. And this is what I will now address. What is it that we are supposed to do about these declines? We believe the key to addressing these problems is the redesign of social contracts. A social contract refers to the implicit agreement between people and their government about what they owe each other and what they can expect from each other. We pay taxes and agree to certain rights on our restrictions in exchange for a set of services, security, and the ability to pursue the goals that are important to us. Traditionally, experts have focused on things like social security, pension, health care, education, unemployment benefits when discussing social contracts. What we argue though is that new social contracts are needed that go beyond these traditional things to involve to respond to evolving needs that are reflective of today's reality. For instance, some experts say that universal primary education is just the beginning. While it is necessary, given the fact that more people are changing their career paths much more often than they did before, there is a need for continuing education and adult education that allows people to reskill long after traditional schooling is over. Another example is the care economy which needs to be taken more seriously, recognizing things that things like affordable and reliable child care is a societal public good and not just a benefit for women. In terms of how to make this actionable, our first recommendation involves protecting the fundamentals of democracy, especially electoral integrity, in response to increasingly common attacks and threats against electoral management bodies and the associated risk of declining faith in what are legitimate and credible elections. It is critical that all actors, governments, civil society, media, the public prioritize the protection of electoral integrity. This means mitigating vulnerabilities throughout the entire electoral cycle and adopting things like peer-to-peer learning across borders as well as cooperation between electoral management bodies and judicial institutions. Second is trust. Governments, in order for social contracts to be successfully renewed, there must be an increased focus on trust not just between governments and people but between people within a society. Accountability and transparency are essential prerequisites for this, adopting recommendations by regional anti-corruption bodies such as Greco in Europe or the follow-up mechanism for the implementation of the Inter-American Convention against Corruption in the Americas and the Open Government Partnership are strong first steps. But trust can also be forged by being responsive and transparent. In Canada, the Federal Housing Advocate, housed at the Canadian Human Rights Commission, relies on public submissions from Canadians who have suffered from homelessness and other housing problems to shape and inform its policy recommendations. Transparency international has also used the idea of integrity packs to motivate public contracting authorities and bidders to sign public agreements committing to refrain from corruption. These are innovatively monitored by civil society organizations. It also critically means respecting the freedom of expression which we have seen adversely impacted in every single region of the world and increasingly online. And finally, governments must prioritize meaningful inclusion. This means that groups who have been historically at the periphery of decision-making, LGBTQIA plus communities, women, racial and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, need to be front and center. It's not about giving them a seat at the table anymore. It's about designing institutions based on their perspectives and needs. In Colombia, a part of the Andes-Amazon rainforest was recently designated a civil society nature reserve, which means it is officially supported in and expressly committed to protecting and preserving not just biodiversity but cultural knowledge. This has empowered Indigenous women to revitalize Indigenous practices. The reserve is expressly committed to protecting and promoting these Indigenous women as the keepers of the knowledge of traditional medicine. This is a good example of inclusion and renovating the terms and expectations between these communities and their government. Second, governments, civil societies, and others with decision-making authority must integrate youth in a meaningful way. Examples of this already happening include the youth advisory councils built into the Council of Europe and such councils at the sub-national levels in Australia in Canada. Countries like Belgium and Malaysia have also recently lowered the voting age. Another good example of changing demands. And now it is my pleasure to introduce our newest tool, the Democracy Tracker, which provides qualitative, monthly updates at the country level for each of the 173 countries that we cover. These updates are event-based and include developments that we believe have the potential to impact the state of democracy and human rights in each country at the time of reporting. We note with appreciation the generous funding from the EU, the Bosch Foundation, and BMZ in the development of the Democracy Tracker. The Tracker is housed on a brand new GSOD platform. The platform has several components. One is the Tracker, which is based on 173 country profiles updated every month. Second is the GSOD indices, which is our annual dataset, and which, until now, is what we have relied on primarily for the GSOD report. Third is the GSOD report itself. The annual edition is our flagship publication, but we also publish in-focus reports throughout the year to respond to events that are happening in our world. And finally is Democracy Notes, which is our blog. This is a bird's-eye view of a country profile page on the Tracker. It starts with an overview of our annually updated quantitative indices at the attribute level. It moves on to a basic information box, which provides you with things like who the head of state is, who the government, who the head of government is, etc. There's a box on human rights treaty compliance, which shows you which treaties have been ratified by the country. It includes an early warning system, which is still in beta form. It's still being tested, but it will be finalized by the end of next year. This early warning system provides a risk assessment of a democracy's risk of backsliding or breakdown. Then we have a small tracker here, which shows you how each attribute in the country is doing every month, color-coded, so you can see net advances, declines, and status quo. A 500-word context-setting profile, which allows you to understand the sociopolitical history in the country so that you can understand the monthly update better, and then the monthly update itself. At the bottom of the page, you can have an interactive experience with our quantitative indices, picking the time period you're interested in, and seeing the spider plot there repopulate depending on which time period you choose. This is a close-up view of the monthly update, which you can see is tagged. According to searchable keyword, it's also tagged to our attributes and sub-attributes, so that you can see exactly which aspect of democracy is affected by that update every month. What we hope this provides is a holistic view of the world. The annually updated quantitative scores and the monthly updated qualitative text allows you to get almost a real-time picture of what's happening in democracy and human rights in all 173 countries. I want to draw your attention especially to the early warning tool, which is one of our most innovative aspects. As I said, it's still in beta form. It shows you the risk of backsliding and breakdown only for democracies, and the heat map over here just provides a picture of the risk of backsliding at the regional level over time, with the lighter red showing lower risk and deeper red showing higher risk. Thank you very much. May I thank