 These manifestations of social unrest are actually tremendous opportunities for social change. These are the times that these are opportunities for social evolution. They play a social evolutionary function actually. So I think that the most important thing is to say, and that they're rare also. So when they happen, it's important not to rush out and squash them because we need that energy to channel into making great changes in our societies. I'm James Harding. I'm the editor and founder of Tortoise, which is a new news company. We are a slow newsroom. We were set up with the idea that there are plenty of other news services that can give you breaking news. We're interested in what's driving the news. And so we're interested in these big ideas. We're interested in technology, our planet. We're interested in wealth, identity, and the 100-year life. And perhaps the most exciting and interesting element of starting a newsroom at this time with that outlook is that it seems to me to fit with a very fundamental change in our politics. When I grew up, 60% of people had some kind of identity or identified in some way or another with a political party. Today, that's about 30%. And the energy, it seems to me, has not disappeared. It's not just sort of fallen into the sand. It's actually moved into a different kind of politics, a politics that is driven by causes, a politics that is animated by activism. But for, I guess, many of us here in this room who in different ways count ourselves as activists, the aim is to try and think not just that we're doing something which salves our conscience, but which actually has a concrete set of results. So that is why we're extremely proud and feel very fortunate to say, as I say, a start-up in news to be working with the World Economic Forum and hosting this session that looks at how we move from protest to progress. Now, the acute irony of this on our first outing is that as you will have noticed, it looks like we've moved from protest back to patriarchy. And we have somehow managed to land ourselves with four blokes on the panel. I'd like to say that that is unfortunately one of the cruelties of Davos on a Thursday afternoon. Autumn, who was going to be here unfortunately, got terrible food poisoning and can't join us. And Alicia, who is here, has got stuck while we all do talk about sustainability and saving the planet in the absurd traffic trying to get back into Davos. So this is not a fault of our own making. It was one of those things that perhaps was in the stars. We have, though, two happy solutions to this problem. One is Craig Franckort, who is a global shaper. I didn't realise what the requirements are of a global shaper, but it seems being fast on your feet is one of them because Craig was dragooned in here about 20 minutes ago and I hope it's going to give us a sense of what activism in the Seychelles looks like. But I wanted to say, most importantly, that what's really required is, I hope, for you to weigh in. We at Tortors have this idea that actually we don't, say it quietly, believe in panel discussions. We believe in hearing from everyone in the room. That as many people as possible should speak in the course of the next 45 minutes. We would really like to draw on your experience and your point of view. So please don't feel you have to ask a question. Weigh in with the thing that you think. Tell us what your experience is. Tell us your point of view. And do say so right from the start. And if you can, by the end of it, have resolved our patriarchy problem by making sure that more women have stood up and spoken than men, will have won. Not a huge victory, but a small one, at least in this room. We have a great gang of people, not just Craig. Bill Browder, many of you will know, perhaps not as the financier that he started out to be, but as a one-man protest movement who took on no small force in the shape of Vladimir Putin and the government of Russia. And as Bill, I'm sure, will explain to you and those small costs to himself had a concrete consequence for the way in which the U.S. and, in fact, the rest of the world dealt with abuse of power. Alicia, you are an absolute godsend. Lovely to see you. Thank you for joining us. And then Michael White. As I was saying, I've actually wanted to meet Michael White for many, many years, founder of Occupy and perhaps one of the world's best thinkers not just on the potential of activism, but the limits of it too and how you actually make activism work. And then Alicia Bacena Ibarra who I suppose in some ways, Alicia, you sit on the other side of this, which is trying to work out how you channel the energy of activism and make a concrete policy response, legal response, regulatory responses as a consequence. The starting point, I think, today is that centuries tend to start late. If you look back, often the first decade or two of a century is actually the punctuation mark to end the last one. And it certainly feels at Davos this year that we are beginning the 21st century in earnest, that the first two decades, if you like, were a period where we resolved what increasingly feels like the disposable century, the 20th century, when we burnt through so much in terms of natural resources, culture, even people. And this is an opportunity for us to think about how do we in the next decade channel the energies that we've got and make them work. I'm going to start, if I may, with Micah because, Micah, I suppose you've had the most vivid experience of, if you like, taking on the system and learning what you can and can't do. But as I say, please do catch my eye. Don't wait for the end. If you've got something to say, why are you telling us a little bit about what you learned from Occupy and what you think about activism now? It's a big question. Let