“Havel regarded civil society as the truest foundation of democracy, and the people at Forum 2000 – those he helped, mentored, or inspired – are a testament to this, as is the Forum 2000 he founded,” wrote ICDR member Brandon Silver, reflecting on the 30th Forum 2000 Conference. We also invite you to read the reflections by María Alejandra Aristeguieta, Olena Davlikanova, and Sriparna Pathak.
Brandon Silver
Member of the ICDR, Director of Policy and Projects at Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, Canada
María Alejandra Aristeguieta
Member of the Democratic Solidarity Latin America, Director, Vision360 Multitrack Diplomacy, Venezuela/ Switzerland
Olena Davlikanova
Senior Fellow, Sahaidachnyi Security Center, Ukraine
Sriparna Pathak
Professor, O.P. Jindal Global University, India
A Forum Worthy of Its Founders
Brandon Silver
Member of the ICDR, Director of Policy and Projects at Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, Canada
The Forum's co-founders, Elie Wiesel and Vaclav Havel, were moral visionaries. They were also friends and close collaborators of the RWCHR's founder, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada and longtime parliamentarian, Professor Irwin Cotler. The legendary stories of their work together in common cause came to life in this conference.
The shared values that underpinned their leadership found particular expression in the stories of the participants. Delegates from every region of the world huddled together between sessions, plotting campaigns to advance democracy, free political prisoners, and hold perpetrators to account. What united them was not only their struggle for freedom, but the fact that several owe their own freedom to the Forum’s founders.
One human rights lawyer shared how then-President Havel had seen global news reports of her being publicly threatened with imprisonment by her authoritarian government. Shortly thereafter, the Czech ambassador appeared at her door with an entry visa, and escorted her onto a flight to Prague. Beyond the grasp of the dictatorship that sought to imprison her, this lawyer is now a voice for so many others who have none, pursuing justice and rescuing others at risk.
These stories were a reminder of the role democracies can play in saving lives and advancing freedoms, and the kind of leadership we should aspire to see from our democratic governments.
Indeed, Havel also mentored a generation of dissidents and decision-makers to continue in this tradition. His former disciples now attend the Forum as diplomats and legislators, former cabinet ministers, and civil society leaders. They share their knowledge and networks with human rights defenders, while also listening and learning from these movements on the front lines. All Forum participants were the beneficiaries of these exchanges, which not only offered practical insights but also lodestars for effective civic leadership.
As a Canadian lawyer working to support dissidents and pro-democracy movements internationally, and as Canada navigates a world increasingly dominated by new technologies and tyrannies, some sessions felt especially salient.
Public intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari were incisive in their commentaries on the risks of artificial intelligence and the responses it demands, sounding the alarm on the dangers of abdicating key elements of our sovereignty and self-governance to systems soon to be beyond our understanding and control.
Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader argued that good governance, the rule of law, and strong public institutions are what grow an economy and sustain trust in democracy. For middle powers, he said, this is a matter of survival, making a country an attractive market and partner when democratic norms are under global assault. That leadership has to begin with elected officials, who must invest in these pillars and abide by them. He also stressed that multilateral institutions, so important to middle powers, need to be reformed and made fit for purpose rather than left to be dismantled by major powers.
Carl Gershman, founding president of the National Endowment for Democracy, made an essential point in quoting Havel’s frequent refrain that affluent democracies grow complacent and take freedom for granted. His answer was public education and movement building around democratic solidarity: helping people understand the dangerous world we live in, why freedom is hard won and must be preserved at home, and why its dissident champions abroad deserve our support.
The leaders of the historic Charter 77 movement that Havel helped lead showed how holding an authoritarian regime accountable to its own laws exposes its hypocrisy, and, in cases of arbitrary detention, can help free political prisoners. As Havel wrote in The Power of the Powerless, “ [d]emanding that the laws be upheld is thus an act of living within the truth that threatens the whole mendacious structure at its point of maximum mendacity.”
Beyond the formal programming and informal plotting, structured roundtable sessions allowed for meaningful movement on some of the most pressing issues of the day.
The International Coalition for Democratic Renewal (ICDR), facilitated by the Forum, was one such gathering. Its in-person, guided discussions, where leading academics and activists, former statespeople, human rights lawyers, and dissidents could freely exchange insights and plan collective action, were especially encouraging.