Dr. Shaw on behalf of everyone here for that introduction to the key findings in the global state of democracy report, those calls to action for things that governments, civil society organizations, and indeed ordinary people everywhere, can do to improve the quality of democracy. We now turn to a panel discussion that will take a deeper dive into one of the issues that was covered in the global state of democracy report in particular on social contracts, and that panel will be moderated by Ms. Sarah Crowe, a journalist and senior communications consultant for the United Nations. Ms. Crowe. Thank you very much, and good afternoon, friends of democracy. I like that title. Being here today reminds me of a time, Bank Save a Certificate, you will remember this, pre-idea time, when I was living and working in Stockholm for Reuters and Radio Sweden, and it was truly an extraordinary period, and you've seen this, this was very clear in the graph that came out from the 89-90 period of what we saw in Dr. Shaw's map graph, and it was really the golden age of democracy. You had, you know, the tank man in Tiananmen Square literally standing up to power, if you remember, in the streets of Beijing. You had the Berlin Wall had come down, the Soviet Union was opening up, and Nelson Mandela, one of the greatest leaders of our time in the country of my upbringing, was coming out of prison while his fellow Robin Island prisoners were here in Stockholm visiting A&C leader Oliver Tumbo, and I interviewed them and they were utterly dismayed, they were just stunned by the rate of change at that time, and it was just like this democratic tsunami sweeping the globe, and it was a glorious time to be, to be a journalist, this sort of revolutionary period. As we've heard today, it's a very different time. We've heard words like attack, red light, it's all very worrying and very scaring, very scary. Since the birth of the democratic system, as Ideas Report shows, there has probably never been a more urgent time for democracies around the world to really respond to these overlapping toxic crises, but does it have to be like this? Ideas Report is saying this could and should be the very moment for democracies to seize, to grab hold of, and to show that citizens can and must forge ahead with new innovative social contracts, as we heard from Dr. Shah, that bind people together and not divide them. So the panel, I'm going to call on my two panelists who are in the room here now, Dr. Massimo Tomasoli and Dr. Julia Leniger, please take your seats. Why is it that democracies are under attack and on life support? What has pushed this passion to kill it off? Is it dislocated and disenchanted young people no longer wanting to live life online and the lack of leadership that really makes them feel that they've no need to vote to get involved? Are we putting some of these questions to our panelists who are in the room, as well as our two who are online? There we go. Thank you very much to Professor Azaz Karam and to Dr. Delia Ferrera, who are joining us online. So we'll go first to the room, I think. Let's start here. If you could, each one of you, please answer this question in as brief a fashion as you can, just two or three things that stands out from this report for you. First of all to you, Dr. Julia Leniger, I hope I've said that right. You're head of transformation political of the political disorder, which is a very long title and I know you don't love that, but you're from the head of the Department of the Institute of Development and Sustainability, formerly the German Development Institute. Let's start first with you and then we'll go on to Dr. Delia Ferrera and Professor Azaz Karam and then back to the room here. First of all to you, Dr. Julia. Yeah thanks a lot. So I am head of department at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability and the name of our department is Transformation of Political Order and Disorder and I also have the honor to be a member of the advisory board here at International Idea. So my big congratulations to the team who provided this report with a lot of insight and also the democracy tracker that is really a great way forward to track democracy around the world. I bring two and a half takeaways. The first very quick one and that was one when I read the report a rather implicit one and none that is upfront. So for those of you and probably that's most of you in the room here and online the communities who promote and support democracy and who support human rights are really a part. In this report Idea talks a lot about both sites, about human rights and democracy and I think it's not a call in the report but maybe a call from my side to really bring these two communities closer together and make a stronger effort for the case of democracy and human rights. My second takeaway is and this is no surprise we've been observing that for a long time that we are observing a fundamental transformation of political regimes and the global order and that also that has been in the making for more than a decade now but what becomes very obvious now is that the values that unite societies within societies and between societies are really shaken up now. So what we do need and I think the report is very explicit about that is a renewal of social contracts. So of the question what do people expect when our states or other entities consider to be legitimate? How are political decisions taken? So this renewal is really important and this is not I'm saying nothing new here but what I think is important what the report brings together here is there is it gives a reason why this is the case and the reason is that the world is facing various very complex problems and so problems like climate change, loss of biodiversity, war, conflict, you name it, stepped crisis in many regions. So all these problems have to be solved at the same time. So this means people and societies have to renegotiate values and solve problems at the same time so the ship, democracy and the social contract have to be rebuilt while on sea so that is very challenging and my implicit takeaway here is that in order to rebuild trust it's really important that governments and other policymakers etc are very explicit about the complexity of problems. There won't be easy solutions and a lot of it will be trial and error as well and I think it's very important to be transparent about that in order to rebuild trust. Thank you Julia. From transformation to transparency Dr. Delia Ferreira you are chief of transparency international are you as worried as everyone else about the findings in this report? Absolutely thank you for the invitation and greetings from Buenos Aires and I joined Julia in congratulating the colleagues who made this report possible and especially the tracker which is really an innovation very useful for those of us working in the not only in the academic field but concretely on the field. I am absolutely worried at transparency international has been highlighting the connections between the erosion of democracy and corruption for many years now. Now it is in the whole world conversation and that's important because we are trying to walk in the solution so I am worried I think the report confirms everything we have been saying in the academic or even in previous reports by idea and other organizations in terms of the erosion of democracy the lack of trust in institutions the dissatisfaction with the performance of democracy the unfulfilled promises of democracy this gap between the expectations and the democracy performance that is to say the response from democratic institution towards the demands of the society and I think and I hope we will have time to go deeper into the contract side but I think that it is very clear that we have moved the needle here from talking just about institutions or institutional arrangements towards the value element the social conditions that guarantee that democratic democratic governments can progress