me start by just situating myself, giving you some context about who I am. I started doing activism when I was 13 years old. I'm a lifelong activist. I was a young anarchist. I've been arrested blocking traffic. I had this idea when I was young that I was going to become, it sounds strange, but basically have the best activist pedigree ever. To do everything, I went to Palestine. I did direct action non-violence with the international solidarity movement before Rachel Corey was killed. I did peace work in Zimbabwe. All of these things before the age of 21. So I just constantly, when I was 17, I got international television for doing activism. So basically my entire life has been a long string of activism, and I've never actually worked a non-activist job. The only job I've actually had was for an activist magazine. We wrote an email, we designed a poster, we gave it a name, we picked the date, we outlined the tactics, we basically made the rules of the game, and we released it in the midst of the Arab Spring and the uprisings that were going on in Spain. People in New York City grabbed on to it and within three weeks of its launch, a global movement spread to 82 countries, 1,000 cities. So the result of that though, in a personal level, is that when Occupy was crushed by Obama and also governments around the world, it left me wondering like, how could it possibly have failed? You know, here I am, an activist, from 13 to 28, I had believed that if you could create something like Occupy Wall Street, you would get the change that you wanted. That was the whole storyline of activism that had been raised under. And so when Occupy was crushed and we didn't get what we wanted, I spent the next five or six years kind of thinking about theories of change and why it didn't work. And I wrote a book called The End of Protest. So there's a lot that we can dive into, but I think that the main kind of conclusion, and I liked what you were saying about the century ending, because I think the bookend of my thought was really that the dominant storyline of contemporary activism is broken. That this idea that we're going to create mass movements that put demands on our leaders and that these leaders are going to be forced to listen to us because of the myth of representative democracy is fundamentally broken. And this is what the new century is about. But we now know that activists have a tremendous role to play because activists are the one force that seemed to have this mystical, almost magical capacity to mobilize millions of people with so few resources. You would be amazed how inexpensive it was to create Occupy Wall Street. So I think we're in this moment now where elites need activists because activists are the only social force that seem to know how to do this mobilization. And activists are now being elites because elites hold the key to not squashing and destroying these social protests. So that's a quick kind of capsule of where I find myself now. But Micah, sorry. What you just said is fascinating but also very shocking. When you say that the dominant storyline of activism, contemporary activism, is broken, that public pressure on elected representatives is ineffective, what's the point of marching? What's the point of writing in? What's the point of joining a movement? Yeah, exactly. What is the point? I mean it's very difficult because, you know, and I think if you want to trace what that moment is that broke protests, it was in 2003 when George Bush and Tony Blair went to war despite an unprecedented global synchronized protest. There had never been a protest in human history if you guys remember, February 15, 2003. Everywhere on Earth protested at the same time. And what did Bush say? If you remember what he said was brilliant, he said I don't listen to focus groups. He had millions of people around the world at the exact same time protesting, he said I don't listen to focus groups. But what he actually accomplished by doing that is he gave permission to every single western government and non-western government to break that social contract. And so to answer your question, what does that mean about marching and stuff, I think one of the things that one of the things that you can do other behaviors, protests throughout human history has taken many different forms. And I think right now it is a mistake to keep repeating the marching. But I can imagine protests taking the form, for example, of planting trees. I think that tree, planting trees as part of the trillion tree campaign could be conceived of as a kind of anarchist protest against our, you know what I mean, and also one that is supported by elites. So I think it's about using the capacity of social mobilization but also providing new behaviors, the behaviors that create the change we want. It's very interesting that you say that, this elision between action and activism. I was with Richard Curtis, one of the forces behind Make Poverty History. He says he has a new view which is if you want to make things happen you first have to make things and that there's got to be something concrete about that. Can I just ask, does anybody disagree with Micah's rather alarmingly attitude? Yes. Is it easier to just wait for a microphone? It might be easier if you stand up as you like. It's not that I disagree. Would you say who you are? I'm sorry, my name is Melanie. It's not that I disagree. It's that I didn't really know what the real objective was of the Occupy Movement. I found myself just kind of listening to the news. Most of the time I think of a protest as we're going to demonstrate this concrete thing. And I thought the Occupy Movement was lacking that. Do you want to address that, Micah? Because you used this very specific phrase that it had been crushed and some people