With the conference falling around the anniversary of Hamas’s horrific massacre and hostage-taking of October 7, 2023, I was reminded that the ICDR was among the first international groups to stand in solidarity with the victims, condemn the perpetrators and their state sponsors, and call unequivocally for the hostages’ release (read the ICDR’s statement here).
The Forum has always taken a stand for justice and spoken out for those unjustly detained. The conference's opening featured Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya speaking compellingly of the struggle for freedom in Belarus, and the plight of the democratic opposition and political prisoners who continue to suffer in her country. In the “Unissued Diplomas” exhibition, posters along the main entrance to the venue showed the faces and told the stories of young Ukrainian students who ended their studies prematurely and lost their lives defending their homeland and our shared democratic values against Vladimir Putin's unjustified war of aggression.
I left Prague convinced that the world needs more Havellian leaders to respond to these crises and their profound human costs. Democracy is eroding in places where it once seemed secure, authoritarian governments are more confident and coordinated than they have been in a generation, and too many of those in power seem to have concluded that principle is a luxury. Havel never made that mistake. He exemplified that moral clarity is not a substitute for political courage but the source of it.
That kind of leadership does not depend on public office alone. Havel regarded civil society as the truest foundation of democracy, and the people at the Forum—those he helped, mentored, or inspired—are a testament to this, as is the Forum he founded.
So are the civil society leaders whose presence would have been fitting, but whose absence was felt. Heroes like Nasrin Sotoudeh, the Iranian human rights lawyer who has been repeatedly imprisoned for defending women and juveniles sentenced to execution. Leaders like Jimmy Lai, who is 78, diabetic, and serving a 20-year sentence for publishing a pro-democracy newspaper. Each is an emblematic Havellian figure, someone who chose to live within the truth when the cost was clear. Their choices, like those of the first Charter 77 signatories, a few hundred people in 1977, show that individual decisions can shape societies. Twelve years later, their country was an independent democracy, and one of those signatories was its president.
For those of us living in freedom, standing up for the dissidents deprived of it is the least that living within the truth requires of us.
Forum 2000’s 30th Anniversary: A Celebration of Democracy and Human Rights
María Alejandra Aristeguieta
Member of the Democratic Solidarity Latin America, Director, Vision360 Multitrack Diplomacy, Venezuela/ Switzerland
Prague seems the natural place to start. It is a beautiful, vibrant city that always leaves us wishing we had more time to explore it—and promising to return for a longer stay. Its rich history, cultural vitality, and commitment to clear values, together with its place at the crossroads of political and economic change, seem to reflect how I see the Forum itself.
What I have always loved about the event is how it brings together policy analysis and personal experience: testimonies, different political perspectives, regions and themes, intimate discussions and larger panels, emerging voices and established thinkers. Together, they form a tapestry that we spend two and a half days exploring.
Then there is the pleasure of seeing old friends again—or unexpectedly discovering that they are there, as when I ran into former OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro in a corridor while rushing to my panel! We find moments to catch up, exchange ideas, and plan new events or collaborations. We discuss what holds us back in Latin America and what actually works. You name it, we probably talked about it!
There are also reunions with people we have not seen for over 30 years, followed by promises not to lose touch again. This is exactly what happened with former Colombian Vice President Marta Lucía Ramírez, who was my boss’s counterpart in trade negotiations when I was starting my career. It was an enormous joy to catch up with her.
Other encounters bring us closer to one of the Forum’s core values: the willingness to meet and talk, and to see others with fresh eyes. In that sense, taking part in our panel discussion on democratic solidarity alongside former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe was one of the highlights of my time in Prague. I discovered a deeply committed, warm, and courteous person. In the panel, our discussions were thoughtful and constructive. It was held under the Chatham House Rule to protect participants, some of whom face persecution even in exile—a reminder of the very real dangers behind the issues we were discussing.
I could go on about the many conversations between sessions and long after the formal program had ended. At the risk of leaving someone out, I will simply add how much I valued spending time with my dear friends Pedro Urruchurtu, Tamara Sujú, and Javier El Hage. All these encounters are as much a part of the Forum as the formal program.
Before travelling to Prague, I had also arranged to meet Alberto De Filippi, a journalist now working independently through his blog Mundo Beto/Beto’s World. That was an added pleasure—and, such is the power of networking, I hope to see him participating in the Forum next year.
