In this CDE Conversation, CDE’s executive director, Ann Bernstein, spoke to Dr Moisés Naím, a distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, internationally syndicated columnist, best-selling author and former Venezuelan cabinet minister.

The focus of the discussion was on the decline of democracy in the 21st century. Dr Naim quoted from the 2023 report released by Varieties of Democracy which shows that 72 percent of global citizens “live in countries where their freedoms and civil liberties are curtailed or do not exist".

In his view we are seeing a global trend where organised crime infiltrates governments, taking corruption and state condoned criminality to another level. In some countries, criminal syndicates or ‘the mafia’ no longer need to find ways of influencing government because they have become the government. This has an impact on thinking about national and international crime prevention.