would say that it didn't have an agenda that was deliverable. We've been hearing this critique since the beginning but listen, it's completely insufficient. It was called Occupy Wall Street. The name itself and where it took place in financial districts with the democracy movement seems to imply it had something to do about Wall Street's influence on democracy. But even more so rather than being kind of snide, I think it's more important to go back to a perfect example of a movement that did have a very clear demand. I already alluded to it, the 2003 anti-war movement. So there's a lot of different theories of protest failure but the theory that protests fail because of lack of demands is one of the most insufficient ones that exist because we have examples of very clear demands that also didn't happen. Interesting. Okay, thank you very much. I don't know if you want to say something and I should have said, I'm going to come to you soon, I should have said that this tortoise is our own tortoise, Agatha. In this session, as in the planet, we are in a race against time and this little tortoise on steroids is making her way across the screen. So when she gets to the end, we're out of time so don't waste too long. So you were just going to say. My name is John Alexander. I run an organisation called New Citizenship Project in the UK. I just want to just playing in my mind and I'm not quite sure how this relates to what you're saying, Micah, but the example in Taiwan of the Sunflower movement and the Gavzero movement that has been one of the leading hackers in that movement since become the digital minister in Taiwan and the sort of leading participatory democracy example and I just wonder if that is a you see that as a kind of, is that a counter example that protest does work in that it did work in that context? Is it an anomaly, is it the exception that proves the rule or is it something that suggests actually that maybe there's a I would argue a new direction where participatory democracy is an opportunity that's bigger and broader and that might be an example of protest turning into progress. Can we come back to that particularly the participatory democracy point because it's clearly live? I was going to if I'm, would you mind just holding Micah for a sec totally different example in Bill's case Bill, will you just tell the room I know some of you will have read his book and if you haven't you can leave now and get it at point Bill, will you just tell the story on how we got to the Magnitsky Act? So I'm probably the least likely person to ever have become an activist I was a hedge fund manager and now I'm a full-time human rights activist I think I'm in a collection of one the way in which this happened was that I was a I ran the largest investment fund in Russia and as many of you know Russia is a corrupt country and so everybody was stealing from all the companies I was investing in and so I decided that I was going to as a fund manager I was going to research how they did the stealing and then expose it through the international media which I did and as you can imagine the people who were stealing didn't like that so much and I was expelled from Russia my offices were raided and then a young lawyer who worked for me a guy named Sergey Magnitsky who was 35 at the time sort of stepped in to help me and in the process he discovered that the reason for the office raid was to commit a massive fraud committed by government officials to steal $230 million in terms of taxes that we paid as a young lawyer a young patriot he exposed the government fraud testified against some of the officials involved and he was subsequently arrested by the same officials he testified against put in pretrial detention tortured for 358 days in pretrial detention and killed on the night of November 16th 2009 by eight riot guards with rubber batons and the morning he was killed on the 16th of November I got the news on the 17th of November and it was the most heartbreaking life changing demoralizing upsetting news I could have ever gotten he was killed effectively as my proxy he was killed in my place and he would still be alive today if he hadn't worked for me and so I made a decision on that moment in time to put aside all of my business activities all of my time all of my resources and all of my energies going after the people who killed him to make sure they faced justice and what I discovered very quickly in Russia was there was no possibility of getting justice whatsoever inside of Russia Vladimir Putin personally got involved in covering up his murder Vladimir Putin personally exonerated every official who played a role they gave promotions to state honors to the people most complicit and in the most shocking miscarriage of justice Sergei Magnitsky on trial three years after they killed him in the first ever trial against a dead man in the history of Russia I then said to myself if we can't get justice inside of Russia then we need to get justice outside of Russia and I had no experience as a activist but I had an idea which was that the people who killed him didn't kill him for ideology or religion they killed him for money they killed him for $230 million they don't keep that money in Russia they keep that money because as easily as they stole it it could be stolen from them they keep it in the West they keep it in London and New York and Geneva and various other places and they send their kids to boarding school in England and they send their girlfriends on shopping trips to Milan and so on and so forth and so I said to myself if we can freeze their assets in the West and ban their visas that's not criminal justice it's better than total impunity which is what these people had been enjoying up until that point I took this idea to Washington I