If I missed anything, it was having enough time to attend more sessions. With so many running simultaneously, difficult choices were inevitable. I would also have welcomed a longer discussion with the Latin American group. There was much to examine, digest, and translate into next steps, both for our region and for our work together. One shared takeaway was the need to organize our work more systematically and find effective ways to exchange information, making its relevance clearer to different participants. Another, more personal observation was that those of us living outside the region can sometimes recognize assumptions that limit our thinking and recur in our discussions. Our different vantage points offer considerable scope for exchange, for questioning familiar ideas and for developing new approaches. I look forward to continuing that conversation.
I also regretted not being able to follow more of the debates on artificial intelligence, perhaps the biggest game-changer of our time. In a conversation with an expert, we agreed that when the internet became mainstream, we tended to focus more on its promise than on its potential dangers. With AI, the risks are already apparent. We need to educate ourselves and make difficult choices about how to protect our collective future.
This technological transformation was one reason why, at times, I was struck by how some speakers on the larger panels described the world order in terms that, to my mind, no longer fully capture the landscape before us.
Other panelists, however, explored a transformation that is becoming increasingly apparent. In a remarkably short time, the international conversation has shifted from promoting democracy and free trade to resisting the expansion of authoritarian states and their influence within Western liberal democracies. It has moved towards nearshoring and protectionism, discussions of a world divided among great powers, and growing fragmentation.
Increasingly, we face a form of transactional chaos: multiple layers of power, competing actors and interests, and rapid technological change. States are losing ground in some areas, while non-state actors extend their reach, sometimes beyond governments’ capacity to respond.
This landscape rewards the pursuit of narrow interests, with little regard for the wider common good. It erodes collective discipline—the willingness to accept common restraints and responsibilities—and further weakens multilateralism and the rules-based order.
The dangers are clear. Disorder disrupts economies, unsettles societies, and brings us closer to conflict and war. In a globalized world taking on increasingly feudal characteristics, no region or area is spared. Ultimately, what is at risk is our shared future.
Perhaps that is my most important takeaway from Prague: the connections, exchanges, and collaborations that make Forum 2000 so valuable must also help us turn shared concern into collective action.
The Luxury of Time That Is Running Out
Olena Davlikanova
Senior Fellow, Sahaidachnyi Security Center, Ukraine
For Ukrainians, time has become a rather relative concept. Thirteen years of war, almost five of them under full-scale invasion, have somehow flown by. At the same time, every night under Russian bombardment can feel endless. We have learned to measure time in air raids, funerals, interrupted plans, and promises that have yet to materialize. Meanwhile, in the comfortable conference rooms of Europe, you have all the time in the world.
Many of us, exhausted Ukrainians, have spent these years repeating the same messages with the persistence of a broken record. Russia understands strength, not concessions. Russia should be strategically defeated, not feared. If Ukraine loses, Europe will again face Russian hegemony. This is not a local territorial dispute over Donbas. Tighten sanctions. Deprive Russia of the economic capacity to wage war. Make its strategic defeat the objective rather than endlessly managing the consequences of its aggression.
We have said this so many times that we are tired of hearing ourselves.
Instead, as Russian attacks grow more intensive, we watch sanctions being eased or their enforcement compromised, military assistance delayed, and the Coalition of the Willing struggling to survive the domestic political troubles of its members. Europe continues to debate how much security it can afford, as if insecurity were available at a discount.
There is still a comforting illusion that perhaps everything will somehow resolve itself. That the war will remain contained within Ukraine, that peaceful European cities will be spared, that Russia will eventually come to its senses, and that after this unfortunate historical misunderstanding, life can return to how it used to be.
But there will be no return to the past. There never is.
We are witnessing the beginning of a redistribution of power and spheres of influence in an emerging multipolar world. The post-Cold War order is being dismantled, and the future balance of power remains unsettled. We are only at the beginning of this process, and there is little reason to expect it to unfold peacefully. Russia's war against Ukraine is one of its most violent manifestations, rather than an isolated deviation from an otherwise stable international order.
This makes some discussions about Ukraine's future sound almost surreal. We can certainly talk about reconstruction, green recovery, investment, and the beautiful future we intend to build. I would personally prefer to survive long enough to see it. Better still, to see an independent Ukraine remain on the political map of the world.