and adapt and face changes for many years and we were talking about this with Kevin Casas in DC some some weeks ago for many years the neo institutionalism forced us to concentrate on institutions laws agencies etc conventions of course in the international arena and whoever talked about values value consensus the culture in societies were treated as a dilettant not academic trustworthy well this has changed fortunately for particularly for those of Apple who has been talking about the broken consensus in terms of value for years now so I think this is clear now and this is another positive trend in our discussion and it is essential if we want to restore trust I think we have to of course reveal trust in institutions and that starts with anti-corruption transparency integrity particularly integrity and I highlight that especially after covid where we have seen not only the concern of the population regarding how much the and how the resources were spent but also the anger against lack of integrity in public officials that didn't abide through the the norms they have imposed on the rest of the population I am referring to the party gates or the VIP vaccination and things like that so trust in institutions transparency accountability integrity and trust or what I think is key here is interpersonal trust in all latino barometer uh euro barometer asia pacific barometer you see that the interpersonal trust is lower even than the absolutely lack of trust that people has in political parties thank you doctor for error we get to come back we're going to come back to the issue of trust and social contracts in a moment but I'd like to turn now to professor as a caram who is the secretary general of religions for peace international your thoughts there were some positive lines there coming out from doctor for error can you give us perhaps a little bit more light at the end of this dark tunnel well first of all I'd like to say I have to say thank you very much for the opportunity to be with you here today I am absolutely thrilled especially because international idea and Mr banks say the sort of very can we just refer to as being in the audience it has a very special place in my heart as I work there for ideas first three years and so it's lovely to be able to celebrate this the tracker not the content of the report as much which is quite depressing as has already been very well pointed out I do think that there is that the as as doctor rubio said this this uh swinging of the pendulum from being forced to look only at institutions legislation convention etc towards beginning to look at culture and the way cultures are and and perhaps mr said this sort of very well remember many conversations in international idea in 95 and 96 where where even within the haloed premises of international idea as all these different democracy experts came together there was a great deal of contention and exactly what dr rubio mentioned in terms of culture seriously we have time for this was was indeed the predominant idea and I think there's I know we're going to talk about it more later especially the the link between values trust cultures but I just want to throw the gauntlet now and both dr massimo tomasoli and and I think dr rubio and dr leninger may agree I want to throw in the gauntlet here for us to take up later perhaps which is it's not just values as we as the secular world understands them but perhaps perhaps it is high time we begin to take a step further step deeper into the values domain into the cultural domain and try to understand or at least to be aware of the roles that religions play in political processes because if a whole bunch of creatures around in the central in the oval office around president trumpus since he was elected blessing him didn't quite bring the idea home that religions are playing an incredibly important role in the deterioration of our democratic system and human rights aspirations and that didn't quite bring it home if iran and sady arabia and the former brazilian regime didn't quite bring it home I think it might be high time that we want to look at that a little bit and I know for all of those who are so sensitive about culture religions and even more now go to rain but I think it's high time we look at it and I think the value added of this opportunity of the global state of democracy report is to give us the chance to be a bit more honest about the cultures of the institutions that do democracy as opposed to only looking at the countries where democracy is failing maybe there is a connection between how we see ourselves how we do our jobs and between what we prefer to continuously ignore around the world thank you thank you professor for that focus on values and culture uh dr massimo tomasoli a director director of global programs and permanent observer for the international idea to the united nations judging from your reports and you've tracked these now over over the years these democratic trends just seem to be getting worse every year I don't want to blame idea for them but you know you've shone the light on them now and why this backsliding and we've heard some key points that have come out of the report but what what are the reasons there well we we may actually identify a number of reasons or factors that are associated with backsliding one is the rise of illiberal and populist parties in government in the last decade another one is the increasing levels of polarization in society and the correspondingly low level of support for democracy and the economic crisis have also played a major role and to some extent also there is a role of authoritarian regimes in their international projection and a certain element of reproduction or mimicking of authoritarian regimes action uh more uh lately uh it has become a mainstream uh topic also the issue of this information that was also recalled by our secretary general in his introduction which is linked to um a dilemma that is uh how to ensure uh safety public safety without compromising a freedom of expression and this is particularly important as we are moving from the conventional traditional platforms for civic engagement more and more to new platforms like social media but if I were to say about what happened and how we captured these images over the time as you know this report was started in 2017 and the first report was about exploring democracy's resilience and I think we can claim that we have been talking about the resilience of democracy well ahead of the impact of the pandemic when resilience became a major mainstream topic and last year's report was about the impact of covid on democracy and human rights and I think that the key message as my fellow panelists highlighted is the issue of trust and renewing social contracts I want to underscore one point my last point as you all know secretary general of the UN Antonio Guterres launched our common agenda and in our common agenda building trust and social contract is one of the key pillars we contribute through these analysis to stressing one dimension that is often forgotten in multilateral fora and that is that the democratic dimensions of renewing social contracts are very important and they are very important in order to deliver for the people and to reinforce trust it's a sort of in a way chicken and egg issue you lose trust in institutions but then you may also rebuild the trust in institutions by engaging in this process so I think that is a key message from today's from these years of report right thank you thank you Massimo so it's a time as we've heard this sort of challenge from Professor Karam is a time for a new look and you think a new way of looking at democracies Winston Churchill said democracy is the worst possible form of government except for all the rest so you know democracies usually are ended by the barrel of the gun or nowadays we see it's more slowly strangled to death by by leaders as you say Massimo this is acting on behalf of of the people Julia on the