It’s time to face facts. Far Right leaders have a firm grip on power in Turkey, Hungary, Italy and more; Trump’s polling lead in America is growing; the leading candidate to be the next Chancellor of Austria is openly using Hitlerian rhetoric in his campaign; and here in the UK the plates are shifting too.

The work to fight back needs to accelerate hard, and it needs to involve all of us – and that begins with a clear-eyed understanding of what’s really going on: where exactly we are, how we got here, and what’s coming down the track. Then we can turn to the work of response, looking at what has already worked and what else might. This will not be a joyful conversation, but it will be an essential one.

Join Ece Temelkuran, author of How To Lose A Country and Together, and leading political strategists Paul Hilder and Jiore Craig, as they share the stories, the data, and the challenge. Moderated by Jon Alexander, author of Citizens.

Speakers:

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist, a political thinker, and a public speaker whose work has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde, La Stampa, New Statesman, and Der Spiegel, among several international media outlets. She won the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book award for her novel Women Who Blow On Knots and the Ambassador Of New Europe Award for her book Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy. She is the author of the internationally acclaimed book How to Lose a Country. Together: A Manifesto Against the Heartless World, her latest book has been published in several languages. Ece Temelkuran lived in Beirut, Tunis, and Paris, to write her novels. She was a visiting fellow at Saint Anthony’s College Oxford to write Deep Mountain: Across The Armenian Turkish Divide. For the last six years, she has lived in Zagreb. She was a fellow at The New Institute, Hamburg, working on a project “A New Vocabulary for 21st Century Progressives from March 2021 to September 2023. She is on the advisory board of Progressive International and Democracy Next. She received the El Mundo Journalism Award for her body of work.

Paul Hilder is Founder and CEO of Datapraxis, an ethical political data company with a mission to help European democracy flourish. He is a social entrepreneur and thought leader on new politics, social change and civic and political technology, with over two decades of leadership experience building campaigns, movements and platforms and engaging in political strategy, policy, organising and international affairs. He has been involved in many of the most significant political innovations during that time, including Crowdpac, Change.org, openDemocracy, Avaaz, and more.

Jiore Craig is a Resident Senior Fellow at ISD with focus on Digital Integrity. Her work focuses on safeguarding democracy globally and the wider impact of online harms on society. Jiore advises global leaders on mitigating online harms including work to advance tech policy reform and tech accountability at a global scale. She has extensive international experience, previously spending eight years helping elected officials, political leaders, media organizations, academic institutions and civic society organizations across five continents to research, measure, and effectively mitigate the impact of disinformation and influence operations on public opinion and elections.

Moderator:

Jon Alexander is the author of CITIZENS: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us, and co-founder of the New Citizenship Project, a book and company that work to shift the dominant story of the individual in society from Consumer to Citizen. Among other plaudits, CITIZENS was listed by McKinsey as one of its Top 5 Recommended Books in its Summer Reading Guide 2022, described as “an underground hit” in the Financial Times, and selected by the World Economic Forum for its CEO Book Club. Jon began his career with a decade in the advertising industry, before shifting his attention to understanding how communications skills might be deployed to invite people into their agency as citizens, instead of just selling stuff to them as consumers.