We have yet to implement ideas discussed years ago, including Sky Shield for Ukraine or the transfer of frozen Russian sovereign assets. Yet we constantly search for new initiatives, often because announcing a new idea is politically easier than doing the difficult work required to implement an old one.
Nearly five years into a full-scale war that will help determine Europe's security and the future of liberal democracy, Europe still lacks a common strategy towards Russia, its principal military threat. Nor is there a coherent, durable strategy towards Ukraine, unless one counts a succession of vague commitments whose meaning and conditions change as frequently as the plot of an Agatha Christie novel.
There is, however, an important difference. In Christie's novels, murder entertains us and offers an intellectual challenge. Russia murders Ukrainians every day. Yet many observers, having politely expressed their sorrow, continue treating the war as a complicated problem that deserves a solution, though apparently without excessive urgency.
For now, somebody else is paying the price.
And yet, at this year's Forum 2000 in Prague, I sensed something changing.
The anxiety in the room was becoming harder to conceal. Representatives from African countries spoke about Russia's expanding recruitment networks and the consequences of Russian aggression far beyond Europe. Sub-threshold warfare, long treated as something too ambiguous to confront openly and perhaps best ignored until it disappeared, had suddenly become a subject of serious interest. Religious leaders and academics discussed how the Russian state had incorporated even the Church into its machinery of repression and killing. Faith, supposedly concerned with the human soul, had been subordinated to rituals serving mass control and obedience.
Most strikingly, Europeans were increasingly asking a different question: How their own societies should prepare. What can ordinary citizens do now? How should communities organize themselves? What does readiness mean beyond government strategies and military budgets?
This is a welcome development. As the Baltic states remind us, don't be scared; be prepared.
There is, however, one word that increasingly makes Ukrainians twitch and laugh nervously. Resilience.
Everyone wants to study Ukrainian resilience, admire it, learn from it, perhaps reproduce it in their own societies. Ukrainians have become a convenient example of how people can supposedly continue living normal lives under extraordinary circumstances.
But the glorification of resilience is also a form of dehumanization. Nobody was designed to live in permanent war while pretending to live in peace. Nobody should have to become accustomed to sleepless nights, the death of friends, or the permanent calculation of whether there is enough time to reach a shelter. The fact that Ukrainians keep functioning does not mean that the price is acceptable or that our capacity to endure is unlimited.
Ukrainians have no good choices. Our options lie somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis. Russia rejects the existence of an independent Ukrainian nation and state. Should inadequate assistance allow Russia to occupy Ukraine, those who survive may envy the dead. The choice is between surrendering and facing destruction, or continuing to resist with at least a possibility of survival.
This is a very different understanding of resilience from the one celebrated at panel discussions.
Forum 2000, established by Václav Havel, naturally brings together people concerned with democracy, human rights, and the capacity of individuals to resist oppression. It also offers an uncomfortable reminder of how many unresolved tragedies the world has learned to coexist with. Tibet is one example. Other nations have spent decades appealing to international conscience, while the world has discussed their suffering, adopted declarations, expressed solidarity, and eventually learned to live with problems it has failed to resolve.
Looking around the Forum, I caught myself wondering whether Ukraine might face the same fate. Whether this war or extermination of the country could become another permanent item on the international agenda, endlessly discussed but never decisively addressed. A problem to be managed, a tragedy to be commemorated, a country to be supported just enough to survive another year.
The bitter irony is that Ukraine also holds a key to Europe's own security problem, particularly as the United States becomes a less dependable guarantor of European defense. Ukrainians know how to fight modern warfare. They have learned to adapt, innovate, organize, and confront Russia without allowing fear to determine every decision. Nor have they allowed pressure from their partners to strip them of their political agency.
Europe has spent decades searching for ways to strengthen its defense capacity. It now has an experienced, battle-tested Ukrainian military and an increasingly innovative defense industry on its side. Losing that asset would be the equivalent of picking up a shovel and starting to dig its own grave.
Perhaps this is where Havel's power of the powerless acquires a new meaning. The question is no longer whether people without conventional power can challenge oppression. Ukrainians have been demonstrating that for years, at an extraordinary human cost. The question is whether those who possess political, economic, and military power are prepared to use it before the price of their hesitation becomes unbearable.
