In 2021, Aarhus University’s annual flagship conference MatchPoints will explore the future of democracy in the digital age. We invited two of this year’s keynote speakers, the renowned political scientist Francis Fukuyama and the award-winning journalist Anne Applebaum, to reflect on digitalization and its effect on our society and politics. 


 

Interview with political scientist Francis Fukuyama

 

Francis Fukuyama is a renowned political scientist and a Senior Fellow at Stanford University. He previously visited Aarhus in 2008, for the very first MatchPoints conference. Professor Mads Rosendahl asked him what kind of power social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have access to in the democratic politics of 2021. And gave him the possibility to ask Anne Applebaum a question, which she will answer in the second episode of this podcast.


Interview with journalist Anne Applebaum

 

In the second episode of the MatchPoints mini-series, Professor Mads Rosendahl talked with the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Anne Applebaum. Did she expect the conflicting claims and confusion that Donald Trump caused after the US election? And does she believe that the EU has any chance of reining in the power of Big Tech companies?


Videointerview with Francis Fukuyama and Anne Applebaum (December 2020)

 

In December 2020, Professor Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, organizer of the conference MatchPoints 2021, spoke with renowned political scientist Francis Fukuyama and award-winning journalist Anne Applebaum about digitalization, Big Tech and democracy in connection with the US election, which at the time was still in a very uncertain state. You can meet the two keynote speakers and many others in Aarhus on May 27–29, as Aarhus University gathers leading researchers, politicians, business leaders and journalists from around the world to discuss democracy in the digital age at this year’s MatchPoints conference.

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