Unlocking Cooperation: Open Societies

KEVIN MALONEY: Good morning, everyone. My name is Kevin Maloney. I am the director of communications at Carnegie Council.

To begin I would like to welcome you all to the Council’s Global Ethics Hub for the latest convening in our Unlocking Cooperation series. Today we are going to be examining how democracies can enhance multilateral cooperation as a means to more proactively and effectively counter authoritarian actors, an especially salient topic at a moment when governments and individuals are embracing nationalism and rejecting democratic norms.

Our discussion will be moderated today by Jim Ketterer, a longtime friend of the Council, who currently serves as a senior fellow at Bard College. Alongside Jim we are honored to welcome Christopher Walker from the National Endowment for Democracy, Tinatin Japaridze from Eurasia Group, and Sunny Cheung from The Jamestown Foundation. Each of these panelists brings to the gathering a critical perspective on the state of democracy today both globally and across key regions.

Before passing the microphone to Jim and to help frame our conversation I want to share a short quote from a recent article by Council President Joel Rosenthal, in which he discusses cooperation as an essential principle at the intersection of ethics and international affairs. Joel writes:

“The commitment to international cooperation is a moral proposition because it goes to the essence of ethics, recognizing what is common for all while managing the intrinsic and inevitable differences between and among people. To simply assert power is irresponsible and in the end counterproductive. To retreat entirely is also unprincipled and short-sighted.”

With that message, it is my pleasure to turn it over to Jim. Thanks, Jim.

JAMES KETTERER: Thanks very much, Kevin. I would like to thank Carnegie Council for convening this very important conversation and for all the work that they do on so many important conversations. If this is your first time here at a Carnegie event, I highly recommend that you find ways to come back and find ways to be engaged with this organization. They make it easy because they are very engaging, and that is so important.

I would like to thank my fellow panelists, who have all made their way here from Washington, DC to be here this morning and all of you. You could be doing different things this morning—having coffee, having breakfast, and taking your time starting your day—but instead you are here. I think it is critically important that people be engaged in important topics, big ideas, serious conversations, and it may be more important now than ever.

This is certainly a very important topic. As I was making my way here this morning from the West Side of Manhattan to the East Side, which New Yorkers know are two very different worlds, crossing the gap from one side to the other of the island, I was headed into the beautiful sun—it is a beautiful day here in New York—and I was just reminded that sunrises are beautiful things, but they can blind you as well. It was hard to cross the street in a couple of places, and it made me think that we can be blinded to the details of a lot of things that are going on, and so we are here to talk about some of those details.

On this topic I was thinking back also a few decades to that time following the end of the Cold War and before 9/11 when it seemed like there were so many possibilities. There was a sense of optimism. It may be hard to remember that, or, for those of you who are young enough here, to not know that, but I am here to tell you that there really was this palpable sense of optimism, perhaps naïveté, but there was a real sense that there were all kinds of possibilities that have in one way or another evaded our grasp.

As an opening question, a kind of thought experiment, I would like to start with Sunny and ask, if somebody from that time of some relative optimism were to time travel and appear today and you had to brief them on where things stand now, what is the lay of the land in the areas that you know well but in the whole world as well, not to limit it? What would you say to this time traveler?

SUNNY CHEUNG: Hi, everyone. First of all, thank you for having me here. Second, if you celebrate the Lunar New Year, Happy Lunar New Year, in respect to the culture.

That is a great question. A little bit of background of myself: I grew up and was raised in Hong Kong, so I witnessed how the Chinese government in recent decades has been undermining the autonomy of Hong Kong.

In case you do not know the Hong Kong story already, Hong Kong was a British colony. If I had the opportunity to go back before 1997, which was the year Hong Kong was handed over from the British to the Chinese, I would actually remind Hong Kong people and the world not to trust China blindly. I think there was an optimism after the end of the Cold War that the liberals could easily prevail and that we should engage with China and try to uphold the principles by introducing a free market and liberalism, and then that could also help China transform to a better state. This is a classic modernization theory, which unfortunately was proven wrong.

I would also say that when we try to examine China we have to understand that the nature and political regime of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is that they do not respect human rights and do not believe in democracy. They do believe in autocracy and trying to centralize power, especially for Xi Jinping in recent years, in order to ensure that the PRC can become a state that tries for not just regional stability but also global stability.

If I had a chance to talk to the British government I would try to tell them—well, actually most of the time before the handover Hong Kong people also did not want to go back to China because after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre many people already lacked the faith that the Chinese government could have any meaningful political reform. So, yes, try to keep self-determination rights for Hong Kong people because Hong Kong was one of the rare cases of a British colony but never had self-determination rights and no public referendum to allow the Hong Kong people to decide their own future. This is one thing.

Secondly, of course, if I could talk to the U.S. government at that period of time because I think at that period of time, no matter whether it was under President Bush or President Clinton in the 1990s, they had a big debate in Washington about whether they should allow China into the World Trade Organization and argued if they should lift sanctions that were imposed against China after the Tiananmen Massacre to give a good signal to China in the hopes that China in return would embrace the liberal order, which again was proven wrong.

I would say a couple of things but mainly just try to warn them to have a more holistic examination of the current state of China.

JAMES KETTERER: Thank you very much. Tinatin, what would you say along these lines to a similar time traveler coming to you and maybe to parts of the world that you are most familiar with?

TINATIN JAPARIDZE: Thank you so much, Jim, and my very special thanks to Carnegie Council. I was very fortunate to be a student ambassador here a few years ago now and sat in this room where you are all sitting, our audience, quite a few times, so it is an honor and a great privilege for me to be here with such a distinguished group of panelists. Thank you all for having me.

Jim, it is one of those questions that I would have answered very differently a year ago compared to what I would say now, particularly when it comes to the country I am from, my native Georgia. Unfortunately Georgia is going through a very concerning transition and sadly it is a transition toward something very negative as opposed to something positive that has been long overdue.

A lot of what we grew up with, my generation of Millennials who were born at the tail end of the Soviet regime and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when there was so much hope and we were so blinded, Jim, as you said by that sunlight suddenly that we thought, This is it, and just because we had access to Western goods that were readily available to us we thought that was going to equal having access to a democratic future. That has in many ways, without sounding cliché, been in our DNA as Georgians.

I did spend my formative years in Russia in the 1990s, which of course was a very different Russia compared to Putin’s Russia today, and I can tell you that the 1990s in Russia, was an era of a lot of hope, perhaps naïveté, and unwillingness to think realistically about what would have to come next and why it was so crucial to start thinking about building and strengthening institutions, which many of my compatriots dismissed as again a cliché, thinking: Well, this is meaningless. We are fine. We have access to everything we need. We can travel abroad now. There is no Iron Curtain anymore. Therefore we started to dismiss these very critical issues that our partners, especially the United States, were warning us about for many years.

Sadly today my native Georgia reminds me in many ways of Russia of the late 1990s and early 2000s, where the Iron Curtain has not come down quite yet, but we are entering this transition phase that worries me a great deal because I am not sure that in this particular case we will get that second chance that some of my compatriots and especially my generation and those younger, the Gen Z generation, are hopeful that we will.

Not that anything is ever a lost cause, and I am a great believer in second chances but also in grassroots movements, and I think what we are witnessing in Georgia at the moment is something that I did not really see in Russia when that transition was happening during the early years of Vladimir Putin’s presidency. That is this grassroots movement where the people are trying to drive that change with no political leadership, which on the one hand is a wonderful thing that it is happening at a grassroots level, is genuine, and is not something that hundreds of thousands of Georgians that some of you may have seen on television that have been protesting for months now that anyone is telling them what to do. On the other hand the issue here is that because there is no real charismatic strong political leadership on the so-called “opposition” side opposing the current pro-Russian regime there is no way to consolidate the sentiment in the streets of Georgia beyond just Tbilisi.

I am very, very hopeful that it will not be the older generation of politicians who have been in power for a very long time. For understandable reasons many Georgians, the general population, are very concerned to vote for them because in many ways they are voting for that same machine. Obviously what is driving the ruling regime is very different from what is driving Georgian Dream, but nonetheless it is time for new leadership and fresh blood that will drive change, not from the top down, but understanding that it is time to listen to the will of the people and not just political will.

To your question, Jim, one thing that I would share with caution with someone if we had a time machine back in the day, in the early 1990s, when there was so much hope and we had every reason to rejoice and so much to look forward to, is that we should not be blinded by the ray of light that you talked about earlier because the sun will start to set and we may not have enough at our disposal available to us for the next day when the sun rises again. I think it is very easy for us to overestimate those good moments when we think, This is it; this is democracy.

I would have warned them that democracy does not mean having access to McDonald’s. It does not mean having access to iPhones, with all due respect to technology. It is far more than that. It is about values. That is not something we can impose. It is something that has to be within you, but we all need that guiding hand and we all need to understand that our friends and our strategic partners are the ones who will be standing by our side and that it is not one of those ephemeral friendships that is here today and gone tomorrow.

I think investing in those friendships, not just the fact that the West has been investing a great deal, not just in terms of funding but in terms of time and energy into countries like my native Georgia, that we also need to do our part as Georgians in this case to invest in these relationships because there has to be some sort of transaction without making this sound like a business sort of conversation. We have to have mutual interests, and I think investing in those mutual interests and understanding where the core values where we can meet halfway is a longer-term investment and is not about immediate gains.

JAMES KETTERER: Thank you very much, also for continuing the sunrise and sunset imagery.

Chris, I think that is a great segue. From your position you have a global perspective on these things and I think are able to take a broader view in some ways and synthesize some of what you have just heard as well.

CHRISTOPHER WALKER: Thank you, Jim, for the question and also for the invitation to be here to talk about this timely topic.

I think both Tinatin and Sunny have been extremely eloquent on a whole host of things connected to their countries of origin, but in a way it is this issue of unmet assumptions or challenging assumptions that were so palpable in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. Some have described the 1990s as a “vacation from history” and all that implies, but if you think about it the opening up of Central Europe, the Baltic States, the unification of the former East and West Germany all happened in very short order as well as Russia’s peaceful dissolution in a sense at the time within the larger Soviet context, so that was an unusual time with hindsight.

I think if we could tell one thing to observers at the time it might be to say, “Don’t view this as necessarily so exceptional,” because if we use our same time machine and go back 25 years it would have been right at the point in January of 2000 when Vladimir Putin was assuming paramount power in Russia. It is 25 years, a quarter century, that that individual has been in charge of Russia. He took a little hiatus for four years when Dmitry Medvedev was prime minister and then Putin returned.