Forum 2000 left me with a cautious sense that the conversation is changing. Denial is gradually giving way to preparedness, and comfortable abstractions to more practical questions. But recognizing danger is only the beginning. Europe has already spent too much time discussing what Ukrainians have been warning about for years.
For us, time is relative. For those killed yesterday, it has already run out. For Europe, the clock is still ticking. But nobody should confuse having more time with having an eternity.
Key Takeaways from Forum 2000 2026 in Prague: Navigating Fractured Worlds Through Middle-Power Diplomacy and Track 1.5/2 Partnerships
Sriparna Pathak
Professor, O.P. Jindal Global University, India
Attending the 30th Forum 2000 Conference in Prague (October 11–13, 2026), themed Reimagining the Power of the Powerless, felt like stepping into a living conversation with Václav Havel’s legacy at a moment of acute global fracture. Marking the foundation’s 30th anniversary and what would have been Havel’s 90th birthday, the gathering of more than 800 politicians, diplomats, dissidents, experts, and civil-society voices from roughly 100 countries underscored that the post-Cold War order is not merely strained but structurally broken. Great-power rivalry, authoritarian resurgence (from Myanmar and Belarus to elsewhere), societal polarization, and the double-edged nature of technology, especially AI-driven manipulation and surveillance, have produced a multipolar, contested landscape where universal rules are eroding and agency is unevenly distributed.
One of the clearest takeaways was the practical importance of middle-power diplomacy. A dedicated panel co-organized with the Institute for Security and Development Policy—“Guardians or Bystanders? Middle Powers, Technology Coalitions, and the Contest with Authoritarian Influence”—highlighted how countries that are neither superpowers nor mere clients can shape outcomes on semiconductors, digital governance, resilient supply chains, green technologies, and infrastructure.
European and Indo-Pacific middle powers were urged to move beyond hedging toward concrete democratic technology coalitions that counter authoritarian influence while protecting a rules-based order. In a world of blocs and geoeconomic confrontation, these actors possess both the incentive and the relative room for maneuver to initiate variable-geometry coalitions: different partners for different issues, without waiting for great-power consensus that may never return. Czechia itself, host and Havel’s home, modelled this by convening diverse voices rather than merely reacting to larger capitals.
Equally vital was the role of partnerships at track 1.5 and track 2 levels. Official (track 1) diplomacy remains indispensable, yet the conference repeatedly demonstrated that durable progress depends on hybrid and unofficial channels. The opening award for Courage and Responsibility went to Myanmar’s General Strike Coordination Body and activists such as Tayzar San, Nan Lin, and Htet Myat Aung, precisely the kind of civil-society and dissident networks that track 2 spaces amplify and protect. Working sessions of long-standing Forum 2000 initiatives (Democratic Solidarity Africa, Democratic Solidarity Latin America, and the International Coalition for Democratic Renewal) mixed officials, parliamentarians, and independent actors. Speakers including Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Tawakkol Karman, Larry Diamond, and others illustrated how track 1.5 formats, where government representatives engage candidly with non-state experts and activists, generate policy ideas, early-warning signals, and moral pressure that pure official channels often cannot. Czech President Petr Pavel’s emphasis on democratic oversight of technology and continued support for Ukraine, alongside video messages and closing discussions featuring figures such as Dominican President Luis Abinader and NATO Parliamentary Assembly Secretary General Benedetta Berti, showed these layers reinforcing one another.
In a fractured world, Havel’s insight that systems rest on the fear, indifference, and resignation of ordinary people remains urgent. Middle powers acting collectively, and the dense web of track 1.5 and track 2 relationships that connect officials with civil society across regions, offer practical ways to reclaim agency. My two favorite sessions out of the many brilliant ones were on the reincarnation of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and that of China in International Organizations. If authoritarian actors have to be made responsible, like-minded partners from Europe and the Indo-Pacific have to be on the same page, mixing approaches ranging from economic measures to political to academic, and these two sessions did precisely that.
The conference’s emphasis on Generation Z, Ukraine’s resilience lessons, and technological threats further suggested that these partnerships must be intergenerational and multi-domain if they are to outlast any single crisis. The power of the powerless is reimagined not as isolation but as networked responsibility—middle powers and non-state actors together refusing to be bystanders.
The views expressed in these works are the responsibility of its authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forum 2000 Foundation or its staff.
