The State of the World: Defending Open Society in a Dangerous World

Dear friends, it’s an honor to be here, back in South Africa—and especially here at the University of Cape Town. This institution holds a special place in the story of the Open Society Foundations. 

It was here that our founder, George Soros, undertook his first major act of philanthropy—making our very first grants, to support Black students with scholarships at this university 45 years ago.

Today, returning to this space, we find ourselves at another pivotal moment in history. The world is more interconnected than ever, yet it feels more fractured. 

The ideals of an open society—human rights, equity, and justice—are under threat. There is greater polarization. The spirit of global solidarity has given way to frightening levels of insularity in many places.

And so, we must ask ourselves: How do we defend open society values in a dangerous world? How do we find our way back to the core values that bind our common humanity? 

A personal story

My own political awakening came first as a child on the campus of the University of Dar es Salaam, where my father taught law for three years—and where I encountered many South African exiles engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle, including Albie Sachs. Frene Ginwala, South Africa’s first speaker of Parliament, organized for me to spend a summer working with the anti-apartheid movement in London. As a student at university in the United States, one of the successes was to get our college to divest from apartheid South Africa.

I come from Kenya, and under the dictatorship of Daniel arap Moi, some of my earliest memories are of people disappearing into the basement of Nyayo House—a notorious center of torture and detention from where people would not be heard from for weeks, months, or even longer. There were reports of people being undressed, beaten, starved, and subjected to other punishments and humiliations.

At the height of the Moi dictatorship, nearly 200 people were detained and tortured at Nyayo House. Their only crime was to question a repressive government, one that depended on brutal force, supervision, and surveillance of its citizens for its survival, and criminalized any expression of dissent.

The law, as flawed as it was, was also a site of struggle. As Nelson Mandela and many illustrious alumni of this university have shown: law can also be used to redefine the frontiers of freedom and justice.

The downfall of Kenya’s dictatorship came from a small group of courageous lawyers that dared to challenge detention without trial and torture in the courts. One of those lawyers is my father, Pheroze Nowrojee. I learnt from him the importance speaking the truth, taking a stand, and affirming the courage of your convictions. These human rights lawyers broke the silence that ultimately brought democratic openings to Kenya.

His example, among many others, inspired me to become a human rights advocate and lawyer. The values that drove and sustained the struggles in South Africa and Kenya, and the lessons that they hold for emancipatory politics, are why I stand before you today, as someone who has dedicated her life to the fight for human rights and justice.   

The idea of an open society

Looking back, it seems inevitable that apartheid would end in South Africa, that the cruelty that blanketed this country would lift, and justice would prevail. But it wasn’t so obvious at the time.

As Madiba once said, “It looks impossible until it is done.” 

Countless South Africans made immense sacrifices fighting for their own liberation, inside the country and outside it. Many young people—in townships, villages, police cells, detention centers, and refugee camps—lost their lives before they could taste freedom. 

Sixty-five years ago this month, the apartheid police massacred 69 people and wounded nearly two hundred others at Sharpeville police station, as they peacefully protested against pass laws.

And those who struggled against the tyranny of the apartheid regime from within South Africa were supported by a global movement for solidarity, motivated by a simple but powerful idea: whoever we are, wherever we are, we are the same people—and we have the same rights. 

This is the idea that’s at the heart of the South African constitution that was adopted after the fall of apartheid, three decades ago, with the express objective to: 

“Lay the foundations for a democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law.” 

But what does it truly mean to be an “open society”? The term itself was first coined by the French philosopher Henri Bergson in 1932. 

To understand what an open society can look like, we need to also understand what a closed society is. 

Bergson described a closed society as one that is restricted to a single identity, closed off to other communities—and therefore shaped in hostility to them. 

“The closed society,” Bergson wrote, “is that whose members hold together, caring nothing for the rest…” 

This impulse—this creation of difference, of separation, and therefore false and dangerous senses of superiority—was the mark of the apartheid regime: setting down layers of inhumanity to place one people over others. 

An open society, by contrast, is one that is transcendent—aspiring toward universalism, melting away differences or embracing them, creating possibilities of a future where all can flourish. 

As South Africa’s Freedom Charter described, it is a society where the people govern, where the powerful are held accountable, where all national groups have equal rights, where everyone is equal before the law and has human rights, and where everyone can share in the country’s wealth and lead lives of dignity. 

The vision of a democratic and open society is one that we need to hold on to, and defend, through these dangerous times.

This isn’t a time for us to back down, but a time for us all to stand by the courage of our convictions. 

A vanished age of optimism

The end of apartheid came at a time of widespread optimism. There was a sense back then, in the 1990s, that events were curving toward a more just, more promising future. 

It was, as one writer famously claimed, “the end of history.” 

And that optimism wasn’t entirely misplaced. We saw many important advances—many of which are still with us today, and should be honored, defended, and built on. 

In that period, we saw more democracies and fewer dictatorships. More peace, less war. In the so-called “developing world,” people were being lifted out of poverty in the hundreds of millions. There was a new spirit of multilateralism that swept through Africa and Europe, binding countries together through new normative frameworks. 

There were advances in the rights of women and girls, in the rights of racial and sexual minorities, in the political inclusion and participation of marginalized groups. 

One of the reasons why we see a backlash today, with anti-rights forces flexing their muscles, is because of the many successes that were achieved through these years. 

This wasn’t a universal story, of course. The horrors of that moment are often forgotten. It was the same period that we saw the return of war in the former Yugoslavia and the massacre at Srebrenica, which was later declared a genocide. 

A few years later, I was in Rwanda, in the wake of the genocide there, investigating sexual violence and other crimes against women—leading to the first-ever conviction in an international tribunal for genocide and the crime of rape as a weapon of war. 

In response to repression, wars, genocides, it’s important to remember, there were also popular expressions of solidarity, a reaffirmation of humanity’s core values, a loud condemnation of the crimes committed, and efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice. 

Despite these awful events, there was still a belief that we were pursuing a common destiny, where countries would develop and march forward in the same way, embracing the same paths of progress and democracy, liberalizing their economies to unlock prosperity, and affirming human rights. 

Faulty assumptions

Free elections, free markets, and free speech were hailed as the guiding lights toward a free, democratic, and prosperous world. 

The assumption was that these three elements were not just complementary, but deeply interlinked and interdependent. They were seen as inseparable, each one necessary for the others to thrive. 

Free elections would ensure accountable governance, free markets would drive innovation and prosperity, and free speech would foster an informed and engaged citizenry. 

Now, we see how these three strands have begun to unravel, revealing not only their differences, but their contradictions. Far from reinforcing one another, they are now often at odds, exposing the fragility of the systems we once took for granted. 

Let’s start with free elections. In many countries last year, notably the U.S., the polls were generally free—ballots were cast, votes were counted, winners were declared. But the mere act of holding elections, a thin procedural exercise once every four or five years, does not guarantee the strengthening of democratic ideals—it can also result in the opposite, with democracies devouring themselves. 

Elections can be used by destructive demagogues to manipulate the public mood, leech off legitimate grievances to feed narratives of hate and division, hollow out public institutions or bend them to their will, and seek to entrench themselves in power. 

Democracies need to be filled—and sustained—with the substance of rights, equity, and justice. Without them, they can become vessels for authoritarianism. 

In the U.S. and in parts of Europe, places where democracy’s future once appeared certain, we are seeing its foundations being shaken and a rapid rollback of hard-fought freedoms. 

Nor has the promise of free markets delivered. The neoliberal experiment, which championed deregulation, tax cuts, and the shrinking of the state, has created an economic system that prioritizes profit over people. It has bred historic levels of inequality—both within and between countries. 

To cite just one example, more than 3 billion people across the world live in countries that are spending more on servicing their debt than on public spending on education or health. 

At the heart of this failure lies the ideology of market fundamentalism—the blind faith that markets, left to their own devices, will solve all problems. 

Markets are not a natural phenomenon; they are human constructs, shaped by power dynamics. 

When we strip away regulations, slash taxes for the wealthy, suppress wages, and dismantle public services in the name of “free markets,” we don’t unleash prosperity—we unleash inequality. 

Instead of creating broad-based growth, market fundamentalism has concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a few. 

It has turned public goods—like health care, education, and even water—into commodities to be bought and sold. It has prized profits over the well-being of workers, communities, and the planet. 

And it has left us with an economic system that is not only unjust, but also unsustainable. 

Today, South Africa is the most unequal country in the world—a stark reminder that the end of apartheid’s laws did not mean the end of its injustices. 

According to the World Bank, the top 10 percent of earners in this country take home two-thirds of national income, while the bottom 50 percent earn just 5 percent. 

Across the world, the figures are just as striking. 

Oxfam reports that over the past five years, the world’s richest 1percent have captured two-thirds of all new wealth created. This is not an accidental byproduct of a mismanaged system; it is the result of a system designed to produce such outcomes. 

The grotesque concentration of wealth has given rise to a new oligarchy—or, as some have called it, a “tech bro-ligarchy,” dominated by a handful of billionaire Silicon Valley men (and it is always men!) who now wield immense power over our economies, our politics, and even our thoughts. 

An unequal planet is also an endangered planet. The ravages of inequality are inextricably linked to the ravages of climate change. The same system that allows a tiny elite to amass unimaginable wealth also fuels environmental destruction, as corporations prioritize short-term profits over the long-term health of our planet. 

Market fundamentalism has not only failed to deliver prosperity; it has actively undermined it. By treating the market as an end in itself, rather than a means to serve the common good, it has created a world that is richer in wealth, but poorer in justice, dignity, and sustainability. 

And then there is free speech—the third pillar of this once-sacred trinity. It was assumed that free elections and free markets would create the conditions for free expression to flourish. 

The more freely information was shared, the more openly ideas could be exchanged, facts established, truths affirmed. A marketplace of ideas. But things have not turned out that way. 

Today, free speech is under siege, not from overt censorship but from the very systems that were supposed to protect it. Social media platforms, once celebrated as tools for global connection and democratic debate, have become engines of division, spreading disinformation and hate at an unprecedented scale. 

Algorithms designed to maximize engagement prioritize outrage and extremism, creating echo chambers that amplify falsehoods and deepen polarization. As successive studies have shown, false news travels faster than the truth—with devastating consequences, from vaccine hesitancy during the pandemic, to the erosion of trust in institutions, and hate. 

Women, racial minorities, and LGBTQI+ individuals face relentless harassment online, or become the subjects of incitement to violence, often with little recourse. The attacks against them are often ignored by claims that hate itself is protected by free speech. 

At the same time, authoritarian regimes exploit these platforms to silence dissent and spread propaganda, while corporations refuse to take meaningful action to curb hate speech and abuse. They have a profit incentive to do nothing. 

The promise of free speech—that it would empower the powerless and hold the powerful to account—has been betrayed. Instead, it’s been seized and manipulated by the powerful to consolidate their dominance, while the voices of the marginalized are drowned out or driven offline. 

Between these two forces—a political system fixated on how power is transferred but indifferent to how it is exercised, and an economic system focused on how wealth is accumulated but not how it is distributed—our most cherished freedoms are being squeezed to the point of suffocation. 

A volatile transition

As these assumptions unravel, the architecture they rested on is being dismantled. 

The end of the Second World War saw the construction of an impressive network of norms, rules, and institutions—with the avowal to promote peace, security, development, and human rights. 

This new liberal international order marked a break from a past “scourged by war,” as the United Nations Charter put it. It led to the creation of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions, the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the expansion of international law, and a commitment to addressing global poverty. 

The liberal international order wasn’t a guarantee of open society values. It formalized the privilege of the most powerful states and, in doing so, it excluded the voices of the many, particularly countries coming out of colonialism. There were inequities built into it—and perpetuated by it. 

But it did advance an important open society idea: that all people are equal, and that their fate is humanity’s shared concern. 

Against the backdrop of a collapsing international order, that idea is now at risk, too. 

We are living in a world that is changing fast. The unipolar moment—when the U.S. had unrivalled power and reach—has closed. We are already in a G20 world—now including the African Union and with South Africa’s presidency this year—and no longer in a G7 world. 

The “BRICS” has a cumulative GDP that’s higher than that of the G7—and collectively represents nearly half of the world’s population. 

And it’s not clear what may come next. 

This transition will not be smooth, nor will it be brief. We could see a prolonged period of volatility—a world of chaos, complexity, and danger. 

A world where defending open society values becomes harder—but even more necessary. 

We may be moving toward a bipolar world that pits the U.S. against China, or we may see the emergence of a multipolar world, where different powers stake their claims. 

There could be, and we are already seeing signs of it, an intensification of competition between powers, a return to “spheres of influence,” and with it, the abandonment of smaller, weaker countries to their fate. 

Cooperation between states may diminish as assertive powers pursue transactional, “me-first” policies, disregarding humanity’s collective challenges—conflict, poverty, health, and the climate. 

One of the reasons why the liberal international order is coming apart is because the same powerful states that presided over its creation are now dismantling it—trampling over its norms, discarding its rules. 

What is at risk is the very idea of human equality and the core values that bind us together—and with it, the threat of the closing world that Henri Bergson warned about—where people only care for “their own” and “care nothing for the rest.” 

As the horrors in Gaza, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine, and Sudan attest, we are currently in a world where conflicts are proliferating, growing wider and wider and more deadly. Where atrocities have been live streamed into our hands, filmed by victims who are documenting their own destruction, while much of the world looks away. 

This is a world where only some lives are deemed worthy of grief, where laws are only invoked when convenient, and where incidents of double standards have become so common that it becomes necessary to ask if any standard exists at all. 

In this moment of volatile transition, many have turned to Antonio Gramsci’s memorable adage: “The old is dying and the new is not yet born…”

The fight for open society values today does not lie in recovering the old world. This is not a crisis that will be calmed by top-down reforms that seek to revive multilateralism or nostalgically rebuild that which is broken. 

So the task before us now is to discover a new moral imagination—one that can shape and build the new world that is yet to emerge. 

Light through the cracks

The cracks in our world are there for us to shine a light through. 

We see flames of hope across the world—roused by a new generation that’s claiming its future. These young people aren’t just protesting bad policy decisions. They are revolting against outdated and oppressive orders that have created the unfair worlds they will inherit. 

Their call is one for a more just and equitable political order, but also for a more just and equitable economic order. 

I was recently in Bangladesh, where I met a brave group of students—people who fearlessly took to their streets to demand their rights and justice in the face of intense repression, overthrowing a corrupt and brutal government that had dominated their lives for the past 15 years.

What these students achieved was incredible. The future of Bangladesh remains uncertain, but the resolve of these students remains firm. We saw similar, inspiring examples last year. In Kenya, my country, discontent against the imposition of unjust new taxes turned into a powerful movement for economic and social justice.

In Senegal, young people were at the heart of a movement that endured repression for two years and then ousted a president who was determined to preserve himself in power for a third term. 

It was one of several elections that unsettled expectations of a relentless slide toward elected autocracies. 

In the U.S., we see young people, women, resisting the onslaught on their reproductive rights—organizing, on the streets, in their communities, through ballot measures. 

In Latin America, meanwhile, there has been an expansion of reproductive freedoms, with the Causa Justa Movement driving “the green wave” for abortion rights in the region.

In France, young people took to the streets last year to demonstrate against the rise of the far right. “Migrants et anti-racistes, même combat!”—“Migrants and anti-racists have the same fight!” they chanted. They’re seeing the links. And their votes made the crucial difference to keep the far right at bay in last year’s parliamentary elections. 

Even in the most forbidding contexts, where it is hard to discern much hope, we see astonishing courage. 

In Afghanistan, young women have taken to the streets to defy the Taliban’s vicious misogyny, despite the threat of violence, detention, torture, or worse. Young girls confined to their homes are seeking out ways to pursue their schooling, through mobile phone apps and other innovative methods. 

Look at any difficult situation, and you will see people defying the odds and driving change. They are the people that we should seek out, support, and stand with. 

The role of philanthropy

My organization, the Open Society Foundations, does exactly that—deliberately taking up unpopular causes, working in difficult contexts, taking risks, and even standing alone when we need to. 

Our work began here, challenging apartheid, when it was at its height. 

Twenty years ago, when I joined the organization, Open Society was one of the earliest proponents of “harm reduction”—this was the advocacy of a more humane and pragmatic approach to the use of drugs, in contrast to the vicious so-called “wars on drugs” that governments were waging, often through mass violence and human rights violations. 

When George W. Bush launched his “war on terror,” we were among the first to hold his administration accountable for the use of torture and other abusive practices. We did this work knowing that we would be accused by some extreme voices of “defending terrorists.” 

When it came to the rights of sex workers, we broke with a consensus that consigned them to the margins, without their rights—even though it meant alienating parts of the human rights field. 

Today, our roots remain the same, but we find ourselves in a different time, and we must grow new branches and leaves. 

The challenges that we face—the ravages of climate change, rising inequality and authoritarianism, the erosion of trust in institutions, the proliferation of conflict, and the breakneck advances in technology. These are not isolated crises. 

They are interlocking, systemic failures that demand new ways of thinking and acting. To meet this moment, we must all reimagine our role in driving change.

This requires not only strengthening civil society, but also expanding our partnerships to include political actors, grassroots movements, and marginalized voices to advance justice and equity. 

For much of our history, Open Society’s focus has been to support civil society. We have supported grassroots movements and amplified marginalized voices to create democratic openings in repressive systems. 

Civil society has been a powerful driver of accountability, holding governments to their promises and exposing abuses of power. But today, civil society itself is under attack. 

Governments around the world are imposing restrictive regulations, choking off funding, and demonizing civil society leaders. This has exposed a weakness in the fight for open society: an over-reliance on this sector—the conceit that the fight for human rights and justice is somehow above politics and doesn’t need to engage with it. 

At the same time, civil society itself has to have its own reckoning. In some places, it has drifted away from the communities it claims to serve. We must acknowledge this reality and adjust our strategies accordingly. 

The fight for rights, equity, and justice cannot be top-down, or exclusively pursued through international institutions or large international NGOs. Philanthropy, too, must evolve, and adapt to effectively support communities at the coal face.

At Open Society, we are committed to this new way of working. We remain a global philanthropy, but we are also grounded in the realities of political struggle. 

Understanding how power is exercised, engaged, rebalanced, and confronted is central to our mission. We seek to move power.

This moment calls for intentionality in everything we do. We are testing hypotheses, approaching our work with humility, and a willingness to learn, rather than assuming we have all the answers. 

There is no finish line to this work. We will not reach a point where we can close our doors and just go home. The work of defending open society values and human rights will never be done. 

In this moment, when things look difficult in so many places, the important thing is to focus on the quiet space beyond the noise and distraction of the moment. This is the place from which we can act with focus purpose and where thoughtful and carefully considered responses can be found. 

Our job is to keep our eyes on the goal, to stay calm, to stay focused, to be brave—and to remember what we have to do.

I want to close with the words of someone who will be familiar to friends in this hall. 

Charlotte Maxeke was the heroic founder of the Bantu Women’s League who, several decades before the anti-apartheid struggle emerged, led a movement of women resisting the racist pass laws that prevented them from moving freely. 

“This work is not for yourself, kill that spirit of self,” she said. 

“And do not live above your people but live with them. If you rise, bring someone with you.” 

Thank you.