It is worth noting that in 2012, when Putin returned to the presidency in Russia, Xi Jinping assumed paramount power as the general secretary of the Communist Party and the other titles that come with it in Beijing. In the spirit of this topic of Unlocking Cooperation, there has been a lot of cooperation that was not anticipated between those two leaders of two very powerful countries that have a very different vision for the world.

When Putin returned in 2012 it was right around the time of the Bolotnaya protests, which you may recall. It is clear with hindsight that Putin used that experience to start to crush any independent thought, any independent civil society, and any independent media from a start point in 2012 that was already pretty rough because seven or eight years before that he was already subjugating the main national media in the country, usually in the context of crises that the government couldn’t handle, either ships or submarines that had major crises or major entertainment events where terrorism or other issues were confronted and where the media was basically suborned in favor of the authorities. All of this was happening in earnest I would say from 2012.

To stay on the topic of Unlocking Cooperation, I think if we then fast-forward from that time, basically a dozen years since 2012-2013, here we are today now in almost the third-year anniversary of Russia’s full-blown attack on Ukraine, a major land war in Europe. That unprovoked attack on Ukraine by Russia has been prosecuted in deep collaboration with China, Belarus, Iran—which is generating the drones that are attacking Ukraine—and the one that nobody had on their bingo card a dozen years ago, thousands of North Korean soldiers on European soil fighting on behalf of Russia against Ukraine.

I think our attention spans are so short, we are so submerged in information, and there is so much abundance of information today that it is hard to step back and think about how incredible that is. We almost become inured to it. North Korean soldiers are fighting in Ukraine against Ukrainians on behalf of Russia with the support of the leaderships of China, Iran, and Belarus. That is pretty remarkable when you think about it.

I can talk about other aspects of such cooperation that defy the conventional wisdom, just about all of the assumptions from 25 years ago in terms of this kind of cooperation, where state authoritarian resources are purposed in a very direct and intentional way over a long period of time.

Maybe the final point I will make on this, as a more general observation is: You think about the leadership in many of the authoritarian countries today—and this is of course true almost by its nature; these sorts of dictatorships, authoritarian systems—by design their leaders sideline political opposition, independent media, and civil society, and they do their best to retain power for as long as they are able to do it. So Vladimir Putin has been in power for 25 years.

Just to give you some examples off the top of my head, in Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev was the president of that country until he passed away. His son, Ilham Aliyev 22 years ago assumed power there. Twenty-two years; that is a long time in that small petrostate.

A similar version of this has played out in a country like Venezuela, where Hugo Chávez would have stayed for a longer term until he passed away, and now Nicolás Maduro has defied almost all of the conventional analytical wisdom at the time that he would be able to remain in power since the mid-2010s. He is still there with military backing, and he is destroying his country.

He is attacking people who are trying to make that country a better place. By all accounts he did not prevail in the election. His opponents prevailed. Very courageous people, like the courageous people of Hong Kong and Georgia, in Venezuela have been showcasing the fact that the incumbent leadership did not win that election, and there has been brutal violence applied there.

The point I would like to finish with is that in these countries, where there is not a rotation of power, the ability to see through a certain set of policies is not inevitable but can be easier. I would say, for example, that Vladimir Putin, having marginalized alternative power in the Russian Federation and pursuing his program as he sees it over a quarter of a century gives him some advantages over democracies, which by their nature rotate power and can have dramatically different approaches to the world. This is true across all the democracies including Australia, New Zealand, through Europe and North America.

I think we need to recognize that in this fight today over values—it is a real struggle—we have to think about ways to not get caught on our back foot in perpetuity when we think about better ways to respond and cooperate. I will leave it there.

JAMES KETTERER: Thank you very much. In all of your answers, in one way or another you are talking about the role of individual citizens, groups, civil society, and the role of information. It makes me think about technology. There was a time also when there was a real optimism about the role that technology could play and that it could give individuals access to information, could allow them to unlock cooperation in their countries in ways that had not been previously possible.

I saw this up close in the time of the Arab Spring, when the Middle East and North Africa were having a delayed response to the post-Cold War time we have just been talking about. Fast-forward, we see an environment where that technology has perhaps been turned on its head, and these kinds of regimes that you were so eloquently discussing, Chris, are using that very technology that was going to be the thing to unlock cooperation and in fact locking it down and doubling down on a very sophisticated surveillance state.

Sunny, I know you have been thinking about this issue. Maybe you could share some of your perspectives on this.

SUNNY CHEUNG: Absolutely. I think everyone since yesterday or two days ago is aware of the Chinese DeepSeek model. Perhaps you have one in your mobile right now.

China is a very good example to argue how good their technological advancement is. Over the past several decades perhaps no one could expect that China one day could compete with or even replace U.S. leadership in terms of the tech world from emerging tech, like artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum. A little bit of my background again. I am now focusing on China’s emerging technologies, so I am pretty aware of this topic.

I think a terrible and horrifying thing for China is that they try to integrate all of these emerging technologies into the surveillance state. When we look at China, they use a lot of surveillance cameras and e-payment systems and try to track the digital footprints of every citizen in China. When they solicit this kind of data they can merge and centralize this and go back to Beijing and have it for their own purposes.

Many people talk about how amazing DeepSeek is, but no one is talking about how all this data will be sent back to Hangzhou, the headquarters of DeepSeek, and you have no idea how they handle this kind of data. This is related to the overall debate we have had with TikTok. Many people talk about whether we should ban TikTok and the risks with TikTok. I think the ultimate argument is that if we do not trust the nature of the PRC government, should they handle the global access of data of every citizen in the world?