got a meeting with a Democratic Senator from Maryland named Benjamin Cardin and a Republican Senator from Arizona John McCain and I told him the story and it's slightly elongated version of what I just shared with you and I said can we freeze their assets and ban their visas and these two senators on both sides of the aisle said yes but that was always the original Magnitsky act It was just for Sergey Magnitsky the moment they put it on the law books all this other victims started coming forward saying you found the achilles heel of the Putin regime can you sanction the people who killed my mother my brother my sister etc and they realized they were understood something much bigger than Sergey Magnitsky they added 65 words to the law to include all gross human rights abusers in Russia We went for a vote in the House of Representatives, it passed with 89%, and it became a federal law on December 14, 2012. Vladimir Putin went out of his mind in reaction to this, and he banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American families. He made it his single largest foreign policy priority to repeal the Magnitsky Act. But instead of being intimidated, the senator said, well, Vladimir Putin got so mad, maybe other dictators will too, and we should make this global. And in 2016, the Global Magnitsky Act was passed since then, and Vladimir Putin hasn't succeeded in repealing it, although he spent a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy on it. I said, if the United States is doing this, we need to do this elsewhere. We went to Canada, the Canadian parliament passed it unanimously in 2017, the British parliament, the Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian parliaments. And now the grand prize is that the EU has now made a decision in principle to do a Magnitsky Act in the EU. And I can tell you that bad guys, dictators, torturers and kleptocrats are literally shaking in their shoes because they do this to steal money, and their money is no longer safe, and they value money more than human life. Bill, it's an extraordinary story, it really is, and it's an extraordinary credit to you personally and your will. What's the personal price you pay for this? Well, being an enemy of Vladimir Putin is not a very pleasant place to be. Is it at this point that Craig and I move a little further away? I mean, there's a story relevant to Davos here as we sit here. I received a phone call as I was coming here from the British security services where I live in London, saying that they had received a message from their Swiss counterparts that there was a plot, a Russian plot cooking to do something to me in Davos, and then I think many of you will have read about the plumbers, the Russian plumbers who were here with diplomatic passports doing something. That's just nothing happened so far. We saw a few more days in Davos, so let's knock on wood or whatever. But the last summer I was in Madrid, Spain. I was there to meet the Spanish anti-corruption prosecutor because we found money from the Magnitsky case going to Spain. I was supposed to meet him at 11 a.m. on the 30th of May, 9 30 a.m. I'm leaving my hotel room and there's the hotel manager and two uniformed Spanish police officers standing outside my room, asked for my passport, and then put me under arrest on a Russian Interpol warrant. So I'm invited by the Spanish prosecutor to cooperate to give evidence to help him prosecute Russian money launderers, and a different division of the Spanish police operating on a Russian Interpol warrant arrested me. I have a lot of Twitter followers. I tweeted it out as it was happening, and the world came to my defense. And lots of people started calling, lots of their politicians, a lot of politicians started calling the different governments and Interpol, and two hours later I was released. I was also detained here in Switzerland three years ago, leaving Geneva Airport on a Russian warrant. And so I've got, Russia's issued eight Interpol arrest warrants for me. They've tried to have me extradited from the UK on a number of occasions. I've been threatened with death, with kidnapping. I've been sued in every different court. They make movies about me. They call me a serial killer in Russia. They do all sorts of stuff. They can do it as much as they want. I'm not backing down. I carry on and let me just finish one last thing. I started as a one-man band, as you say, but it has turned into a movement because everybody who's been victimized in every country now realizes they have a tool that they can use to go after their persecutors. And so the Uyghurs, the Rohingya, the Iranian demonstrators, Nicaraguan demonstrators, everybody now has a tool, and they're using it. And all of a sudden there are literally tens of thousands of people all over the world who are using this tool, who are submitting names and evidence, who are lobbying on behalf of the Magnitsky Act to get it passed in other countries. And it's turned into a very focused but global movement to end impunity of dictators and kleptocrats. I guess the question that I had, though, Bill, was about something else. There's something about your story, which actually is a counterpoint to Micah's and is rather reassuring about the power of elected governments, the rule of law. The flip of it is that it's lifted the lid, if you like, on something that we probably don't look at and talk about enough, which is just the scale of corruption. And corruption not just in countries like Russia, but all over the world. Has your view changed about the extent of corruption within the system of global capitalism? Well, so we're all experienced with corruption in, or we know about corruption in Russia and China and Mexico. But I've discovered that there's a lot of corruption in very developed