Today's Fight for Open Society

Contributor(s): Professor G John Ikenberry, Professor Mary Kaldor, Professor Charles A Kupchan, Professor Ayşe Zarakol | Leading experts on world politics take up these questions and others about the future of the liberal world order.

Contributor(s): Professor Ricky Burdett, Dr Amara Enyia, Tracy Jooste, Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey | Drawing on their research and practice and in conversation with each other, Atlantic Institute’s Leaders in Residence, Amara Enyia and Tracy Jooste, and LSE academics Robtel Neajai Pailey and Ricky Burdett will consider how in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic we can not only build back better, but also build differently.

Contributor(s): Dr Annette Zimmermann, Dr Zeynep Pamuk, Professor Jocelyn Maclure, Dr Etienne Brown | Public administrations increasingly use AI to automatise the allocation of public services. Judges use risk-assessment algorithms to determine a person’s eligibility for bail or parole. Social media platforms use AI to optimise content moderation, while political actors can use these platforms to engage in microtargeting and misinformation. And law enforcement agencies can use facial recognition systems and predictive analytics to strengthen surveillance. This new reality requires careful examination: Who should be responsible for selecting principles of AI governance? How can we align the decisions of AI systems with democratic values? Are “black box” algorithms undermining transparency and our capacity to exercise scrutiny over public decisions? Panellists reflect on these and related questions and engage with the audience.

Contributor(s): Lord Malloch-Brown | For decades, democracy and human-rights advocates have assumed that a growing number of governments were embracing democracy, freedom and the international law. Yet today, 38 percent of the world’s population live in countries which are not free – the highest proportion in a quarter of a century. As the enemies of open society further accelerate their attacks, and Ukraine becomes the frontline in a systems-breaking clash between democracy and authoritarianism, where do we turn next in today’s fight for open society?

Contributor(s): Professor Scott Barrett | This keynote lecture explains: why, despite thirty years of diplomatic effort, global collective action on climate change has failed; how climate diplomacy can be made more effective; and what past and ongoing diplomatic failures imply for future climate diplomacy.

Contributor(s): Professor Nancy Fraser | In the wake of the perfect storm that is COVID, how can we stop it from cannibalising our whole world?

Contributor(s): Professor Boris Vujcic, Dr Debora Revoltella, Francis Malige, Fokion Karavias, Dr Anthony Bartzokas | What are the forces reshaping finance in South East Europe? What are the lessons learned from the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic? What are the prospects for banks during the recovery phase? How technology and nonfinancial corporations are transforming the banking sector? A panel of experts from the region discuss key challenges from the build-up of vulnerabilities, proposals by various institutions for future action and the role that banks and investors could play towards building back better after the pandemic.

Contributor(s): Dr Anthony Masters, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter | Anthony Masters is Statistical Ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society. David Spiegelhalter is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge. They are the authors of COVID by Numbers: making sense of the pandemic with data. Qiwei Yao is Professor in the Department of Statistics at LSE.

Contributor(s): Dr Alina Averchenkova, Professor Barry Buzan, Professor Kathy Hochstetler, Dr Miriam Prys-Hansen, Professor Stacy Vandeveer | Great powers are also great polluters, particularly when it comes to the global greenhouse gas effect. Through the 2015 Paris Agreement and recent international conferences, all major powers - from the United States to China, India, Brazil, Russia and the EU - have committed to bringing greenhouse gas emissions under control and decarbonising their economies by 2050.

Contributor(s): Winnie Byanyima | This event with Winnie Byanyima, the feminist activist who leads the UN’s response to HIV and AIDS and who chairs the People’s Vaccine Alliance for COVID-19, will highlight lessons rooted in ongoing experience from the AIDS response and the commonalities between the two pandemics, as well as learnings from other health crises, to set out an approach that can actually succeed in keeping us all safe. The COVID-19 crisis has alerted world leaders to the urgency of stopping and preventing pandemics, which are recognised as undermining health, stability, and economic progress. But the path on which the world is embarking to overcome pandemics cannot succeed, because it is failing to address their underlying systemic drivers. Inequalities are increasingly preventing overwhelming majorities in most developing countries from accessing COVID-19 vaccines, enabling the pandemic to spread and the virus to mutate. If we end inequalities upfront, we will increase our odds of ending AIDS, ending COVID-19 and winning against future pandemics. But business as usual will fail. In this time of emergency, the only realistic approach is a radical one, the only safe response is to be bold.