Let me tell you a little bit more. Whenever China tries to solicit this kind of data, they will build a massive database and try to use that to advance their AI and try to forecast what is going to happen with that particular individual in order to monitor and surveil their individual behavior. This kind of action is very horrifying. I think this is also why it is very important nowadays that we talk about AI ethics and AI collaboration, because if we do not have this principle in place we cannot really stop this kind of expansion and aggressive exploitation of technology just in the case of China.

I could go on and on. What happens in China does not just stay in China. We also see how China, whenever they develop this kind of invasive technology, tries to export that to foreign countries, like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations countries, African countries, like in America and Europe, and all of this kind of technology developed by China, like Huawei and other tech giants, is very concerning, and I think we should be aware of that and try to be ready to hold our position and try to develop a framework in order to provide another option based on democracy, human rights, and based on a more responsible use of technological frameworks in order to ensure that this situation will not escalate further and be worsened.

JAMES KETTERER: Thank you very much. Tinatin or Chris, would you like to weigh in on this technology question?

TINATIN JAPARIDZE: Absolutely. It is very interesting. I was listening to Sunny now, and I thought from the Russian perspective it is very different because obviously Russia does not have the technological means that China has. They do turn to China very often and oftentimes they get the support that they need, but they use technology in a very different way actually in terms of controlling information and digital censorship, the “digital Iron Curtain,” that we have seen in Russia, which was a long time coming.

I remember when I was working on my Master’s thesis it was on the so-called “cyber sovereignty” of the Russian Internet or Runet, and some of the tools that Moscow was going to borrow and was already at that time borrowing from Beijing. This was around 2017, 2018, and 2019, and the world that we live in today is completely different, which once again shows us the speed at which everything is developing and evolving.

As soon as the full-scale invasion of Ukraine started we immediately started seeing how Russia started to unplug itself from technology and information, trying to go back to the Soviet regime’s tools of “Let’s just keep our people in the dark,” not fully realizing that whatever worked in the Soviet days was not going to work today just because of how far we have come in terms of technology. Just because an average person is not able to access YouTube, for example, or Facebook and Instagram, which are now considered in Russia to be terrorist organizations essentially or “extremist” as the Kremlin likes to put it, we still have virtual personal networks and so the people in Russia are still able to access a lot of this information.

What we are seeing that is different and is also a throwback to the Soviet times is self-censorship, that fear of even wanting to google something or use the Russian equivalent Yandex to look something up. A lot of people I have spoken with in confidence have shared with me that they are worried about googling certain things that a couple of years ago would have been absolutely benign. I am very concerned about what that means in the longer term because we see cycles, and some may disagree, but I think Russia has been through these cycles itself. Inevitably regimes end and we have those narrow openings every now and then and then the window, door, and all the other windows start to close again.

When that opening is there and when it is available I do not know what sort of frame of mind—and frankly, mental and emotional state—the people will be in and whether or not they are going to be able to make the most of that brief window that some were able to essentially use for their own benefit in the early 1990s, partly because of technology, self-censorship, and fear. All of these things that would have been unheard of a few years ago unfortunately we are reliving once again, and the repercussions and implications will I believe last far longer than anyone would like to think.

In Georgia’s case it is slightly different. I think technology plays a lesser role in this. It is more about, as I said earlier, grassroots movements that are taking the front seat in all of this, the individual roles that they are able to play.

Also I have noticed, going back to fear and self-censorship, some things that my fellow Georgians are worried about putting online or even sending to each other via WhatsApp, Signal, etc., they are able to discuss these issues and these grievances with each other when they gather during protests, so they have gone back to the tools that were available to them that they stopped turning to a few years ago because everything was about technology, posting this, liking that, and sharing something else, and now they are worried about doing that because they are worried about that knock on their door in the middle of the night.

Unfortunately the repressions are back, and instead they are getting together in large groups, starting to congregate, and starting to share grievances, fears, and hopes with each other, a lot of which happens by the way during these protests. We see these images on television and social media and some of us probably wonder, Well, what are they doing? You have hundreds of thousands of people getting together every evening in Tbilisi and beyond throughout the country.

Many of them are using these platforms as safe places and spaces to be able to talk to each other because they no longer trust technology and they are once again, as was the case for their ancestors, fearful, worried, and in some cases deeply concerned about putting anything in writing, so they have gone back to the traditional means of communication.

JAMES KETTERER: What is old is new again.

TINATIN JAPARIDZE: Exactly.

JAMES KETTERER: Getting together and discussing in person is safer than using technology.

Chris, anything on this issue?

CHRISTOPHER WALKER: Maybe just building on some of the observations of my co-panelists, I think we also underestimated the degree to which these authoritarian powers would incubate, road test, and innovate technology to help meet what is in their leadership’s DNA, which is to say preventing free speech, free expression, and coordination of speech across societies. It is why I and my colleagues focus so much effort on supporting groups and efforts to try to challenge that kind of censorship and break through it.

If you think about Xinjiang in China or Tibet, the Chinese authorities have built what are only understood as highly intensive webs of techno-surveillance. There has been great reporting over the years in places like The Wall Street Journal. Josh Chin and Liza Lin have a fantastic book entitled Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, where they cover this issue, but then, as Sunny notes, they also explain how there is a methodology to sharing this technology from the PRC outward with the wider world. There is Huawei’s surveillance technology in Serbia, which was settled in advance of the protests of disputed elections within the last period. One only wonders at the extent to which that technology is leveraged in ways we do not appreciate.

