The aim of this Global Roundtable was to bring together a group of leading and emerging experts, to engage in a global ‘stock-taking’ exercise, aiming to map the health and trajectory of key democracies world-wide, pin-point gaps in analysis, and divine what broader lessons may be learned from multiple contexts and experiences.

Due to the constraints presented by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Roundtable, which had originally been envisaged as an in-person event, was organised as a series of 9 webinars held on 18, 19, 24, 25, 26 November 2020.

Each webinar was 2.5 hours long, devoted to an array of themes including global and regional overviews, challenges from algorithmic governance to vote suppression, understudied countries, key actors like courts, parliaments and parties, and possible remedies and renewal of our democratic systems:

Webinar 1 - Global Challenges: Threats & Resilience

Webinar 2 - Global Challenges: The Big Picture

Webinar 3 - Americas: Constitutional Decay, Breakdown & Resilience

Webinar 4 - Middle East & Africa: Constitutionalism, Corruption & Courts

Webinar 5 - Asia: Non-Linear Constitutional Pathways

Webinar 6 - Europe: Constitutional Impatience & Uncertainty

Webinar 7 - Asia: Spotlight on India & Sri Lanka

Webinar 8 - Europe: Spotlight on Hungary & Poland

Webinar 9 - Saving Constitutional Democracy: Remedies & Renewal

The Roundtable featured analysis of at least 30 countries and territories: Australia, Belarus, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, France, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malawi, Malta, Nepal, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Palestine, Philippines, Poland, Slovakia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Turkey, UK, USA and Zimbabwe.

Both emerging and established experts presented as equal participants in each panel: 17 of 58 speakers (29%) were early career scholars (i.e. doctoral or post-doctoral researchers).

Care was taken to ensure gender balance across the event, for both chairs and panellists.

The flagship output of the Roundtable was a special issue published in the journal Constitutional Studies,

The seven articles collected in this special issue provide an excellent reflection of the breadth and originality of the discussions at the Global Roundtable.

We see them as speaking to five major themes at the roundtable:

major global challenges that transcend national boundaries;

the role of courts as guardians of democracy;

the manipulation of elections to undermine democratic rule;

the ambiguities of democratisation in many states; and

the search for sources of resilience.

We took a broad multimedia approach to Roundtable including webinar recordings, interviews with selected speakers, a ‘pop up’ blog with 46 posts, and a conference e-book issued in December 2020.

These other outputs are all still accessible on the conference website: www.iacl-democracy-2020.org.

The co-organisers of the Roundtable were:

Associate Professor Tom Gerald Daly University of Melbourne, Director, DEM-DEC.

Professor Wojciech Sadurski University of Sydney, IACL Executive Committee.

The roundtable, organised under the aegis of the International Association of Constitutional Law (IACL), was co-sponsored by the Laureate Program in Comparative Constitutional Law at Melbourne Law School and the School of Government at the University of Melbourne.