Camden Conference in the World ~ October

Noble Peace Prize Laureate Maria Ressa, who will be returning to Camden as keynoter in 2025, aligned with the coming conference’s theme of “Democracy Under Threat” in multiple venues over recent weeks. On the eve of the Sep. 28 World News Day, she penned a call to arms jointly with editor-in-chief of investigative South African newspaper Daily Maverick: “ We, the news media of the world, in moments when systems are crumbling and foundational truths are under pressure, must show that we’re made of sterner stuff; the stuff that can withstand disinformation campaigns, sustained attacks, and a flood of falsehoods.” Those of us who heard Ressa, CEO of the online Philipino newspaper Rappler, at our 2020 media conference don’t doubt the sternness of her intent – as demonstrated also by the $150 million goal announced last month by The International Fund for Public Interest Media’s (IFPIM), which she co-chairs. The money will go “to bolster independent media in low and mid-income countries globally over the next three years.”

Two past CC speakers on the dynamics driving right-wing populism in the West wrote on the conference’s 2025 Democracy theme last month, as well. University of Georgia professor and well-known public commentator on right-wing politics Cas Mudde, who spoke at Camden’s 2017 Refugees and Global Migration conference, in Voxeurop last month laid out an alternative to what he sees as the “highly symbiotic… and mutually beneficial” – not to say dangerous – relationship between the liberal media and the far-right across the West, and particularly in the US.

Matthew Goodwin, a 2018 speaker in Camden who will be returning to our February 2025 Democracy conference, presents a very different perspective from Mudde’s on his widely circulated Substack blog. The truth that the New (liberal) Elite doesn’t see, Goodwin argues, is that ”mass immigration … is managed decline because it’s putting enormous pressure on a state that is already struggling to provide public services for its existing population.”

A favorite of several years standing at Camden Conferences, US Ambassador to China Nicolas Burns, related the “relatively better news about the US-China relationship” in an address to the Atlantic Council, made virtually from Burns’ current post in Beijing: “I think we’ve been able to stabilize it [the relationship] over the last nine or ten months.” Burns also provided less upbeat resonances from our 2025 theme, though. The US, Europe, and many Indo-Pacific countries will be “competing” with China for a long time to come, “because we have to defend democracy.”