There are lots of examples. My understanding is that a fair amount of Chinese surveillance technology has already been adopted in Georgia, so these are things that we need to be mindful of, not because the technology per se is a bad thing. There are many countries that seek out the technology in order to modernize, ostensibly to be more secure or more prosperous. Fair enough.

I think one of the big challenges is having enough information and breaking through the secrecy that invariably accompanies these deals when China and their home-run companies are operating in different countries around the world. It does not take much research looking at how confidentiality agreements and secrecy clauses are baked into virtually all of the agreements that China has with their partner countries.

I will just give one quick example on a different topic, which is a big one. In Kenya, the standard-gauge railroad project that China was involved in was littered with secrecy clauses, and when civil society, political opposition, and others there properly tried to get a better understanding of what underlaid that deal, those clauses were invoked to prevent access to it. This is a systemic thing.

AidData, the terrific project based at William & Mary down in Virginia, does terrific work mapping the nature of these deals at scale. It gets very little attention, but this is something that I would contend can actually reshape the way countries think about basic governance approaches in a pretty fundamental way.

Latin America is also good geographical terrain to look at for these kinds of things. There is an enormous amount of Chinese engagement and investment there. Much of that, including in the tech space, is happening in less than transparent ways.

JAMES KETTERER: One of the things I think we have learned over the last few decades is that democracy means more than election day. There was this sense in those optimistic days in the 1990s that if an authoritarian regime suddenly started having elections and if they were some semblance of free and fair then you had crossed a major threshold and were basically home free in some sense or another. We have since learned that all of the other things that the three of you were discussing are so vitally important and they go on before, during, and after election day.

That being said, it does not mean that elections don’t matter, and 2024 saw a huge swath of the global population go to the polls and vote on elections at various levels in their countries. Several of these countries would by any measure be deemed deeply authoritarian states, yet they are still holding elections.

When we look back on the last year and on the elections in some of these places—elections I think are events that bring together issues of citizen involvement, authoritarianism, technology, media, and civil society at these times—what sorts of perspectives in your parts of the world or globally do you have on what we just went through in 2024? Also, we have more election coming up this year.

Tinatin, what would you say about elections and where things stand now?

TINATIN JAPARIDZE: Jim, my biggest concern when it comes to even thinking about elections is the fact that in my part of the world and the broader Eurasian space many have actually started to if not accept at least start to accept normalizing political interference. Many have started to take it for granted: “It has always been thus. There will be political interference and every other sort of interference, and we have to learn to coexist with it because it is not going away anytime soon.” That is deeply concerning.

I have covered a number of elections in my professional capacity over the years, and the most striking one was the most recent one, again in Georgia, when I noticed that a lot of things that would have been deeply frowned upon even a few years ago were suddenly accepted as the norm, but it is the new norm: “We have to learn to live with it. Let’s learn how to counter it so that we can at least diminish the scale and intensity of interferences of sorts.” But nobody is talking about not accepting interference of any sort.

Some of this is unfortunately a Soviet legacy, in Georgia’s case certainly. Many of my compatriots, especially the older generation, grew up quite frankly not believing in voting, in one’s vote, and the power of one’s voice because they felt that it was meaningless and would not count for very much, and those who genuinely had some political beliefs were very fearful about sharing those beliefs publicly, let alone going to the polls.

When I first became a U.S. citizen I remember I was so excited about voting that some of my friends back home I would tell that I was going to go and vote, not just in the presidential elections but everything else in between, looked at me like I was completely out of my mind: “Why are you wasting your day going out there and voting when you know that your voice, that one voice, will make no difference?”

That is deeply concerning because I think that combined with now fear of actually going out there and voting for a candidate, if there is a candidate on the ballot that one believes in—unfortunately that is a whole other situation if we talk about Belarus, for example, which I will not get into now—that is very concerning in terms of citizen engagement going forward and what that means. Accepting that political interference is the new norm and normalizing this is very, very problematic for what it means going forward and for what it means for the younger generation, who will one day for better or worse inherit these political seats, and what it means for the continuation of that sort of regime going forward.

JAMES KETTERER: Chris, I would like to throw this to you but let me also give a time warning to you and Sunny as we do this last question because we would then like to take questions from the live-stream audience and also the audience in person.

CHRISTOPHER WALKER: Elections, of course, are critical. It is among other things one of the few tools to understand citizens’ preferences, and if you do not have elections it is very hard to do so. Authoritarian regimes which either don’t hold elections or hold manipulated or sham elections use other ways to try to figure out what their societies are thinking and feeling, including today paradoxically using technology and their ability to surveil to have a better understanding of the degree to which they can extract that from data and from communications in the tech domain probably more efficiently than in the analog era. That may even argue for more ability to manage and control in authoritarian settings. I think that is a subject for debate.

Coming back to your original question of whether the promise of technology, where 20 years ago the overwhelming thought in this context both within and beyond the electoral process was that it is absolutely going to be a good thing because people will be expressing themselves without fear or favor. I think authoritarian regimes have proven very adept at manipulating this.