countries. I mean, just to give you an example, in Switzerland, we made a criminal complaint finding money going to UBS and credit Swiss coming from people benefiting from the Magnitsky murder. And the person in charge from the Swiss federal police in investigating the case, and it was going on for years, that we put it in in 2011 and it's still not resolved, the main police officer in charge of the investigation was found to be taking bribes from Russia, the Switzerland. I mean, this we're not talking about Guatemala. We're talking about Switzerland. We found the same thing in Cyprus. We found all sorts of places you find in Great Britain. There's a member of the House of Lords. He's here in Davos. A member of the House of Lords that was paid $5 million by a Russian oligarch to go to Washington using his House of Lords imprimatur to lobby to lift sanctions for that oligarch. There's a lady here. Alicia, I'm going to come to you in one moment. I'm going to invite the state here. Would you introduce yourself? Thanks. Trisha de Borger, I'm a writer. Thank you very much, Bill, because your book is an extraordinary book and everybody should read it. It's a red notice, isn't that what it's called? That's right. And it just shows the courage that this takes, even to just speak here today about somebody who's at the same conference. But my question to you is, is there a difference in terms of turning protest into something significant that then becomes legislation, whatever? You started as one person and then it almost became a movement. You started as a movement that, and the bit that's missing is that leadership bit. And that's all I'm saying. Is that a more effective way of doing it? Because we're missing the link of leadership. I mean, look, I think that first there's a question of what defines success. And I think there's a question of what are the capacities of these different organizing models. So this is a great example. I mean, there's lots of different. Activism is like martial arts. There's lots of different types of martial arts and different ways of fighting. You can box, you can do jiu jitsu, et cetera. Leaderless social protests have a unique power to spread very quickly, very far, very fast, and impact in ways that are completely unpredictable. Occupy Wall Street literally spreads about 82 countries, 1,000 cities, in about two or three weeks. It's insane, OK? Your struggle, on the other hand, is taking years. But it has achieved things. I'm not saying it hasn't achieved things. And it's very important because as a leader of my thing, they know exactly who to target. There's no way of targeting that stuff. But somebody had to be a leader. You probably could have taken that and done a lot more with it if somebody had said, here's our five things that we want to achieve. I disagree. I disagree. I think that the reason why Occupy spreads so far and so fast is precisely because there was no leader. There was a moment when it was growing so quickly that it exceeded the human capacity to even understand what was going on. It wasn't just exponentials, it was beyond exponential. It happened exactly, I'll tell you the exact moment is when 700 people got arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge and that made such international news that all of a sudden, all over the world, people started setting up encampments. They didn't have to wait for anybody, et cetera, et cetera. So obviously, there's difficulties with leaderlessness. There's advantages and disadvantages. But I think for the particular challenges in which we face moving forward in this decade with a need for a climate mobilization, we are going to have to harness the power of leaderless social protest. I'll come to you in one moment, this lady behind you. Thank you, Trisha. But Alicia Basseniabara, you are, I guess, in your capacity as the executive secretary of the United Nations with a view to the region of Latin America, dealing with a huge number of requests, demands, hopes from protest movements. And Evernos, you've had experience on both sides of this argument. What's your view of how you make activism most effective when dealing with government or dealing with society, in fact? Thank you for the question. And I have some convergence on some of your points, but I have a very concrete difference. And that is that I think protest can become an opportunity. And why so? And I think governments are missing the point. At least in Latin America, governments, what they are doing is repressing repression, using repression, like in Chile, taking the military to the streets and whatever. Missing the point that instead of, I mean, instead of repression, you should try to see why is this happening and try. There's no leaders, I agree with you. There's no concrete leader. It was not the unions, it was not this, it was not that. But the protest had a common thread, and that was inequality. I stand for that. I really believe that in Latin America, the common thread is inequality, not poverty. Inequality, who was in the streets was not the poorest of the poor, was the middle strata, the youngest of the young, because the millennials are already in the comfort zone. Sorry, I'm triennial, of course. But you see, the millennials are already, you know, comfort with their debts or whatever, the young people are not. 15 to 25 years old are the people that were in the streets and mobilizing their families, their parents, their grandparents, so you had millions of people in the streets, but because of concrete things. At the end of the day, yes, there was not a single, let's say, phrase, but it became possible to transform the protest into progress in the sense that this movement created sorts of change, the need for change, social change, that was impossible before