thought the the concept of social media and these huge changes that have taken place since the say the 2017 report the need for transformation to what extent do you see social media as being a tool that is useful or indeed a tool that is actually hindering the development and depth of democracy I mean there's a lot out there on on on social media let me let me let me say first because that struck me what you said let me first refer to that and then I come I come to the social media because I mean I would just like to remind us what the social con what the social contract is right I mean a social contract is there to avoid that rights and obligations in a society have to be renegotiated constantly and that's what's happening at the moment we have to renegotiate it constantly and there if you I mean I had other things to say here I can do that later but then when it refers to a social media I mean social media is a factory that comes in that breaks the social contract in a sense that it opens new spaces where this social contract the values the rights and obligations can be renegotiated but without any power to take political decisions that are binding for the society and the individuals and the social groups that take part in in in social media so there is a risk here I mean and this is what I said there's a lot out there on it so there is a lot of literature analysis evidence that say okay there is a big opportunity because people can just everybody can talk but then there is also a big risk because people withdraw in their echo chambers and just to talk talk to those who who have the same values and that fosters polarization and as we see in the report polarization is one of the instruments autocratizing countries or governments use as a tool to autocratize a country so social media helps democracy if it's able to bridge between social groups and also make an exchange between values or religions for instance possible but not if it takes them takes them apart. Dr. Ferrero just to pick up on the point of that sort of overlap between social media and social contracts you know can social media be a tool for social contracts to be developed haven't governments got an obligation to put in place safeguards so that people can tell the difference between misinformation disinformation and you know be more aware of their democratic role in society. Well first of all I don't think that social media is the way in which we can restore the or create the new social contracts because of the characteristics of the social media itself and a tendency to defensiveness to warming or social warming not only we have a climate warming we have social warming that comes from social media. The other thing is what can the state do or the governments do in order to prepare citizens to act in a context where social media is a main way of communicating between us but with a particular condiment or with a particular way of doing that generating outrage and also polarization. One thing is to prepare people to distinguish or detect misinformation and this is nowadays part of citizen building or citizenship rebuilding for many years we talked about building citizenship about talking about the institutions the constitutions and making people aware of their rights. Now in this set we have to not only the state but civil society organizations academia etc we have to prepare or work on literacy digital literacy of the citizens because they will interact with social media and for that they are exposed so they have to be able to detect which is very very difficult because you cannot take any post you receive imagine an ordinary citizen and start tracking whether this has been checked or not because one of the problems of social media is that the intermediaries that did that work before are not here any longer not the community organization not the traditional media without the problems but they were there to do this fact-checking civil society organizations are working in fact checking are working in detection of deep fake which is even more complicated than misinformation so we have lots of things to do but in order to negotiate and I don't like the work the work for the social contract it is not social media the space where we have to do that. Thank you Delia so if it's not social media then perhaps it's religion professor Azhar Karam you've challenged the the group here and those online to think differently to think about issues around values and culture so what role does organized religion have in boosting not only the quality of voter turnout but crucially in cementing and solidifying the the not only the quantity but the quality of democracy we heard from Dr. Dr. Shah this 300 percent it was this increase a slide earlier including that that showed a decade ago there were 12 and today there are 52 countries where quality is eroding and that's pretty shocking so coming back to you is there a sense that people are leaving the the mosques the synagogues the temples and the churches in the same way they're not turning up to vote and does organized religion have a role to play in cementing and solidifying social contracts? Well that's a very fine question I'm not quite sure how long we have but let me just tell you very briefly that I don't think organized religion is the only religious space that we need to be looking at I think we need to be looking at faith communities writ large so churches mosques synagogues yes absolutely amazing spaces but we need to look faith communities writ large which also by the way includes indigenous communities around the world because they indigenous faiths are faiths nevertheless so I think we need to be a bit more savvy we also need to look a little bit more critically at non-state actors who take on aware a religious garb and we need to keep in mind a couple of very important statistics that often get overlooked in international development and foreign affairs those statistics are as follows we know for a fact that a minimum of 30 percent if not more but a minimum of 30 percent on average globally of basic primary health care is still being provided by religious organizations and institutions in the united states of america 70 percent of the hospitals and this came out very clearly during the covid dynamics 70 percent of hospitals are run by the catholic church by the way it comes out also very clearly when we begin to look at abortion rights issues yes because which hospitals are definitely not which doctors are definitely not where the problems lie so we just need to be aware of the fact that we talk about a social contract we need to be conscious of social services in any given community and who provides them who runs them and on what terms and basis so if 30 percent of basic primary health care globally is being provided through religious institutions if 30 percent and I think it's 32. something percent of education educational institutions educational centers are still being provided through religious institutions globally yes we're not talking about the global south we're also talking about places like the united states of america and europe so we need to be a bit more conscious of the fact that these religious actors in their diversity religious institutions religious leaders religious NGOs are actually very critical service provide social service providers we talk about a social contract and ignore the social services how is that possible in addition can we just note that the covid dynamic has taught us one thing that the primary responders in any humanitarian crisis man-made or natural disaster linked the primary responders four out of the top 10 global humanitarian organizations are actually religious in nature so hello where are we actually looking critically at what this community now i'm not arguing that religion is all good i would be the last person on earth to argue that religion is all good but i am arguing for two things i'm arguing that we're overlooking for way too long for way too long the