Authoritarian practices are on the rise. Civic space is closing. The international community must be ready to respond, and its role has never been more vital.
Those were some of the key messages from speakers at the Trust Conference, which took place in London, the United Kingdom, last week, and which saw a gathering of pro-democratic players including international NGOs, lawyers, and journalists from around the world.
After a general rise in the openness of society in the last decades of the 1900s and the early 2000s, the pendulum has started to swing back toward authoritarian powers. Freedom House, the U.S. think tank that tracks freedom across the world, identified that a “democratic recession” began around the time of the global financial crisis in the late 2000s and has not abated. Its annual report found that world freedoms had declined for 19 years in a row up until 2024.