Global Centre for Rehumanising Democracy

15/06/2026

Students of Universiteti "Fan S. Noli", Korçë - UNIKO
in Albania, gave testimonials on the recently concluded research on the Democracy Discourse Index Project .

Watch Megi Bregu share her experience.

11/06/2026

The quality of a democracy can often be seen in the quality of its conversations.

Healthy public discourse is not defined by agreement. It is defined by how people engage with views that differ from their own.

Empathy helps disagreement remain constructive. Without it, public discourse becomes increasingly divided.

Not every disagreement has to end in consensus. But democratic life depends on citizens who are willing to recognise the humanity in perspectives that are not their own.

That willingness, or its absence, shapes the quality of every conversation that happens in the public square, digital or otherwise.

Empathy is one of the virtues we monitor through the Democracy Discourse Index (DDI). We track it because we believe empathetic public discourse should be a key democratic outcome, evidence that democracy is not just functioning structurally, but thriving humanly.

The data we are building across countries is showing us where empathy lives in public conversation, and where it is quietly missing.

That knowledge matters. Because you cannot rehumanise democracy without first understanding where the human connection has been lost.

🔗 discourseobservatory.org

10/06/2026

Babel is not the only thing we can build.

In our latest GCRD Insights reflection, GCRD Executive Director, Dr. Jacob Jacob, engages Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas and its urgent challenge to the age of artificial intelligence.

AI does not have to deepen fragmentation, distrust, or democratic exhaustion. It can also be directed toward human flourishing if dignity, truth, empathy, and democratic agency remain at the centre.

Read the article here: https://gcrd.org.uk/insights/babel-is-not-the-only-thing-we-can-build

On 25 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical in the Church’s history devoted entirely to artificial intelligence. In this reflection, GCRD Founding Executive Director Dr. Jacob Udo-Udo Jacob finds in it an argument the Centre has been making in its own language ...

05/06/2026

REHUMANISING DEMOCRACY STARTS WITH LEADERS

Democracy is something modern governance is very good at building.

It sits in constitutions, electoral systems, oversight bodies, and institutional frameworks. It tells us whether the right processes were followed, whether power was transferred correctly, whether the rules held. And in that sense, it matters enormously.

But it does not always tell us whether leadership was actually present.

Presence is different.
It is less about process, and more about the person inside the process. It is whether a leader remains genuinely connected to the human reality their decisions create — not just the decisions themselves. Whether governance is being carried with awareness, or whether it has become a sophisticated performance of correctness.

In many democracies, this distance is becoming harder to ignore. Institutions are increasingly well-designed, yet citizens experience leadership as remote — procedurally sound, but humanly absent.

That is where democratic trust is quietly breaking down.

For Global Centre for Rehumanising Democracy, this is where the real work begins. Rehumanising democracy is not only about strengthening what institutions do. It is about deepening what leaders carry.

Because citizens do not experience democracy in the abstract. They experience whether the person making decisions about their lives seems to feel the weight of those decisions. Whether leadership is connected to consequence, or insulated from it.

Institutions can be designed from the outside.

Presence has to be formed from within.

And the future of democratic legitimacy may depend less on how well systems are structured, and more on whether the people inside them still carry what those systems were built to protect.

03/06/2026

We are proud to celebrate a key milestone in Albania’s participation in the international pilot of the Democracy Discourse Index (DDI). 🇦🇱

Yesterday, students from the Faculty of Education and Philology at Universiteti "Fan S. Noli", Korçë - UNIKO were honoured at a certificate ceremony recognising their contribution to groundbreaking research on the quality of civic dialogue and what it tells us about democratic health.

None of this would have been possible without the vision and commitment of Dr. Juliana Çyfeku, Albania’s Principal Investigator, and the generous support of Rector Prof. Dr. Lorenc Ekonomi and Dean Prof. Assoc. Dr. Jonela Spaho.

Congratulations to the 15 students honoured — your engagement is proof that young people are not just the future of democracy, but an active part of it today.

🔗 To learn more about Albania’s participation in the DDI, see link in the comments

02/06/2026

How do you bring a democratic end to a populist autocracy?

In April 2026, Péter Magyar and the Tisza Party ended sixteen years of Viktor Orbán’s rule. But electoral victory, however decisive, is only the beginning.

In a new essay for GCRD Insights, Branislav RADELJIC, PhD SFHEA reflects on what made that shift possible and what Magyar’s government must now do to avoid the pitfalls of its predecessor.

Dr. Radeljić tells us that democratic renewal is not an event, but a process that begins the morning after.

📄 Read his incisive essay: Step by Step: Hungary’s Democratic Reckoning and the Weight of What Comes Next → Link in the comments section.

01/06/2026

Democracy is strengthened when students are invited to study public discourse seriously, critically, and responsibly.

Tomorrow, the University of Korça "Fan S. Noli", through the Faculty of Education and Philology (FEF), will host an Award & Recognition Ceremony honouring fifteen undergraduate and postgraduate students who contributed to the Democracy Discourse Index (DDI) project in Albania.

Under the supervision of Dr. Juliana Cyfeku, these student researchers spent five months analysing over 1,000 social media posts — coding patterns of empathy, civility, trust language, and democratic agency as part of a global effort to better understand the moral and informational health of democratic life online.

Developed by the Global Centre for Rehumanising Democracy (GCRD) in collaboration with Sensika Technologies, the DDI is a human-validated AI tool that monitors and measures the quality of public discourse across digital spaces. It is among the transformational innovations registered on the Doha Solutions Platform for Social Development, launched in 2025 by United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) UN-DESA in collaboration with the Governments of Qatar and France.

Albania joins a founding consortium of universities across seven countries. We are proud to see these young scholars already doing the work.

📅 𝐓𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝟐 𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔
🕦 𝟏𝟏:𝟑𝟎 𝐀𝐌 – 𝟏𝟐:𝟑𝟎 𝐏𝐌 (𝐂𝐄𝐓) | 𝟏𝟎:𝟑𝟎 𝐀𝐌 𝐆𝐌𝐓+𝟏
📍 "𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐫" 𝐋𝐢𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐫𝐲, 𝐅𝐄𝐅, 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐊𝐨𝐫𝐜̧𝐚 "𝐅𝐚𝐧 𝐒. 𝐍𝐨𝐥𝐢", 𝐀𝐥𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐚

Scan the QR code on the flyer or visit the comments section for the event link and to find out more about the Albania Discourse Observatory.

27/05/2026

Eid Mubarak from Global Centre for Rehumanising Democracy.

To all those celebrating, may Eid bring you and all yours joy, hope and peace.
Happy Eid.

26/05/2026

We are gathering a small circle of 25–30 leaders for a Contemplative Policy Retreat in the Yorkshire Dales - focused on AI, democracy, and public policy.

This is a space for those carrying difficult questions about the moral direction of AI and its governance. Not a conference. A retreat. Intentionally small. Intentionally deep.

If you work where technology, public policy, and democracy meet, this gathering offers a chance to step back, think carefully, and join a small circle asking one of the defining questions of our time:

𝘐𝘯 𝘢 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘪𝘥𝘭𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 𝘈𝘐, 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘧𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯?

Details and applications in the first comment.