role of the the myriad religious dimensions and actions and actors in society and we're ignoring it at our expense but yet we argue for a social contract and number two i'm arguing that unless we wake up and smell the coffee of certain religious institutions and specific religious leaders becoming overly closely aligned with the very same authoritarian regimes that we are now decrying that unless we wake up and smell that coffee we will wonder what on earth is happening when in fact it's been laying out very closely amongst us but the amazing thing is how we can blind ourselves to those developments and unless we wake up and smell that coffee we will not be able to hold those religious leaders accountable because they're simply out of the frame of our reference even though we talk about a social contract right thank you professor thank you your your passion is contagious here in the room so we'll pick up some of the ideas of the social contract but also looking at that authoritarian aspect that partly coming from religious leaders but also at a time when you look back to the 2014-2015 migration crisis it seems that correlation of authoritarianism really sort of took root there and how do you temper the the passions around migration while kind of bearing in mind that there needs to be a forum for for free speech and for expression of these frustrations well we have used the word the global crisis of course well ahead of the pandemic and one of those occasions was the 2014-2015 period when at the UN they addressed the issue of safe and orderly migration policies as an aftermath of conflict provoked flows but as a matter of fact people is on the move since decades and there is also a big element of this information especially in the public in the global north which is that these affects the global north more than the global south most of the burden is actually born by the global south and just before today's meeting I had a view at the UNHCR latest data and they are striking 89.3 million people forcibly displaced in 2021 and these includes refugees internally displaced people and asylum seekers now about 83 percent of these people are hosted in low and middle income countries 83 percent so think of how the impact of the hosting of the remainder the minority of these people in high income countries how it has impacted on the political discourse thanks to I would say the cynicism of politicians or political entrepreneurs who use these as a very good platform for winning elections now the issue here if I well understood your question is should they focus on winning the elections or should they provide policy solutions and if it is about providing policy solutions it can't be anything different than taking seriously these issues and not staying on the surface one of the big question for the global north is a demographic transition the sustainability of our social services as I was referring to in the north depends a lot on the possibility of shifting the balance between the different age brackets in in our population and we do need good sound policies on migration and I think the sooner this will be understood the better there will be odds to counter backsliding because this is very unpopular but it is necessary and then the necessity of the reality is something that politicians should sooner or later be confronted with thank you thank you must be more let's look ahead now because we don't have a lot of time and we what we are going to go to the floor in a minute but let's look ahead to some of the solutions Julia we've seen we've heard from from Dr. Shah earlier that one of the sort of concrete suggestions for for improving social contracts is continuous adult education how feasible is this where is it happening how can it be rolled out to other countries allow me to just respond to the religious comment here I mean I do agree that we overlook this aspect and I would like to bring in an additional one if we look at constitutions I mean constitutions regulate the relationship between state and society not with business what we overlook is that most constitutions also regulate the relationship with religious organizations and churches and what we see except of the US what we see is a cop throughout countries all over the world there is a cooperation between the state and religious organizations and I mean that that's not problematic right I think it gets problematic well sometimes it can it can be I mean I agree it can be and one example here is so if we conceive the social contract as regulating the rights and obligations the state and citizens have so for instance the state protects the people the state provides basic services to the people people have the obligation to also contribute for instance through taxes but very important people also give legitimacy to the state so but but now we heard that there is a broken consensus and people want different things from the state that they don't conceive the state as legitimate anymore one reason could be that in state building um religious organizations take over that social social provision of basic services so how can I legitimate a state if if whatever church or religious organization provides the basic services that the state is is supposed to provide that could be one reason for a broken consensus but now the civic education so the broken consensus requires the renegotiation of values of the question who takes part in the common good who identifies with the state who are we so what we what we know is that civic and what we in that case science and evaluation studies from from civic education and adult education is that for instance to overcome polarization and negotiate these values it's really helpful to bring people together and um and people from different groups with different identities and that helps but it's not sustainable if state and other actors do not tackle systemic and structural factors like inequality and poverty and that leads me back leads back to your point there need both needs to go hand in hand and that's probably a difficult task for idea because idea focuses on one part but but idea is an organization and you do that in the UN or already for instance to partner with others to tackle these problems from different different angles so I think we really need to broaden the coalition for democracy beyond that core democratic community we are used to work with in order to tackle the problems we face you've thrown so many things out there now we could go on for another hour but we can't and I can see professor karam you're itching to pick up some of those points about bringing people together right but let's look forward now to some of those solutions because we need to start wrapping up and look to the room for some questions so how do you see the next report what would you what would you hope to see from it and what do you fear and the same question to you delia in a minute so first to you asa so for the next report I would love to see us talk exactly about the point that Dr. Leninger just made building broader coalitions for democracy who should be part of that how should that happen to date to date we tend to see democracy as the business of the secular civil society actors and the argument I would like to make is that there are many of the faith-based and faith-inspired actors who are also very powerful human rights defenders some have already lost their lives for democracy and human rights and there are many religious actors who speak to the very core values that eight out of 10 people believe in there's eight out of 10 people in our world according to a few 2012 study that showed us that people confess to belong to a certain faith or religion or religious tradition we have to look at who else beyond the secular western oriented civil society actors are actually also fighting for democracy and human rights we cannot afford to ignore the experience from latin america where liberation theology was a key factor in the struggle against militarization