the protest. The government of Chile would have never agreed to do the things they are already doing now, to even consider a constitution, even incrementing salaries, even incrementing pensions. That was not in the Raider screen. The Raider screen was to diminish taxes. Okay, hello, the 1%, hello. So, and the inequality there is a threat in Ecuador, in Chile, in Bolivia, in Colombia, everywhere. So, now, each country, of course, has its own reality, but it's about the lack of opportunities of hope, of social mobility. The youngest of the young, 15 to 25, are seeing clearly that what is going on here. I mean, I'm not gonna have social mobility. I'm not gonna have a clean environment. I'm not gonna have, you see, I'm not gonna have, no? So, where are the public goods? Who is innovating? Who is creating the jobs? And those are the questions that are in the streets. And the governments, and the elites were not listening at the beginning. Now they are listening a little bit better. But, human rights is a big problem, because, you know, and I understand your movement, and I'm very glad you're there, but you have power and you have access. You went to the White House, right? Or to McCain or whatever, and you went to Wall Street. What do you do with these people that don't have access? You know, Greta, Greta fine, but Greta is Swedish. She can go to the streets and come here and speak English and Spanish or whatever, Swedish or whatever. But what do you do with the 16, 17, 20 year old people of Latin America? Alissa, can I just ask you? This, I think, would be probably quite an unpopular view, and it's quite an unsympathetic one. But the argument that you hear from people in government, and you may say you don't need to take them seriously, they're speaking for those elites, is that the task that's being set for them is now almost impossible, that the speed at which you can orchestrate protest and the speed at which that can actually manifest itself on the streets is just so much faster than what you can feasibly do to address that inequality, to deal with skills and education, to invest in infrastructure, to deal with some of the structural problems in a market economy. And so the governments have a point, don't they, when they say that actually protest itself can lead to something that's not progress at all, but instability and actually be damaging for the people who themselves are on the streets. Do you have any sympathy with that view? I do in a way, but I want to ask Occupy because the anarchists, you were an anarchist yourself, so the thing is when the protest becomes violent and goes into looting, that's a problem, that's a real problem. I don't know how that emerges in a way, I'm not a sociologist myself, but what I do know is that people went to the streets in peace, then they confronted the police and the police was the one who started the violence, I'm sorry, and then it became like a vicious circle with the violent and anarchist with no cause came into looting and violence. So that I understand. Now the thing is, just don't send the police so quickly to the streets, you see? Let the people express themselves, let it move rationally or irrationally, but not violently. Who starts the violence sometimes is the government's themselves. Absolutely. So there was a lady here and there's a gentleman, I don't know whether you're waving me, just there, were you waving me? Yes. Hi, my name is Layali and I am from Palestine actually. Nayali did you say? Layali. Layali, forgive me. And I just want to actually just reflect on the leadership, not having leaders actually in this mass demonstration. When you take Lebanon now, when you take Iraq, I mean these like large demonstrations that they go without leaders. And then the government would go, oh, but there's nobody to negotiate with. What do you want? What can we do? How we can then progress these demonstrations for the government to take actions. And then when you said also you want to collude with the elites, that the elites, you need to partner with them. How do you do that? I mean, it is because the elites already are colluding with the government, the government feels that they can go away, they can do stuff, they can keep corrupt, but how can demonstrators then collude with elites to pressure the governments? I just want to understand this point actually. Thank you. Can I put one example? Yeah. The movement, the women, women, lastesis, the women from Chile, they were so powerful. They are so powerful. And they have made a point of parity. So that has been concrete, perfect, I mean not perfect, but I mean it has been tremendous, has gone all over the world. So it's not exactly a leader, but it's a concrete cause, gender, parity, no violation, no violence, you see these type of things. So I don't know if it's a leader what we need or a concrete cause that we need to have clarity on. Sorry. Yeah, I mean I'll just respond briefly because it's like we're already running out of time. There's so much we could talk about, but I guess I would just look, I would just say two things. Number one on this question of violence and instability. You know, activist culture, it's like music. Some people like punk bands, some people like classical. It's not fair to expect everyone to like classical music. There are people who believe in insurrectionary anarchism that the most, that nihilism, political nihilism, that the most important thing is to burn it down. You will never eradicate those social forces in unrest. And one of the problems with governments and elites and everything is they always want the clean social protests. It's not gonna happen. When you create these chaotic leaderless social protests, it brings forward all different kinds of social elements including anarchists, there will always