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There is no simple way to sum up this year. Fierce, terrifying, exhausting. Resilient, heroic, helpful. Was this a blip, an interruption of the ever accelerating, but no more than that, and things will return to what they were? Or will 2020 have a lasting impact and extend well past the events we are living through?

We asked experts from different areas to reflect on what has happened, on what this year meant. And how they think 2020 will affect what comes next. Read what they have to say – as we begin to make sense of this tumultuous, terrifying and hopeful time.

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How would our perception of ethics and politics change if we were to understand the body as the starting point of our experience? If we would put the materiality of our senses first, beating back the pretension that consciousness is at the origin of all sense?

What is the meaning of death? Or, as the philosopher would say: finitude? In other words, if live must end – isn’t that the ultimate limit to our existence, the very opposite of freedom? Not at all and quite the contrary, claims Martin Hägglund in his book “This Life”; the fact that we will die constitutes the basis for our freedom.

What will this coming decade be – the ten years, some say, that are essential if we want to change the course of things, tackle climate change before more tipping points are reached. This is one of the goals of the ten-year-project “Untitled”, initiated by Demos Helsinki, a think tank that we cooperate with.

It is hard to think of a period when every single person on the planet was facing the same threat, forming a collective of vulnerables and, yet, had to cope with the consequences on the most immediate, most intimate, most individualistic level, our bodies. A look at coronavirus diaries from across the world reveals the different impact COVID-19 has had – across socio-economic classes, gender and race.

In contemporary societies we can observe a growing tension when it comes to the relation between citizens and experts. On the one hand, the public is more and more dependent on various forms of expertise in order to address urgent problems – such as manmade climate change or loss of biodiversity. On the other hand, there are legitimate worries about conflicts of interests in the dissemination of new knowledge; researchers see themselves under attack not only from populists, but also from those who rightly criticize the blind spots of traditional forms of expertise.

Lottie Cunningham Wren is a lawyer active in the fight to protect the rights of the indigenous people and the afro-descendants in Nicaragua. In 2014, she founded the non-profit organization CEJUDHCAN, which provides educational programs, legal support, and practical assistance to indigenous peoples and afro-descendant communities on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. The organization has documented at least 60 attacks by settlers with firearms against indigenous people and 24 indigenous people killed whilst defending their territories. The attacks have included such criminal offenses as kidnapping and the destruction of property. Entire communities have been forcibly displaced. The violence has been indiscriminate, affecting indigenous leaders, children and families, as well as human rights defenders. For her work, Lottie Cunningham Wren has been awarded the Right Livelihood Award 2020.

Should the social sciences only analyse the past and present? Or should they also try to help design the future? THE NEW INSTITUTE aims to support faster and closer connections between social science and the vital changes needed in our society as we respond to climate change, ageing, inequality and a world flooded with powerful new technologies.

Homi Bhabha was the perfect person to talk to about the outcome of the U.S. election – a scholar of multiculturalism with a keen eye for the power structures in discourse and in reality and an observer who lives in the country for a long time now but has kept his perspective as an outsider, born in India and endowed with a very distinct world-view. He sat down with Georg Diez – remotely in these Corona times – to discuss Trump, Kamala Harris, the Latino vote and the fate of the refugee as the starting point to rethink our concept of citizenship.

Joe Biden is the new President-elect - and Democrats have long insisted that an increasingly multi-ethnic population will favor them in the long-run. However, the surge in Latino votes for the G.O.P. might question that assumption. Please read an annotated collection of some of the most interesting writing on this important aspect of the 2020 election.

Daniel Ziblatt is sitting in his study in Newton, not far from the Harvard campus where he normally teaches as the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government. Now everything is done via Zoom. Ziblatt is well-known for the book “How Democracies Die” which he published together with Steven Levitsky in 2018, written out of shock, as a reaction to the election of Donald Trump. Ziblatt is Director of the Transformations of Democracy Unit at WZB Berlin, Social Science Center and starting in 2021 a fellow at THE NEW INSTITUTE in Hamburg, working on the program “The Future of Democracy”.

THE NEW INSTITUTE is opening its second call for fellowships for the program “The Future of Democracy”, bringing together academics, artists, journalists from fall 2021 on to addresses the current challenges and failures of the democratic system and aiming to find ways to strengthen participation. The goal is to imagine how democracy can be reconfigured to be fit for purpose and capable of evolving in the future.

"Well, here we are." This is the first sentence in Jean-Paul Sartre's play "No Exit", in which the four protagonists Garcin, Inès, Estelle and an enigmatic figure, the valet, find themselves in the underworld. They do not know how they ended up there. They do not understand how to get out. Their situation seems to them as inexplicable as it is inevitable. With the play Sartre quotes Heidegger, who had coined this inevitability of existence "thrownness".

THE NEW INSTITUTE issues its first fellowship call – focusing on “The Foundations of Value and Values”. The program will be a central element of the fundamental research activities of the new Hamburg-based institute dedicated to promoting systemic change and finding answers to the most urgent ecological, economic, and political challenges of our time.

Markus Gabriel, Germany’s most innovative contemporary philosopher, will become a fellow at THE NEW INSTITUTE. Beginning in the fall of 2021, Gabriel will help to shape the program “The Foundations of Value and Values,” whose aim is to find answers to one of the most central questions of our time: What is a sustainable value-system for the 21st century? 

THE NEW INSTITUTE is expanding: Francesca Bria, President of the Italian Innovation Fund, Geoff Mulgan, the former head of the UK innovation agency Nesta, and Christoph Möllers, law professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, support THE NEW INSTITUTE. As Senior Advisors, they will guide the mission of this newly founded platform for societal change, initiated by the Hamburg-based entrepreneur and philanthropist Erck Rickmers. 

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