Global Centre for Rehumanising Democracy

01/09/2026

Happy New Month

Welcome, September.

A new month is here, and we’re looking forward to everything it will bring.

New conversations. New perspectives. New work worth doing.

From all of us at GCRD, wishing you a beautiful September.

31/08/2026

On 26 August a wall of water came down the Bhote Koshi into Rasuwa district, sweeping away villages, bridges and roads. Hundreds are confirmed dead, thousands remain missing, and around 90,000 people have been displaced across Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading.

The GCRD has made a contribution to Oxfam's Nepal Floods Appeal, supporting emergency assistance to communities affected by the disaster. We encourage our friends, partners and supporters who are able to do so to contribute as well. Oxfam and its partners are providing clean water, food, sanitation support and shelter.

But solidarity must extend beyond responding after disaster strikes. Protecting our environment, strengthening climate resilience and ensuring that vulnerable communities are not left to bear the greatest costs of environmental degradation are questions of justice, accountability, and and human dignity.

Please support the Oxfam Nepal Floods Appeal or any other organisation providing help on ground, if you can

🚨 Please donate now to support Oxfam’s response to the devastating flash floods in Nepal: https://bit.ly/4zDyjSN. Devastating flash floods caused by the collapse of a glacier tore through Nepal’s Rasuwa District on August 26. At least 538 people lost their lives with hundreds more missing. An estimated 40,000 people are displaced. Villages were swept away and roads and bridges are gone. The only way in is by air.

Oxfam is in contact with our partners on the ground to assess what people urgently need. We’ve begun distributing hygiene kits to help people stay clean and safe from diseases that can easily spread in disasters like this.

Our response will be locally led through our partners and will likely include emergency food, clean water, sanitation and hygiene support, and shelter.

Thousands of people need urgent help. Please donate now to support communities most affected.

26/08/2026

A new memorandum between Rwanda’s Centre for Peace, Democratic Governance and Development (CPDG) and GCRD opens a space for Rwandan youth to contribute to building the Democracy Discourse Index.

Writing in The New Times Publications (Rwanda), GCRD Board Chair, Dr. Margee Ensign and Prof Pierre Damien Habumuremyi(PHD), former Rwandan Prime Minister and Chair of CPDG, argue that Rwanda has an opportunity to connect its emerging leadership in AI with its tradition of home-grown approaches to governance and accountability.

Through the new GCRD–CPDG partnership, Rwandan students and universities will use the Democracy Discourse Index (DDI) to analyse real public discourse, identify misinformation, hate speech and damaging narratives, and measure empathy, civility, trust and democratic agency.

The larger ambition is noteworthy. Young people should not simply learn how to use AI. They should learn how to use it to understand, strengthen and serve their societies. And Rwanda could help show Africa what that looks like.

A link to the article is shared in the comments section.

21/08/2026

The recording of "𝐌𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦" is now available.

On 10 August, we joined Alt Liberal Arts for a virtual panel on civic engagement, artificial intelligence and the Democracy Discourse Index (DDI).

Faculty and students from Pakistan, Albania, Greece and the United States discussed how the DDI is built. The conversation covered the training of student researchers to code public discourse and the early findings emerging across our observatories, including a striking pattern. Democratic agency is consistently the weakest dimension measured so far.

If you missed the live event, you can now watch the full conversation on YouTube.

🎥 The link to the session would be in the comments.

19/08/2026

Are some social media platforms more empathetic than others?

Our new Democracy Discourse Index data from Pakistan suggest they may be.

Across 4,000+ public comments, each independently coded by three annotators, TikTok recorded the highest Empathy score at 52.0, followed by Instagram (46.0), Facebook (45.2), YouTube (44.7), and X (42.4). TikTok also recorded the strongest overall DDI composite (47.5), while X recorded the lowest (40.0).

What makes this especially striking is that we have seen a similar pattern in our recent “Bring Back Hope” study in the UK. Across 8,000+ comments, TikTok and Instagram hosted measurably healthier discourse than Facebook and X, with X again recording the weakest empathy environment.

We should be cautious about causality, though. Platforms do not simply create more empathetic discourse or make users more empathetic. The accumulating evidence does suggest, however, that platform ecology matters. Different architectures, audiences, norms and interaction cultures may create very different conditions for public discourse.

The Pakistan corpus comprises public responses to news and public-interest content published across the social platforms of leading Pakistani news organisations and selected high-reach public-interest channels. Content is sampled across substantive topics and assessed against the DDI’s four dimensions and 20 indicators. Each comment is independently coded by three annotators, with inter-coder reliability and adjudication protocols.

This autumn, GCRD moves to the next stage: scale. The human-coded ground truth being built by our university partners will support much larger AI-assisted analysis across platforms, countries, topics and politically significant events-allowing us to assess, among others, whether these platform effects persist across different contexts.

If democratic life is constructed through the encounters citizens have with one another, then platforms are not simply channels through which public discourse passes. They are part of the democratic environment and thus worthy of deeper scrutiny.

Our enormous thanks to Principal Investigator Dr. Wajiha Raza Rizvi and our student interns, faculty, and staff of NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi. Watch out for the forthcoming reports.

14/08/2026

Could younger publics be more democratically open than our dominant political discourse suggests?