be anarchists, there will always be black block, there will always be these forces. But I would say the second thing, very quickly, is just that you have to change how you understand these social protests. I think it echoes something you just said. These manifestations of social unrest are actually tremendous opportunities for social change. These are the times, these are opportunities for social evolution. They play a social evolutionary function actually. So I think that the most important thing is to say, and that they're rare also. So when they happen, it's important not to rush out and squash them because we need that energy to channel into making great changes in our societies. Craig, this is like a perfect time to come to you. Craig Franco is a global shaper. You are an organizer of youth activism on, if you like, the front line of environmental issues in a country that itself is dealing with those every day in the Seychelles. When you listen to this conversation, are you filled with despair or are you gonna head back to the Seychelles with a plan? That's a good question. I think I should point out first that I'm wearing several hats. I'm a global shaper from the Victoria Hub in the large ocean state of the Seychelles. It's important that countries like mine firstly are represented, and not even just sitting here, but actually having our voices meaningfully heard. On the issue of climate action in particular, we're the least responsible, however, we're amongst the most vulnerable. And I'm speaking specifically about the Seychelles, but that applies to the African continent. That applies to the Caribbean. It applies to your corner of the world. It applies to Asia too. So I think it's important that we have a meaningful seat at the table and that our voices are heard firstly. I think in terms of whether I have hope, I think for me there's been an interesting component that's been missed from the debate. And I think leadership is absolutely important when it comes to protest, yes. But I also think strategy is important and I'm surprised that I haven't heard that. So we can mobilize people effectively and we've seen great examples here where you can mobilize people, people go to the streets, perhaps you have a leader, perhaps you don't. But ultimately for me, successful protest, impactful protest is about having a clear strategy. What is power? Who are the people who have power on that particular issue? Is your timing right? Are you mobilizing the effective stakeholders? So for me, there's a wider consideration when it comes to protest in particular. And what do you think, Craig, on the point that, I'm really interested in the point that Micah made in the context of a place like the Seychelles where you say actually there's been a long history of protest, what we've understood about protest, which was an attempt to force those in power to change direction. But I suppose now we talk much more about activism where the outcomes are potentially in your own hands. Is that a itself an act of wishful thinking or is that a reasonable expectation in the Seychelles in terms of the groups that you're working with? Well, forgive me, but I'm a bit of an idealist. So I'd like to believe in the power of protest. I'd like to believe that you can effectively mobilize, you can effectively get people on side. The key thing I think for me also is agency. The people who are protesting, do the people who are protesting have that level of agency? Do they understand what it takes to influence power? Do they understand what it takes to have the knowledge on an issue really in depth? Do you have the skills to campaign effectively? Do you have the confidence? I would argue marginalized groups in particular and the represented groups, those who perhaps who are poorer, may not. But when they understand how to mobilize effectively and when there is that level of strategy, then I think change can be brought. That's great. There's a person here in the red. Yes, I think it's red, but in this midnight blue it might be something else. I just want to point, to bring one. Sorry, what's your name? Daria from Ukraine. I want to bring one point to this table. It is a privilege to have opportunity to protest. We shouldn't forget there are many countries in the world that a protest could trigger death result for the one who protests. And these countries are, you know, our neighboring country, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, many, many countries. And there is a need of kind of solidarity between those protesters who can protest in the developed countries with those who cannot for them even standing up on the street alone is a huge challenge. And I applaud what Bill Browder is doing. I think, you know, doing some change to the developing country from outside of the developing country is a big impact to the developing world. Thank you. Thank you for making that point. There's a person just by the camera, just behind you. And just to follow on Daria's point, my name is Arim Fadda, I'm from Palestine. How do we go away from protest as spectacle? Mobilizing using strategy, especially in cases where protest is not necessarily, let's say visible protest is not allowed. How do we use other forms? What are these other forms? Interesting. Do you have a view, just out of interest, do you have a view on what those other forms might be? I think back to your point on strategy, I think there's something to be said that, and we see, let's say, some failures within the Arab world itself where we are not building strategy as a form of protest and it could be collectives, internal collectives that can really mobilize and hit in, let's say, backdoor lobbying for governments and influential kind of personnels within corporate structures, within our own companies. This