WEXFO Youth and World Expression Forum delegates join in the conference’s opening day at Lillehammer.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

See also:
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The IPA Prix Voltaire Announces Its 2025 Shortlist
Norway’s WEXFO: New Dates, Early Notes on 2025 in Lillehammer

‘Democracy Dies With the Lies’

Part empowerment, part reportage, Lillehammer’s World Expression Forum (June 2 and 3)—called WEXFO—has opened its fourth annual staging in a way that makes good strides toward defining its intent and potential.

If anything, as many WEXFO Youth participants crowded in to hear the opening morning’s speakers, the instructional nature of this growing program became clear: as it exists now, WEXFO is as much about teaching—in terms of humanitarian urgency—as it is about policy debate.

It’s not impossible to imagine a time when WEXFO evolves into a parallel program that serves (a) the educational and motivational requirements both of youths and adults to address what people need to understand about threats to democracy and free expression, and (b) a more advanced policy-savvy program for delegates who work in the field or in nearby disciplines and can move more rapidly through detailed challenges.

Opened by the Ukrainian 2016 Eurovision winner (“1944”) Jamala, the program moved rapidly to 30-year-old Omar Alshogre, a Syrian human rights advocate who described his and his cousin’s three years of political imprisonment. Today a Swedish resident, Alshogre is the director of detainee affairs with the Syrian Emergency Task Force.

“Syria taught me,” Alshogre said, “that resisting is not about just fighting your enemy. Resisting is mainly about holding on to something deeper, holding on to your values, holding on to your hope of a better future. And a better future is nothing that anyone can provide to you. A better future is something you create yourself. … It’s very important for us to stand here in every opportunity and tell them, ‘We see you and we care about you’. Because that’s the feeling I missed during my time in prison. I was worried that the world forgot about me and nobody cared.”

‘Democratic Backsliding’

The next speaker—the University of Gothenburg’s Staffan I. Lindberg who directs the V-Dem Institute—is known for moving the energy of an emotional appeal like Alshogre’s quickly into the practicality of a social scientist’s research.

“Democratic backsliding, the [autocratic advance] in the world the last 25 years,” Lindberg told his audience “has been predominantly, on average, in large countries with large populations that typically also have a lot of effects on the world. …

“You have freedom of the media getting worse in 44 countries and better in only eight countries within the past 10 years,” he reported from his research. In fact, V-Dem’s numbers now show that “there’s never been a greater share of the world population, almost 40 percent, living in countries that are moving toward autocracy”, he said. “It’s worse than in the 1930s.”

About that process, Lindberg repeated one of his most insistent warnings: “Democracy dies with the lies.” Not surprisingly for many, he quickly connected that axiom to the second Donald Trump administration as “a frontal attack on all democratic norms and institutions in [the United States] that exist or used to exist.”

The Publishing Connection

While many speakers on the WEXFO roster have published books on various aspects of public affairs and the political context in which the book business exists, this is clearly not an event produced as a book-industry gathering, although many who now are here each year are in the book business.

Kristenn Einarsson—chief of the International Publishers Association‘s (IPA) Freedom to Publish committee and the founding CEO of WEXFO—is a longtime Norwegian publisher, and Mads Nygaard, WEXFO’s chair, is publisher and CEO of Aschehoug.

To the program’s credit, it tends not to “settle” into the book-publishing background of these and many of its backers and participants. Instead it works to pull international publishing toward the world’s broader challenges in democratic dynamics and growing efforts at censorship.

Partly to that end, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and author Maria Ressa is here for a second time, having been a keynote speaker in the inaugural staging of WEXFO.

In her morning-closing comments this morning to the packed WEXFO audience in Lillehammer, Ressa—having said to Publishing Perspectives, “It’s only gotten worse” since her headliner presence here three years ago—demonstrated onstage that she, like the deepening of autocratic trends—has become a more considered, quieter speaker.

Now free of the travel restrictions under which she labored for 10 years in her native Philippines, Ressa—her 2022 How To Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future from HarperCollins has been translated into at least 25 languages—is today focusing heavily on threats to journalism, reporters, commentators, and disinformation, as the pressure of disinformation and broadening authoritarian energies mount.

Referring in part to her work in bringing together responsible news media to battle online disinformation and to create penetrating, actionable fact-checking, she said, “This is what’s important. We have to build communities of action, and we have to do it globally. So this is your challenge today. This is what we need to do.”

Ressa talks about “the cellular level of a democracy” in reference to the fragility of intelligent governance when factual accuracy and reliability is compromised.

“You have to ask yourself the question,” she said, “because, as Stefan Lindberg [of V-Dem] has shown you, the clock is ticking.

“This is the year. What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?”

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More from Publishing Perspectives on issues of the freedom to publish, more on the World Expression Forum, WEXFO.