Athens Democracy Forum 2026
GCRD joins democracy leaders from around the world at the 2026 Athens Democracy Forum
In the city where democracy was born, leaders, laureates, journalists and young activists asked why democracy matters and how it must change. GCRD brought a new way to hear where it is under strain.
Dr Jacob Udo-Udo Jacob, Founding Executive Director of the Global Centre for Rehumanising Democracy, joined democracy leaders from across the world in Athens for the 14th Athens Democracy Forum. Organised by the Democracy & Culture Foundation in association with The New York Times, the Forum brought together more than 400 policymakers, civil society leaders, technologists, academics, artists and young leaders under the theme "Building Order Out of Chaos".
Its central question was a demanding one: why democracy, and how must it evolve to be fit for purpose in the twenty-first century?
A forum facing hard questions
The Forum opened at the Academy of Athens with a debate on democracy's identity crisis. Former Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė drew on her country's resistance to Russian influence to argue that democracy can win. Laura Thornton set out democracy's performance crisis, from institutional distrust to compromised information environments. Pedro Abramovay of the Open Society Foundations urged that democracy be judged against its real alternatives, not against an ideal. Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times described a "second Big Bang", in which artificial intelligence, climate change and cyber threats are transforming the environment in which democracies must survive.
Over three days, sessions moved from forecasting autocracy, with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakkol Karman, to kleptocracy, journalism, democracy support and the governance of artificial intelligence, with teenagers from the Forum's Teens for Democracy programme taking their own place on the stage.
Honouring those who keep the flame burning
The City of Athens Democracy Award 2026 went to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, presented by the Mayor of Athens, Haris Doukas, in recognition of his political courage on peace, human dignity, international law, migration and the regulation of artificial intelligence. Sánchez dedicated the recognition to those who strengthen democracy every day: "These are the people who keep the flame burning."
The Kofi Annan NextGen Democracy Prize 2026 was awarded to Lara Parizotto, Executive Director of the Migrant Democracy Project and the first Brazilian-born councillor elected in the United Kingdom, for her work bringing migrant communities into political life through voter registration, candidacy and advocacy.
GCRD's contribution: hearing democracy before it breaks
Within this architecture of debate and recognition, the Forum's Tools of Democracy series turned to practical mechanisms. On 30 September, Dr Jacob presented the Democracy Discourse Index (DDI), GCRD's instrument for measuring democratic health through the quality of public conversation.
"Long before a democracy fails in its institutions, it begins to fail in its conversation. You can hear it before you can see it."
Framing the talk through his father's work repairing radios for the displaced in Calabar during the Nigeria-Biafra war, Dr Jacob showed how the DDI reads the comments citizens leave beneath the news across four dimensions: empathy, civility, trust and democratic agency. Student coders at partner universities triple-code every item in a ground-truth sample, and that triple-coding provides the ground truth for GCRD's ReHuman AI system to code at scale and produce national scores.
The findings spoke directly to the Forum's diagnosis. Across six national observatories, every country sits in the Concerning band, and in five of the six the weakest dimension is democratic agency. "The crisis we hear is not, first of all, a crisis of manners," he said. "It is a crisis of futility." Where the opening debate described democracy's crisis of performance, the DDI offers a way to detect its earliest signal: citizens who no longer believe their voice changes anything.
Watch Dr Jacob's full talk: Tools of Democracy, The Democracy Discourse Index. Video: Athens Democracy Forum.
From diagnosis to partnership
Dr Jacob closed with an invitation: universities to host observatories, funders to "back observatories before elections, not autopsies after them", and platforms and newsrooms to build a governed alternative to Google's Perspective API, which closes at the end of 2026. GCRD will follow up with partners on each of these fronts, convinced that measuring the health of public conversation belongs alongside the work of defending institutions.
About the Democracy Discourse Index
The DDI is a human-validated, AI-assisted system for measuring democratic health through the quality of public discourse, developed by GCRD with a consortium of universities and technology partner Sensika. To partner with us, write to info@gcrd.org.uk.