is a way, and I think that's a language that is not mobilized in the global south at large. And this needs to happen simultaneous to front row, let's say, protests. And at the same time, I think we need to start to mobilize social media, the media in general, and this is our kind of avenue to be able to do that. Okay, thank you. There's a gentleman here. I don't know, Craig, whether you wanted to talk about mobilization and what systems you think work or we just pass the mic over. So I think in terms of mobilization, I suppose so much of this is unique to the cause and the campaign, so you mentioned social media and engaging with the media, for example. That can be incredibly effective, and we've seen it in your corner of the world, for example, where that has worked in getting the wider message out there, just to give an example from the African continent, for example, there was a time last year in Zimbabwe, for example, where there was a shutdown, there was an electricity shutdown, but people from Zimbabwe were desperately trying to get their voices heard, and they would do it through social media until the electricity was shut down. So it can give that hope, absolutely, but it's one of many potential tactics. Sir, there's a gentleman here. Hello, my name is Georg, I'm global shaker from Armenia, the Lijant Hub. I want to ask you to do a small exercise and let's think about one thing. We're living in a planet where there are different worlds. As a life surfer, I'm going to States when I see the steel, the people who they called old money and when they are the same in Russia, which practice the USSR, the people which become more or less a little bit equal on their education skills. It was just a heritage, it's happened. Now it disappeared. But can we imagine how we use the technology to empower people who need to be empowered to see near the table and to create that societies? It's all about, as I understand, what world we want to create and what society we want to live. Do we want to empower these people? So my question is to all panelists, the image in the world where we can use the technologies to reach the people, to listen them. A lot of the example like uplink, what we have right now, I'm pretty sure most of them are new, how we can use this for maybe developing democracy. OK, I'm going to give you, I'm not going to, because we're going to run out of time in just under a minute, I'm going to ask you, Alicia, to give that final point. Do you think that technology is going to be able to really enable protest in the decade to come? Definitely. I think social media is already helping a lot. Or, I mean, it's becoming a mechanism by which many people are communicating and convening, by the way, many of the social protests. And I have to come back to what our colleague from Dahlia, what you said, because I think this is true. Many countries don't have the right to protest. And I come from the UN, and we have a tremendous problem, for example, when we see the violation of human rights in countries and the social protests. And then the government comes to us and says, why are you saying what you're saying about us? But that's our role, you know, as the United Nations, we defend human rights, we defend fairness, we defend justice, we defend the voices of the voiceless. So, yes. So, there has to be social actors. Social actors, companies also, NGOs, social actors that are looking for the public good. I definitely think so. Well, on that note, I guess a call to arms for all of us, thank you. I wanted to, if I could, just very briefly wrap up. So we go away with a sense of, at least, what I heard, maybe not what everyone else did. I think that, Dahlia, I'm really grateful to you for the point you made. There is a risk that we, with the enormous privilege of being here, assume that there is not just a right to protest, but even access. And I think the point about countries where it is illegal and dangerous, even countries where it is allowed, but not accessible to people, I think taking that away, the idea of the privilege of protest is, I think, an extraordinarily valuable one. But we started, I suppose, with, if you like, a classic Davos truism from me, that this is the age of activism. But it was followed, I thought, by one of those moments that you sometimes hear where a deeply controversial and provocative thing is said. And it was, I thought, from Micah, the point that that the modern narrative of protest is broken. That is an extremely important thing for us to think about and internalize. We may agree or not, but I hope that we can take away three concrete ideas. And for me, they were that for protest to turn to progress, we need three things. Action, actors, and acts. And by that, I mean something that, in the form of action, captures the imagination of those in power. Actors, whether that is an individual, as exemplified by Bill or touched upon, I think by what you meant right at the beginning, how do you have some kind of sort, whether it was a judiciary, it was leadership. But then acts, which is that we shouldn't underestimate the power of the state, the power of institutions, even in an age when it seems as though so much power has been deinstitutionalized. And I think there are lessons there for us, whether we're thinking about a trillion trees, whether or not we're thinking about Magnitz Gatz, whether we're thinking about the cleanup of the Seychelles. I hope that there is a lesson here for all of us that we can take away in the year to come. I hope you'll also agree with me that there was too little time, too much to talk about, but there was still something worth doing in making that protest turn into progress. Please say a heartfelt thank you to Alicia, to Micah, to Bill, and to Craig. Thank you very much.