the struggle for democracy before the catholic church itself descended like a ton of bricks on its own people its own priests in across latin american countries there are many many faith-based look at the context of the gulf there are there are governments that are today illegitimate governments if i may say so who are claiming to be the the spreaders of love around the world and tolerance and peace while they have political prisoners from religious minorities in their own prisons some of them unable to reach their families for decades so i'm sorry i think we need to start identifying these these religiously inspired those faith-inspired actors who have to be and maybe they maybe the inclusion of such actors into the coalitions for democracy may well enlighten some of those coalitions certainly we will get different ideas i don't say that we will stop wanting to do the continuing adult education of course we will but the question is not just what the services should be the question is also with whom and for whom so that the next time the arab spring please god happens and it does succeed we don't sit there wondering where did all these people come from all right well there are some shimmerings of hope for another arab spring let's say uh in iran and elsewhere uh delia you're you're speaking from a country that knows contextual theology very well what do you hope to pick up from what professor karam says what do you hope and what do you fear might come out of a new report with regards to the issues that karam as i had had pointed out i i agree with both julia and uh and asa in terms of the broadened coalitions in order to talk about this new what i i i prefer to use the word covenant instead of contract following jonathan sacks because this is about transformation it's not just a negotiation or a transaction between the government and the citizen and that's all so i i fully agree with both of you on this i think we have to take care of who will participate in this conversation and 52 percent of the world population is under 30 52 percent and this part of the population is the one who has less trust in institution and who answer for instance that it is the same to live in democracy or authoritarian regimes so they have to be incorporated only 2.6 seats in national part uh parliaments are for this set of actors who are the majority but i would like to highlight very briefly one thing that i am very concerned about we are talking about this inclusion movement this enhanced participation this responsive in the middle of identity politics prevailing around the world in crisis before we have broadened the rights incorporated people uh meaning fully in meaning fully in positions at the seat uh at the table to discuss and these had contributed in the past to generate community understanding peace in societies in the middle of identity politics what we are seeing is that this enlargement of rights this incorporation of sectors that has been under migrants as massimo was um mentioning is one of the groups but women uh indigenous people and groups etc these groups that has been discriminated or not well represented might be included by legislation institutions quotas and everything you want but in the middle of identity politics this instead of creating community sense participation on a common future is strengthening and solidifying consolidating the fragmentation and the polarization of societies i don't have the answer but i think we have to take care of this thank you thank you delia i'm going to give the last word to massimo we've seen an extraordinary year there's some perhaps some glimmers of hope there unprecedented protests in iran women life freedom women standing up for their rights china the zero covert policies protests there delia was mentioning young people they've been partly excluded yet they're very involved in so many other aspects of society extinction rebellion climate change and all that what could you do idea or what recommendations and policies would you give out to to governments that you could pick up in next year's report to include young people in solutions going forward and finding more democratic involvement well this is a key concern not only for our report but also for our next institutional strategy which we are actually approving by the end of this year well i would say as you and others rightly said that there is a decline in the voter turnout among young people but that is in a way a process that affects all segments of the society by age there is a general voter decline not only by the youth but it is true that the young people are actually voting much less than the other age brackets and i think that the voter turnout one of our key publications provides data on these and we do have an indication of the fact that just about 34 percent of young people both always had elections as opposed to many more more than 60 percent of the other age group above 26 now that doesn't mean that young people disengage from politics as you said mass protests there are some examples also in the report i may just refer to the example of iraq where the mass protest of a couple of years ago which was very much a generational protest because it was led by the youth was criticizing a system that has been crystallized in the transition and still this is a mission unaccomplished but we can see a few civil society organizations and think tanks who are working on engaging and supporting their engagement in in these protests and also in some proposals so i would say yes we can expand the partnerships as delia asa and julia said it's a very good idea to do that for the next iteration of the report i would build on the existing partnerships that are sometimes untapped resources let's look at the un they tend to avoid using the word democracy but they are working on democratic institutions and processes and they may actually do more much more than they are ready to accept that they are doing explicitly there is a big a big bridge that we can build with the community of peacemakers or peace builders or mediators for example and we were talking before about the forum in Geneva that julia attended the human rights council i think that there is also now a gap which has been bridged between those who work on democracy systems and those who work on human rights so i think we are already in motion we can build on what exists and make it even more consistent great so democracy is mission unaccomplished do i have any questions from the room on for any of our panelists i have a few online but let me turn first to anybody in the room if you'd like to raise your hand say where you're from which organization you represent to which country you're representing don't all shout at once now i've got one taker here thank you please if we could have the mic up here in front there we go hi can you hear me okay i'm i'm jason latour canas ambassador to sweden first of all congratulations to international idea on the this year's report and on the incredibly innovative tracker it really is these tools and the analysis contained within them are just so important for governments they're so important in helping us build resilience and strengthen our democracies i wanted to ask a question about disinformation it's it's come up in this discussion today disinformation is such a major threat to democracy it's one reason why canada selected disinformation as our thematic priority for our chairship of international idea this year i'm really interested in some of the themes you're seeing some of the trends in disinformation are there ways that that we can build resilience against disinformation and how is it being used is it being used in some regions more than others just a little more on on disinformation thank you thank you very much any more questions from the room yes please over here thank you my name is diane kashumba i'm the ambassador of rwanda yeah um i'm new i started my post last year and i was very interested in this report and