As Tinatin alluded to, one of the big changes certainly over the last decade and a half is that there are many more opportunities in a globalized environment to engage in political discussion from beyond a country’s borders. One example that has been with us for some time but I think has matured is the emergence of alternative election observation groups, some of which are organized out of Russia. There are different permutations of this, but they are actually the mirror image in a bad way of the established groups, say, that operate from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE) Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, which is understood to be the gold standard for this kind of thing.

These alternative groups emerged over the years. They essentially fly in the day of the election and give a rubber stamp to whatever happened in country X, Y, or Z, even if it is evident that the reality on the ground might belie what they are saying.

At the same time, they are just as likely to find their voices disseminated on authoritarian state media both within the country in question but interestingly also beyond the country’s borders, so it may be that a discussion of an election in Azerbaijan is finding its way to be featured on China Global Television Network, Sputnik, or other places as an indicator that that country’s election met standards. In countries where you do not have free media or political opposition that can meaningfully compete, you are not having a free and fair election. That is true certainly in a systemic way leading up to election day.

What the alternative observers will say is, “Absolutely free and open on election day and hence we give it the stamp of approval.” I think that is something for us to reckon with. It is quite different from 20 years ago, how free societies, democratically accountable societies, support each other in making sure that election observation in this instance is actually abiding by the UN standards and other established guidelines of rules-based election observation.

JAMES KETTERER: We could have a whole other session on election observations and how does an organization like the OSCE, which is driven by the member states, be effective and how can they get access to the other member states and do these election observations and at the same time not appear to be de-legitimized and used by the authoritarian regimes that are basically saying, “Well, we need this observation as window dressing” or something.

We do not have time for that. I do want to give an opportunity to Sunny to weigh in briefly on elections, and then we will go to some questions.

SUNNY CHEUNG: I think elections can mean a lot of things. For me I feel like an election is like a large-scale sacred ritual where we enforce and consolidate people’s choices, dignity, autonomy, and state sovereignty.

A very good example last year was Taiwan. That is also why China hates Taiwan for organizing elections every four years. Every four years Taiwanese uphold democratic principles and successfully have an election to choose their own country’s leader, and we can see that actually we enforce the premise of democracy to respect people’s sovereignty, autonomy, and choices. This is exactly what Xi Jinping and the leadership in Beijing hate and dislike.

I would say that elections are a good way for people to demonstrate their public will, and usually this is something that we should not take for granted. We should protect elections and ensure that elections are not interfered with by foreign powers, especially in the case of Taiwan, where we see that the Chinese often try to frighten Taiwanese and during election day there is a lot of propaganda, disinformation, and political warfare trying to be waged at the Taiwanese to frighten them into not running for leadership and not to participate in election day. That is scary, and we should by all means try to protect the sacred right for organizing and participating in elections.

JAMES KETTERER: Thank you very much. Speaking of the voice of the people, why don’t we take some questions now? Do we have some online questions?

ALEX WOODSON: I am Alex Woodson, editor at Carnegie Council. A great question came in from the live stream: “How do surveillance practices differ between democratic and authoritarian states in terms of methods, oversight, and impact on civil liberties?”

CHRISTOPHER WALKER: It is a great question. I think fundamentally these things work best when democratic societies interrogate the purposes for which surveillance would be used.

It is clear that we live in an era when these technologies are proliferating across all of our societies. They are often used on the basis of enhancing security. Personally I think that needs to be interrogated as well: Does more surveillance in fact deliver more security in terms of crime on the streets and so forth?

It can make us feel more secure, and perhaps it is useful in many respects, but the main thing I would say is that we need an engaged and educated populace that is asking the right questions, pressuring, and letting their elected officials know that they are keeping an eye on these things and then in turn optimally you have elected officials raising questions about the efficacy and the need for these technologies.

I would say in contrast to that—and it is a really important issue—there are no guardrails in modernizing wealthy countries, at least as it relates to their regimes’ willingness to invest in technology. Certainly the PRC is in this category as well as the Gulf States and Iran.

Russia, as Tinatin alluded to, is maybe not quite at the same capacity of China in this regard, but very few countries are, so that comparison is not always the most useful one. The Russian authorities as I understand it are running as fast as they can to adopt surveillance technology, facial recognition, and that is not for street crime; that is for regime security purposes.

In those settings it is important to have groups on the ground, activists who follow these things closely and who can articulate the dangers to their fellow countrymen and to the wider world as a way to at a minimum check and keep some transparency on these things, because as we have discussed already—I think Sunny made this observation a propos of Las Vegas—what has developed in terms of surveillance tech within China does not stay in China.

That is not theoretical. We see this now in a large number of countries. There are a number of scholars, analysts, and groups that are doing phenomenal work on this topic and I would encourage those who are interested to take a look. Samantha Hoffman is a good example. She really knows her stuff and does great work on this, but there are a number of others too.

I think we are obliged in this world in which technology does spread and disseminate from all of our perches to be very mindful of how the technology is evolving and then maybe spreading from the least-free settings because the characteristics and features of the technology coming from China in particular can also be harmful to our own freedoms.

JAMES KETTERER: How about if we take another question, and if you want to circle back to that question too we can do that.

QUESTION: Hello. Thank you for this conversation. It is very interesting. My name is Pablo. I am here with the International Students and Scholars Office of Columbia University. I am from Chile.

