Constanze Stelzenmüller, Director of the Center on United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, will be at FLAD on February 15, at 6pm, for a conference entitled The Free World and Its Enemies: Russia’s war and China’s rise, in which he will discuss the consequences of the war in Ukraine, and the rise of China for Western democracies. The debate will be moderated by Bruno Cardoso Reis, Coordinator of the PhD in History and Defense at ISCTE – IUL.

Critical of the German government’s indecisiveness about stepping up military support to Ukraine, she believes that the German people are more supportive of an interventionist position than what Chancellor Olaf Scholz tends to give credit for, which, in her opinion. Indecision, she says, has already done lasting damage to Germany’s standing in the world. Constanze Stelzenmüller has been one of the most active voices in the debate over the German executive’s stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and on the 15th she will be at FLAD to debate the future of democracy.

Stelzenmüller is an expert on German, European, and transatlantic foreign policy and security issues. She was also defense and international security editor in the politics section of the German weekly DIE ZEIT between 1994 and 2005, most recently Kissinger Chair on Foreign Policy and International Relations at the US Library of Congress between October 2019 and March 2020, and director of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin.

This will be the second conference of the Democracy: The Way Ahead cycle, a FLAD initiative that aims to promote a space for reflection and debate on the current problems facing the world and, with the help of international experts, seek solutions for the coming decades.

The cycle began in January with a conference by John Ikenberry, Professor at Princeton University and one of the great references in international relations worldwide, under the theme Does the Liberal International Order have a Future?

The conference with Constanze Stelzenmüller will take place on February 15, at 6pm, and will be held in the FLAD auditorium – Rua do Sacramento à Lapa, 21, Lisbon.

Admission is free with confirmation of attendance to fladport@flad.pt.