There is something humbling about discussing the future of democracy in the city that gave the idea its name. Athens wears its history openly. You turn a corner and the Acropolis is there above you, honey-colored against the sky, as if keeping watch over the conversations happening below.
I came to the 14th Athens Democracy Forum, carrying the questions I work with every day in Nairobi. Who gets to speak? Who gets heard? And who is left outside the room?
The venue itself felt like a quiet ode to the forum. The Athens Conservatoire sits beside the remains of Aristotle’s Lyceum, the school he founded in 335 BC. His students were known as Peripatetics because they walked as they argued, testing ideas in motion. Long before that, the Lyceum grounds had also served as a meeting place for the Athenian assembly. Gathering there to ask how democracy must change felt fitting; ideas were never meant to sit still.