I want to broach a subject that has been kind of addressed but not totally: In my region in South America almost all countries hold regular elections. Democracy has been ingrained for at least 30 to 40 years thankfully, but during the last years we have been seeing an obvious turn to conservative and populist measures. The main issue for every country—I have both studied this and lived it—is that wealth disparity and inequality is so huge in the continent that everyone is turning to leaders that talk to the people and say that they have solutions for what 40 years of liberal democracy has not been able to achieve, which is to produce a society in which everyone feels a part of, not only voting but also in the economic wealth of countries.

This has been the main framing also of elections here in the United States. The framing of the wealth of the people turned the election in ways that everyone knows, and populism is verging on an assault on international cooperation and collaboration due to this issue.

What do you think about new ways of including the ethics of equity and equality into democracy for it to be empowered and to not be suffering because authoritarian states, as have been mentioned here, are a real issue, but also in democratic countries it is verging on conservatism and populism and not really collaborating with states.

JAMES KETTERER: Excellent question. Thank you very much. You also raised something we have not discussed directly yet, which is the United States. I like the way that you raised it by putting it into a broader global perspective in the kinds of things that we are discussing here.

Tinatin, would you like to address this issue of wealth disparities and inequities?

TINATIN JAPARIDZE: It is a very timely question, one that unfortunately we do not have that one answer for, and it does vary from country to country. Obviously there are historical ramifications in terms of what the population has gone through in recent history and the role that history has played in terms of how we think about equity, equality, et cetera.

In the case of Georgia I can tell you that it is an issue that is on the minds of many and is perhaps one of the reasons why the ruling regime, Georgian Dream, was actually able to—whether free of fair elections; I think many of us will agree that elections in Georgia in October of last year were not free or fair—remain in power, though some do talk about Georgian Dream as a de facto government, but nonetheless.

That is precisely, Pablo, why I think they were able to stay in power because they did have that camouflage of sorts that they used to show the general population that they were trying to address the bread-and-butter issues. It was also a government that tried to appeal to those segments of the population that were pining for a populist government rather than an elitist one.

Sadly those issues are not always used in the best way, especially during pre-election and election campaigns. They can often be abused for the political gain of a given candidate. I am not entirely sure that any of the political candidates in my country of origin at least are thinking about these issues the same way that you are trying to address the issues in your question, which is coming from that place of good faith.

I think it is mostly used for political gain and sadly, as is the case everywhere else, when they do get elected or reelected these political powers do not necessarily continue to care about the issues, and that is where one has to be held accountable in a democratic country rather than a semi-authoritarian or an autocratic one, where people will actually hold the government they elected accountable to address the issues that do not just matter in terms of bread-and-butter problems in the pre-election campaign phase.

JAMES KETTERER: I know we are winding down on time, but Sunny, do you have anything you would like to add to this topic?

SUNNY CHEUNG: I would just try to bring in another perspective to respond to your question. The rise of populism is also I think in response to the so-called “failure” of globalization. For many people, I think populists rely on the narrative that for the past several decades globalization actually did more harm than good because many people did not enjoy the fruits of globalization and did not enjoy the economic outcome.

I would say that China is actually part of the reason with a lot of state stipends, and then they flood foreign markets with cheap labor and cheap products and try to exploit foreign workers’ well-being, and that actually helped the rise of populism because people felt that, “Well, whenever we try to do business with China, we do not gain much.”

In fact, when China has a factory, for example in Africa—I have spoken to many friends from the continent—they told me: “Yes, China brings in capital and brings in some new factories and critical infrastructure. However, at the Chinese factory they only hire people from China, they do not hire locals, and that is a problem.” I think this kind of thing should be addressed.

My last point is that I admire and appreciate the last U.S. trade representative, Ambassador Katherine Tai. I think she set a very good standard in order to ensure that in the modern era when we talk about trade initiatives and trade agreements we have to bring in the elements of equality, justice, and all this kind of stuff in bilateral trade agreements in order to protect workers and the well-being of individuals and to ensure that the grassroots people can actually enjoy the fruits of globalization. This is something that we should talk about, and this exactly echoes the general topic of today: How do we ensure that ethics should be disseminated and delivered to the everyday lives of people?

JAMES KETTERER: We have time for one more question. I want to add one thing to your question too, just food for thought as you leave.

In some parts of the world even the word “democracy” is just off the map in the sense that it has not delivered the goods and is completely delegitimized because it has not produced results that are tangible in people’s everyday lives. The word itself is a nonstarter in many parts of the world. Thank you again.

CHRISTOPHER WALKER: I might just chime in on that. I think it is important to look at the data in these settings. In the main, democratic systems do deliver according to the data, certainly compared to authoritarian regimes.

Do democracies deliver perfectly in every case? Of course not. These systems are comprised of human beings who are contesting ideas and competing in pluralistic settings, but I think we should be very careful not to sweepingly allude to democracy “not delivering.” Even if in instances it doesn’t, it is important to know the context. Countries that have not been democracies and that are low-income countries struggling to become more democratic tend to do pretty well in terms of their economic growth for a time. They actually outperform autocracies. Autocracies in certain instances can perform better.

China distorts the discussion because it had this growth over a period of time, but when autocracies stop delivering economic growth and their performance legitimacy erodes, you see precisely what is happening in the PRC today, by the way also throughout the Middle East and in a laundry list of other countries. It is more repression, more censorship, and more control of the people. I don’t think that is what ordinary people seek.

I do think this needs a little more interrogation in terms of what does and does not deliver.

