Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Professor A C Grayling, one of the UK’s leading public philosophers and author of For the People: Fighting Authoritarianism, Saving Democracy, is in conversation with Dr Leor Zmigrod, a political neuroscientist and author of The Ideological Brain, as part of the Calleva-Airey Neave Global Security Seminar Series. The seminar is moderated by Dr Julia Ebner, Calleva Researcher and Leader of Oxford’s Violent Extremism Lab.
As the closing seminar of the series, this session will consider the contemporary pressures facing democratic systems, including the role of political structures, information ecosystems, and individual psychological predispositions. It will examine how institutional and cognitive factors intersect to shape the resilience or vulnerability of democratic governance in the face of authoritarian and extremist currents, and reflect on possible strategies — institutional, civic, and psychological — for strengthening democratic practices and safeguarding political freedoms in a rapidly changing global environment.
This seminar series is funded by the Calleva Centre for Evolution and Human Science and the Airey Neave Trust.
Blavatnik School of Government,
University of Oxford
bsg.ox.ac.uk
Professor A C Grayling, one of the UK’s leading public philosophers and author of For the People: Fighting Authoritarianism, Saving Democracy, is in conversation with Dr Leor Zmigrod, a political neuroscientist and author of The Ideological Brain, as part of the Calleva-Airey Neave Global Security Seminar Series. The seminar is moderated by Dr Julia Ebner, Calleva Researcher and Leader of Oxford’s Violent Extremism Lab.
As the closing seminar of the series, this session will consider the contemporary pressures facing democratic systems, including the role of political structures, information ecosystems, and individual psychological predispositions. It will examine how institutional and cognitive factors intersect to shape the resilience or vulnerability of democratic governance in the face of authoritarian and extremist currents, and reflect on possible strategies — institutional, civic, and psychological — for strengthening democratic practices and safeguarding political freedoms in a rapidly changing global environment.
This seminar series is funded by the Calleva Centre for Evolution and Human Science and the Airey Neave Trust.
Blavatnik School of Government,
University of Oxford
bsg.ox.ac.uk
