It is September 1991.
I'm wearing my new green and white uniform,
and I show up to my second grade class with both excitement and trepidation.
It should have been a walk in the park,
but my first grade year was disrupted by a coup d’état,
which was a culmination of a 17-year civil war in Ethiopia.
As a second grader,
I was now emerging back into the world after months of lockdown.
What should have been this euphoric moment to reunite with my friends,
however, became one of the most haunting moments of my life,
shaping both my worldview and my future life's work.
You see, in my prior six years of life, up until this point,
I had no idea that I was a multiethnic individual
in the Ethiopian context.
I knew my parents belonged to different ethnic tribes,
but I had not assigned meaning to these labels.
But that formative September,
I began to realize the political significance
of each of my identities
as systematically orchestrated by the new ruling government.
So as any child trying to fit in and avoid bullying,
I began the journey of claiming one ethnic identity, my father's,
and hiding the other, my mother's.
I spent my entire childhood navigating this identity minefield.
Eventually, at 13, I immigrated to the US.
And let me tell you what I learned.
Exclusion -- it's global.
You see, whether in a quasidemocracy like Ethiopia
or a developed one like the United States,
we are confronted with the ideology of both inclusion and othering.
So the question becomes,
how do we build societies that are both functional and inclusive?
This is a question I've been wrestling with since second grade.
I strongly believe the answer is democracy.
This is not to say democracy as we have it today is perfect.
In fact, it is struggling in so many ways,
including in being effective and representative.
However, with its inherent values of individual choice and collective voice,
democracy is the most compelling vision we have for self-governance.
So straightening democracy has become my life's work.
In 2022, I founded the nonpartisan, nonprofit organization Keseb
to address two challenges facing democracy:
the rise of authoritarianism and the need to reimagine democracy.
These are enormous challenges that I'm talking about,
and addressing them requires a global pro-democracy movement.
So how do we do it? How do we build this movement?
I believe we need to make democracy inspiring.
We need to accelerate the pace of innovation
in the pro-democracy movement,
and we as a global community need to come together
to embrace our interconnectedness.
I'll explain what I mean.
Let's start with: make democracy inspiring and relevant.
For a few decades now, democracy has been in crisis.
We have to ask, why is this happening?
In my work, we have found four key drivers:
economic change and inequality;
dysfunctional and unregulated information ecosystems;
rapid demographic changes;
and finally, the interplay between opportunistic populist leaders
and political elites.
Collectively, these forces are driving the crisis of democracy globally.
This has left many people feeling disillusioned
and thus more susceptible to manipulation by authoritarian narratives,
activating what researchers call the “authoritarian reflex,”
which is really about people's desire for answers and security.
Authoritarian leaders are exploiting this
by offering very simplistic
and often ethnonationalist and malinformed solutions
to address our everyday challenges,
like building a wall to promote security.
And unfortunately, they're succeeding.
To make democracy inspiring,
we have to tell a better story about democracy.
Let me ask you this.
Have you ever found yourself waking up before sunrise,
thinking about the state of democracy?
(Laughter)
No? I mean, I do. It's my job.
But I'm sure there are lots of you who do as well.
But the vast majority of us,
we wake up thinking about food, our families,
our health, our jobs,
the day-to-day life matters.
Compared to these issues, often democracy seems so distant.
But it isn't.
It is embedded in everything that affects our daily life.
We fight authoritarianism not only through elections,
but also through a compelling pro-democracy narrative
that is both practical and inspirational.
Practical in that it speaks to how democracy meets our everyday needs
and inspirational in that it addresses
what political scientists call the “root ideas.”
Who we are as a people,
what we value, what matters to us.
And we're seeing innovative examples for how to do this.
In the US, the nonpartisan media organization PushBlack
promotes civic engagement through sharing Black history,
presenting information often people never learned in school.
PushBlack's nine million subscribers
are responsible for one of the most effective
voter engagement programs in America.
In Israel, before the war, a historic citizen-led movement
had galvanized people across the ideological spectrum
to stand up for democratic norms and institutions.