We coded 8,086 public comments on the UK Prime Minister's "let's bring back hope" address across X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, where he shared the video clip of his message.

X returned the lowest discourse quality of the four: 13.2 on our composite index, against 20.3 on TikTok. Hostility was present in 52.3% of comments on X and 18.0% on TikTok. Empathy on X scored 0.65 out of 20.

On who remains open to persuasion, the gap is wider still. On X, 23.3%. On TikTok, 47.8%. Almost exactly double.

This is not a one-off. Across our monitoring, X consistently returns the lowest composite of any platform we measure.

The generation most often described as disengaged produced the most open, least hostile and most deliberative response to a hope-based political message.

Interactive findings linked in the comments.

11/08/2026

Yesterday, faculty and students from Pakistan, Albania, Greece and the United States came together to reflect on how we are building the Democracy Discourse Index (DDI).

Across our university consortium, trained student researchers analyse public discourse using 20 indicators of empathy, civility, trust and democratic agency. Every post is independently coded by three annotators, with disagreements resolved through faculty-supervised adjudication.

This human-validated data is also the foundation for ReHuman AI - the system we are training to monitor the health of democratic discourse at scale, across countries, issues and politically significant events. Our model foregrounds context and human judgement, then uses AI for scale and near-real-time monitoring.

The early findings are already revealing important patterns. Across six observatories that have published data, democratic agency is the weakest dimension in five. This suggests that one of democracy’s deeper vulnerabilities may be citizens losing confidence that their voices and participation can make a difference.

A huge thank you to our keynote speaker and Board Chair, Dr. Margee Ensign, Executive Director Dr. Jacob Jacob, our panellists: Prof. Juliana Cyfeku, Prof. Wajiha Raza Rizvi, Prof. Verse Shom, Prof. Panagiotis Paschalidis, Subulna Imran and Redina Skënderi; and our wonderful moderator Croshelle Harris.

Thank you, too, to everyone who joined us from around the world and contributed to such a thoughtful conversation. We are particularly grateful to our student interns in Pakistan, who stayed up late to join us, and whose brilliant work and commitment continue to make an important contribution to the DDI.

We are also grateful to Alt Liberal Arts for hosting, Sensika Technologies for supporting this work, and to our university partners: NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi, Tulane University, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), Universiteti "Fan S. Noli", Korçë - UNIKO, New Bulgarian University, University St. Kliment Ohridski in Bitola, Iqra University (Official), alongside our growing consortium.

10/08/2026

A lot has happened over the past few months, and this edition brings it all together.

From our Democracy Discourse Index (DDI) work in Pakistan and Albania to new partnerships with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and Bard College, we are seeing our research move beyond theory into classrooms, public discourse, and spaces where decisions are being made.

We also share updates on our Community Knowledge Encoder, welcome our first cohort of Senior Fellows, and reflect on some of the conversations shaping our work around democracy, trust, peacebuilding and AI.

There is a lot to catch up on.

Welcome to 𝐕𝐨𝐥. 𝟑 𝐨𝐟 𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐲 𝐑𝐞𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐝.

The link to the newsletter would be in the comment

10/08/2026

What happens when students move from studying democracy to helping measure its health?

Today, we find out.

Join the Global Centre for Rehumanising Democracy and Alt Liberal Arts for Measuring Democratic Health from the Classroom, bringing together faculty and student researchers across four countries to explore the Democracy Discourse Index (DDI), responsible AI, and the role of higher education in democratic renewal.

🗓 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝟏𝟎 𝐀𝐮𝐠𝐮𝐬𝐭
🕛 𝟏𝟐:𝟎𝟎 𝐏𝐌 𝐭𝐨 𝟏:𝟑𝟎 𝐏𝐌 𝐄𝐓 | 𝟓:𝟎𝟎 𝐏𝐌 𝐭𝐨 𝟔:𝟑𝟎 𝐏𝐌 𝐔𝐓𝐂+𝟏
📍 𝐎𝐧𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐯𝐢𝐚 𝐙𝐨𝐨𝐦

There is still time to join us.

Registration link would be in the comments.

08/08/2026

Nigeria is heading into its first general election of the generative-AI era, with campaigns opening in days and voting set for 16 January 2027.

Much of this contest will play out on X, TikTok, WhatsApp, and increasingly, in AI-generated content.

In a new Premium Times Nigeria op-ed, GCRD Board Chair Dr. Margee Ensign and Founding Executive Director Dr. Jacob Jacob argue that democracy has vital signs, and most of them show up in everyday public conversation. That is the idea behind the Democracy Discourse Index (DDI).

Nigeria now joins a growing global research consortium already active in Pakistan, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, and the US, with Ecuador, Lebanon, the UK, Rwanda and Ukraine joining soon. University students sit at the centre of the work, training AI to recognise healthy democratic conversation instead of only being shaped by it.

Read the full piece, and join our free global webinar this Monday, where students and faculty from across the consortium share their work and what they are learning.

Article: https://www.premiumtimesng.com/features-and-interviews/901533-nigerias-2027-election-will-be-fought-in-the-age-of-ai-is-the-country-ready.html

Webinar registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_vSdv7SwvSNuS6C4y5NYmcA #/registration