The rise of populist leaders, of identity-based politics, of fear-based politics is due as much to the appeal of those ideas as to the failure of liberal and progressive leadership. Against a dark backdrop of the state of freedom of expression in the Middle East and North Africa, Ayman Mhanna offers his assessment of what civil society can do to change and fight back.

Ayman Mhanna is the Executive Director of the Samir Kassir Foundation, the leading press freedom NGO in the Levant region. He also served as the Executive Director of the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD), a network of 200 media development and journalism assistance organisations. Ayman previously served as Senior Program Officer for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, where he worked on election observation, electoral reform and civil society involvement in public policy-making. Since 2010, he has sat on the the executive committee of the Democratic Renewal Movement (DRM), a secular, social-liberal political party in Lebanon and became the DRM’s Secretary General in September 2016.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx