Science Under Attack: From Solidarity to Strategy

Science is not just under attack — it is being defended. This session moves deliberately from diagnosis to agency: naming the real and growing threats facing researchers globally, drawing on hard-won lessons from history and frontline experience, and arriving at concrete strategies for institutions, international networks, and policymakers.

The picture is more complex than a simple authoritarian-versus-democratic divide. Populist governments in liberal democracies are deploying familiar tools — defunding, delegitimising, politicising appointments — while the erosion of public trust in expertise creates vulnerabilities that no legal framework alone can fix. At the same time, the global research community remains structurally unequal: partnerships between Northern institutions and researchers in high-risk settings often reproduce the very asymmetries they claim to address.

What does effective solidarity actually look like? Not just moral declarations, but structured, practical, and political responses — legal protection mechanisms, cross-regional coalitions, advocacy frameworks that carry weight in legislative corridors, and institutional cultures that share risk rather than export it.

The session brings together voices from the European Parliament, from African academic freedom networks, from frontline pandemic science communication, and from global health advocacy. Together they map the terrain: where the threats originate, where the defences are holding, and where they are failing. By the end, participants will leave with a clearer sense not only of what is at stake, but of what levers exist — and who needs to pull them.