JAMES KETTERER: That is a whole other session. For the record, I was not saying that I believed that. I am just saying that the perception is there, but you are right; there is great data on this. People like Dani Rodrik and others have written extensively on this, yet the perception persists.

How about one last question?

QUESTION: Hello. Thank you for the awesome talk. I am here with the Borough of Manhattan Community College as well as representing the Lithuanian Alliance of America. I recently came back from Lithuania, and one of the main things I noticed was the omnipresence of Russian soft power, in particular with the Yandex engine, noticing that they offer a taxi app that is extremely competitive in terms of pricing that is really attractive to young people. I noticed that their search engine is really being pushed in particular to young people. Looking at our recent government elections that were very upsetting to the diplomatic community of Lithuania, young people are not participating in the governmental process, so they are very affected by this soft power use.

With this new government that is seemingly pro-Russian in some ways and collaborative, how do you mitigate and urge them to notice that this is an issue that we need to stop companies such as Yandex from having access to our young people and not mold them in unfortunate ways?

JAMES KETTERER: Thank you. That is an excellent question. Before our panel, when we were all upstairs, we were talking about soft power and public diplomacy, so you must have been reading our minds.

Anyone want to weigh in on this topic?

CHRISTOPHER WALKER: I am happy to take a crack. The Baltic States distinguish themselves in the main on these kinds of issues. Lithuania has faced encroachment from Moscow for ages and was fortunate at the end of the Cold War to regain its independence, as did Latvia and Estonia. However, that did not mean that Russia did not stop engaging in a wide range of domains in Lithuania as well as the other two Baltic States and frankly the wider region, not just in the information domain but in many others, cultural and so forth.

I would say that the way in which Russia operates not only in the Baltic States but in other such places probably does not really fit the definition of “soft power.” I would call that “sharp power” for a variety of reasons.

I am confident actually that Lithuanian society and the system will respond well. For those of you who have not followed the Baltic States, Lithuania stood up to the PRC. Lithuania has a population of just under 3 million people if I remember; the PRC has 1.4 billion. The Chinese Party-state brings a lot of resources to bear, and the Lithuanians stood up to them. There was a lot of economic coercion and propagandizing against Vilnius. It was incredibly impressive in my view.

I think whether it is Russia or China Lithuania is in many respects a model for other democracies to follow, and even with rotations of power in that particular country I suspect the system will prove to be quite resilient.

JAMES KETTERER: I like that hopeful note. Thank you.

Any last thoughts on this topic?

TINATIN JAPARIDZE: Very briefly. To your excellent question, I can tell you that Yandex Taxi is one of the big issues we are dealing with in my native Georgia as well. That has been a major problem, particularly interestingly not so much for the younger generation but rather the older generation. The first thing they look at is that it is cheaper than the alternative, Bolt, so they will opt for that.

Also, once you start talking to them about Russians—the Kremlin, the government obviously and not the people—having access to your data, that goes over their heads, whereas when you talk about this to the younger generation it is a lot easier to explain to them in terms of how it impacts them. So some of this is about critical thinking, some of this is about countering disinformation, and about talking about these issues in a way that matters to the general population where we are not making it sound so complicated that it goes over people’s heads.

To your point about soft power versus sharp power, I agree with you completely, Chris. I think the Soviet Union and Russia thereafter were not so good at soft power. I think we can say that with absolute confidence. They never really claimed that they were good at it.

What does make a huge difference is when the power is sharp and when it is not camouflaged as something soft. It is about instilling fear as opposed to making someone want to be part of their camp or their group. It is not quite as nuanced as that, I don’t think.

Soft power did work and I think continues to work better than sharp power in some societies but not so much in others. Also it is a generational issue. If we talk about these things openly—it is about having conversations, the younger generation having a conversation about it with their elders and explaining why this matters so much instead of using the kind of terminology that, as I said earlier, goes over people’s heads a lot of the time until they realize what the implications are for them specifically and not just talking about broader values and broader politics behind it.

JAMES KETTERER: Sunny, last word?

SUNNY CHEUNG: I will just try to add to that, regarding the soft power part. I will go back and talk about Asia a little bit to respond to that to see if there is any lesson you can draw from it.

In the case of Asia we talk about China as a very strong power and they have remarkable soft power, hard power, and sharp power, every kind of power, but the thing is that if you live with very intrinsic values that you try to uphold and with the help of technology in the modern era I would still remain quite hopeful.

For example, nowadays in Hong Kong, even though we face a significant crackdown, still when you have access to the Internet and every form of technology I think it is still possible and very likely that you can disseminate your message well and across generations. I think if you uphold your core message well in this way, then you can also try to be a bridge between the younger and older generations because in the case of Hong Kong we previously had the problem a decade ago that perhaps the younger people were more pro-democracy and elderly people liked China more and felt like their heritage was there, and they embraced Chinese Communist Party rule in this way, and then we had a big fight between generations.

If you try to do that relentlessly and use a softer way to do that, I think it is still possible and still likely. At the end of the day, I remain hopeful about the progress of democracy. Of course there are ups and downs, especially after the Cold War and until now, but if you look at all of human history and the evolution of civilization I think we will at the end move to a better place, and I remain strongly hopeful about that.

JAMES KETTERER: On that hopeful note, thank you to the panelists, thank you to the Carnegie Council for convening these things, to the audience here in person and to the live-streaming audience. It has been a great conversation, and I hope you continue the conversations immediately following and beyond. Thank you so much.