i want to congratulate the team but i have maybe three questions okay we might give you three we'll give you two anyway simple one how do you assess like a freedom of religion yeah that's my first question and my second question how do you const contextualize uh whatever you do um i will give you an example how do you assess like the effectiveness of a parliament in a country do you look at what the people of this country the communities that have elected this parliament was looking for when they elected them and the missions they they gave this parliament i know there are common things all the parliament are supposed to do but i think there are particularities in each country okay and my last question is about hate speech hate speech yeah i see freedom of speech everywhere here freedom of speech and i know most of the african countries are criticized for lack of freedom of speech but nobody talks about hate speech and i've noticed that this country sweden doesn't punish hate speech okay and genocide denial right because i'm coming from a country that was destroyed by genocide in 1994 absolutely so how do you right how do you put this into context and good points and the last question how do you think you're i think you're on four now how do you think this report helps countries and uh people of countries because i've seen it's um it has been there for many years 1995 if i'm not mistaken so how do you think you help countries and how do you interact with the countries thank you thank you excellency let me first take up the the point on disinformation julia would you like to tackle that one freedom of religion and freedom of speech perhaps that would be for you as a let's go with those two first let me first say because you ended ended the first that that is last round by saying democracy is a mission unaccomplished i would say that per definition democracy is always a mission unaccomplished because it's an open-ended process and that's the beauty about democracy as well that it gives it it needs to be flexible to react to to the demands of the people right so um yes they will remain a mission unaccomplished i think that this information is um um is a tough one um i actually i got the same question in shiniva um last week and um my first answer was i wish you asked me this next year because i just started a project where we look at this information in the context of of election but elections but um i think there are two issues here the first one is um the worrying trend is not only that um autocratizing governments and states use this information as a means and tool to polarize countries and or not countries but societies it has also become and that's that's not new a tool to influence societies abroad if we think about russia influencing elections elsewhere for instance there are many other examples uh chinese media really um reproducing chinese news one to one in other countries without contextualizing etc so it has become um an issue for diplomatic affairs that's one one thing so it's part of of the autocratization and backsliding trends but the other the other point is is about we tend to look at either the digital space or the analog space right but i think it it goes back to to the values here because i mean do people believe what they hear when it comes to this information so a lot is about civic education here as well and to really reshape and renegotiate the values and then also inform people right good point over to you as on the questions from rwanda freedom of speech hate speech freedom of religion thank you very much and just to just to pick up i'm actually going to answer and then i have to leave i have a very concrete a couple of examples um the first was related to the 80s and 90s when we started to see massive rates of hiv and AIDS infections going around the world and a great deal of the finger pointing um and discrimination that was taking place against HIV positive sufferers was actually coming from religious institutions and religious leaders who were claiming their moral high ground that this you know if you do this you deserve to get HIV and AIDS it was a massive problem discrimination was a really bitter situation and it it required tackling the problem of discrimination from its roots those who were uh attacking hiv uh sufferers and and and zero positive people um and in in that process of trying to tackle that kind of hate that kind of very very problematic hate um it required dealing with religious institutions and religious leaders now here's an interesting point it wasn't possible to do so in countries which already under authoritarian regimes could claim and still do that there is no such thing as HIV AIDS in their communities because their religious affiliation and moral upbringing prevents them from having HIV right there these claims are still being made so the irony of course was that it was only possible in democratic contexts to actually provide scientific data to the very same religious institutions and religious leaders who are busy finger pointing and discriminating and making it more and more difficult to go and get tested right sounds familiar anyone difficult to go get tested and then get live with the shame of having the disease but in the in in authoritarian context it still remains very difficult to get that particular part of hate and antagonism to be revoked and taken backwards so the point I think from HIV and AIDS from the COVID hallabaloo that's happened with serious misinformation taking place also being propagated by some religious leaders and institutions was if if you have an authoritarian structure governance structure in mind and in place it becomes increasingly difficult to advocate against the misinformation from the sources of some of it right so you you're hampered because these same misinformers who happen to be from the religious space are being protected in some ways by the religious by the authoritarian regimes so it is important for us to understand that particular that particular connectivity hate speech and Rwanda is a beautiful example of where on the one hand you had a remarkable amount of people at the height of the genocide trying to seek refuge in churches and on the other hand getting butchered inside them so I think we see that dual nature the dual role of either being respectful of the religious spaces within them and about them and those who speak in them and and or ignoring them and realizing that they will not feature that they can be violated there's there's an intense there's a value to say that encountering hate speech some of which some of which not all of which is indeed the culprits of come from within religious institutions and spaces because remember fascism and Nazism were not religion free either remember that apartheid was also promoted by certain churches yeah so as long as that congruence is there and it is very much there you cannot then try to say let's work on trying to prevent hate speech let's work on trying to counter it but without including that sector which has the good the bad and the ugly in it thank you and the good the bad and the ugly I know you have to go and I'm sure the room has to go as well but I'm just going to get two last points in both to Massimo and Delia I have a question online about what are some of the features that new social contracts could contain and then we're going to wrap up unless there's some urgent questions from the room over to you Delia I would say that of course we should be talking about this reconstruction of value consensus incorporation of all actors that has to be in this conversation and this new contract should be seen as a transformative tool not just in terms of how many services or who provides the services but of the construction of a real community of reconstruction of the weak community the weak culture instead of the high culture and working together for the common good I think this would be the the best impact and contribution from new social convenience thank