This has led to the creation of a new political center
that will impact the future of both Israel and Palestine.
These are examples of ordinary people coming together
to create compelling pro-democracy narratives
that unite communities.
Second, we need to accelerate the pace of innovation
in the pro-democracy movement.
The battle between autocracy and democracy is both conceptual and tactical.
It requires offensive and defensive strategies,
and on this front, the authoritarians have been quite innovative.
Through effective cross-border learning,
they have developed what scholars call "The Authoritarian Playbook."
From North America to Southeast Asia to Europe,
you see this playbook in motion.
It consists of strategies such as undermining institutions,
spreading disinformation,
exploiting racial and religious differences,
weaponizing fear,
and stoking political violence.
I call this playbook the “authoritarian innovation ecosystem,”
because the tactics are not static.
They are continually being perfected based on wins and losses across the globe.
I'll give you an example.
Election denialism.
In 2020, former US President Donald Trump
catalyzed a movement claiming the presidential election was stolen.
This led to the January 6, 2021 riots in Washington, DC,
and continues to define American politics today.
Soon after that,
Brazil's former president Jair Bolsonaro,
also known as Trump of the Tropics,
started to claim fraud in his upcoming election
and then refused to acknowledge his loss.
This led to the January 8, 2022 riots in Brasilia,
and similar to the US, the country remains highly polarized.
So if authoritarians are learning from each other
and supporting one another,
we have to ask: Why aren’t our best pro-democracy innovators doing the same?
Currently, the pro-democracy movement is stymied
because we operate in silos divided by national borders.
We find ourselves responding to crises as opposed to preventing them.
But the good news is that we don't have to start from scratch.
There are pro-democracy innovations all over the world.
What we need to do is learn from them and then weave them together globally.
In Brazil, the organization Pacto pela Democracia
builds cross-partisan coalitions to protect elections.
Guess what? The American organization Protect Democracy does the same thing.
Or take Academy for Future Leaders in France
and Futurelect in South Africa.
Both organizations are working to train young people
to pursue political office based on their values.
There are innovative pro-democracy organizations like these
all over the world.
Most of them don't even know about each other.
We need strong transnational learning platforms,
convenings and pro-democracy networks
to enable these democracy champions
to learn from each other and support one another.
I believe if lessons can be imported and exported
by the authoritarians to dismantle democracy,
we can use the same strategy to save it.
Third,
we need to embrace our interconnectedness as a global community.
I don't need to tell you how badly polarization is impacting us.
We demonize each other within borders and across borders.
This is a key component of the authoritarian playbook.
The reality is that democracies depend on one another to survive,
just as autocracies do,
which means that we, as people of different nations
also depend on one another.
We can use this interdependence to promote oppression or liberation.
We see this throughout history.
For example, concentration camps
were not actually an invention of Nazi Germany.
They first appeared in Spanish Cuba and South Africa
long before there was ever an Auschwitz.
Concentration camps were an exported innovation
for oppression.
On the other side of the spectrum,
civil disobedience that served as the anchor strategy
for the US civil rights movement
was honed by the nonviolent movement in India against British rule.
An example of an imported innovation for liberation.
Innovation for oppression, or innovation for liberation:
it is up to us to choose.
In today’s political discourse,
isolationism is often presented as a solution to our many problems.
But we know that's not the answer.
We can be locally rooted and globally connected.
We can be proud of our unique national identity and culture
without disparaging another.
The authoritarians want us to believe that problem is the other.
I have been the other.
In Ethiopia, in the US and most places I've ever visited or lived in.
But I also know what it feels like to be a part of something,
a part of a collective
that is working towards a common and unifying vision,
a better world.
Our future lies in our togetherness,
not in our separation within our countries and across borders.
In this century, I believe we can be imaginative and audacious
about what is possible.
From Addis to Atlanta, from Brasilia to Berlin,
from Jakarta to Jerusalem.
This is our moment, for all of us,
not only for professional democracy advocates like me,
but for every single one of us
to come together and build a truly global pro-democracy movement.
Thank you.
(Applause)