you very much Dr. Ferrera and Massimo you again have the last word well just a couple of ideas one was already mentioned by Sima this element of lifelong long learning which is an evolution an improvement but even a transformation of the idea of right to education which is so important when coping with the crisis and we can see it especially now in the response to the pandemic and and then perhaps these these other element of engaging or creating or preserving a space for dialogue I think this is a very important element maybe it is implicit but what we see under attack is also the space for civic dialogue the space for creating also that engage the citizen inform the citizen and I think in different ways in different contexts this space is under attack so I think a key element should be innovative approaches to creating space for that dialogue thank you very much and on that note I'm going to wrap it up thank you so much for an incredibly rich discussion I think we've only just touched the surface but read the report continue the dialogue make contacts with the group here at the reception afterwards and online so for the final words over to Alex for the wrap up well may I also add my thanks to our wonderful panelists to our moderator for a very thought provoking discussion I suppose there's a sense in which we could begin writing the 2023 report this very evening we regretfully draw near to the end of our event today but certainly not to the discussion and in closing we are honored to have remarks from both the Honourable Robert Oliphant the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada and from his Excellency Tobias Bilström the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Sweden Mr Oliphant has recorded a video for us as all of you know this internationally recognized report is one of ideas key initiatives it provides evidence-based research and data on the current state of democracy in the world and it serves as an essential tool to protecting democracy and upholding fundamental rights and freedoms around the globe for Canada this report is also an opportunity to reflect on the state of democracy in our own country Canada believes that democracy is crucial to creating the adequate conditions for economic and social development democracy leads to peace peace leads to stability stability leads to social inclusion and the protection of human rights and it's central to a free open inclusive and prosperous society but it's increasingly under pressure from internal external and digital threats in the past year we have witnessed people around the world continuing to yearn for freedom dignity and the protection of human rights we must all work together to face the current threats to democracy to do that we can acknowledge our own shortcomings we can learn from our own mistakes and we can share our experiences and best practices with like-minded countries as the end of Canada's idea chairship draws near we are pleased that we could raise awareness of the urgent need to combat disinformation around the globe and its impact on democratic processes over the past year to continue this work I'm very pleased to announce that Canada is providing IDEA with $250,000 in funding to expand the Institute's capacity to address the impact of disinformation on global democracy while Canada's chairship comes to an end tomorrow we will continue to work with idea to protect democracy and human rights around the world always as the incoming chair we wish the Netherlands great success as they continue to build on this important work thank you very much and our final speaker for today is minister Bilström who has also recorded his remarks by video mr secretary general member states representatives colleagues and friends of democracy thank you for inviting me to give closing remarks at the launch of a global state of democracy report 2022 unfortunately I'm unable to attend in person but very grateful for the opportunity to address you at this important occasion a year ago when the IDEA launched the previous global state of democracy report a lot of the challenges presented for democracy centered around the COVID-19 pandemic today a year later the world faces challenges of a different kind one that was hard to imagine just a year ago Russia's aggression against Ukraine and its full scaling invasion on February 24th this year has set back the clock to a time before most of us were even born with its war of aggression against Ukraine Russia flagrantly violates international law humanitarian law and human rights one conclusion is clear internal repression is strongly linked to external aggression as shown by scholars democracies not do not go to war with each other while authoritarianism for men's violence and wars and as described in the report presented here today Russia's war against Ukraine has demonstrated just how threatening democratic growth can be to authoritarian regimes the strong link between authoritarianism and violent conflict makes my government work even harder to support democratic movements and strengthen the work for free elections we stand with Ukraine Russia's aggression against Ukraine is an attack on democracy itself it is not the only attack on democracy globally the global state of democracy report 2022 presented this heartening trend reading the report i'm especially taken aback by the fact that during the last five years the number of countries moving towards authoritarianism have been more than doubled the number moving towards democracy at the same time authoritarianism continues to deepen in those countries where it has already taken root the report describes a world that the critical crossroads democracies must show that they can meet the aspirations of their constituencies and deliver on changing needs and priorities fortunately it also outlines how efforts are already underway to put appropriate and corresponding mechanisms in place while there are many challenges facing democracy today that does not fail to remember ourselves of the positive effects democracy has for many many people around the globe and why it is worth taking the fight as shown by independent research democracy outperforms authoritarian states in countless fields democracy brings more gender equality more economic growth and is more effective in combating the climate crisis towards this end collaboration between the more democratic allies around the globe has seldom been as important as now forums for mutual and multilateral cooperation such as idea v you and the summit for democracy are crucial in this regard lastly i want to thank idea again for your fine and inspirational work in promoting protecting and advancing democracies worldwide sweden is proud to be the host country of idea and look forward to our continued partnership the swedish government will not tire in our efforts to defend democracy as an important part of our security policy preserve and develop democracy at home and help create strong bonds between democratic allies let us together create a new global trend let us win democracy back as a global practice thank you thanks to mr oliphant and minister bilstrom for ending our event today on a challenge that we must take up in the coming days and finally on behalf of international idea thank you to all of our distinguished speakers and to you who have joined us here and the headquarters in stockholm and others joining online by the internet and we invite you to read the 2022 global state of democracy report links are available across our social media channels and also via the qr code on the screen our new democracy tracker is available for your use at idea dot int slash democracy tracker for those joining us here in stockholm we have laptops in the back of the room where you can try out the website for yourself and of course if you're joining us via youtube you have access in front of you wherever you are today we hope you remain engaged with international ideas work throughout the coming year thank you