In June, I had the privilege of attending the World Expression Forum (WEXFO) 2026 in Lillehammer, Norway. Since 2022, WEXFO has been a banner under which thinkers, creatives and activists from all over the world gather to strengthen the protection of freedom of expression.
Whilst attending, I stretched my legs a little and interviewed a pair of Norwegian politicians. Hans Olav Sundfør, the mayor of the municipality of Lillehammer, and Kajsa Kirkhus, a member of the Regional Assembly in the municipality of Ringsaker. Hans is a man in his 50s, an elected leader of a region and a coalition, and he’s a member of an explicitly Conservative party. Kajsa is a woman in her 20s and a member of the opposition Liberal Party. The idea behind interviewing them was to gain insight into a generational fracture I observed at WEXFO and to see how these two, theoretically, very different politicians thought about issues like democracy and freedom of expression.
The framework for my questions was heavily inspired by the book Don’t Talk About Politics, by Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano . Sarah is a writer and researcher who holds a Master of Philosophy in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge and a Doctorate of Philosophy in Political Theory from Oxford.
In her book, Sarah assembles the evidence and makes the case that the ways Western, Liberal societies think and talk about politics are, by and large, comforting lies.
Quite simply, Sarah asserts that talking about politics and presenting ‘the best’ ideas to people is not how minds are changed. That the day will not be won with words alone. Nonetheless, as a Marxian Theorist, she lays out some refreshingly material pathways for how the day might well be won yet. But you’ll have to read the book to find out.
After the interviews with the Norwegian politicians, I thought it would be interesting and useful to get a second opinion on their responses and on WEXFO as a concept. I reached out to Sarah Stein Lubrano who graciously agreed to join me via Zoom.
Damilare Williams-Shires (DWS): So, Sarah, as I said, the impetus for this interview was my attending the World Expression Forum 2026. WEXFO is a conference in Lillehammer, Norway, where I found myself among a diverse group of participants drawn predominantly from Western liberal institutions. This year's theme was "The Freedom to Disagree."
Credit: Publishing Perspectives
The attendees were academics, journalists, creatives, LGBTQ+ activists, political scientists, and often some combination of those.
They got to know each other. They shared their experiences and expertise with one another. They talked about democracy, and they talked about talking's role in democracy.
In your book, one of the first things you say is that you don't see democracy as primarily a matter of talking. Could you expand on that, please?
Sarah Stein Lubrano (SSL): There was a study that came out recently, and I was just looking at it today. It's about conversation-based strategies for local democracy. And it's funny to watch people report on it, because they'll say something like, “This is such a moving and meaningful report.” But then three paragraphs into the report, it says something like, “This [a conversation-based strategy] appears to have had zero effect on voting outcomes.”
Unfortunately, and I genuinely mean that it is unfortunate, this is what we find empirically over and over again. We find that many different conversation- based strategies, things like debate and arguments, do not seem to have the empirical outcomes you might imagine, given our cultural norms.
DWS: Chapter five of Don't Talk About Politics is about infrastructure. At WEXFO, I asked my two interviewees what they considered essential infrastructure for democracy. And I'll summarise their answers here.
Hans Olav posits that the essential infrastructure of democracy is a neutral technocracy (civil service), a state that can preserve individual rights, freedom of speech and access to the marketplace of ideas, a state-held monopoly on violence, and the ability to hold elected officials accountable via the ballot box.
Kajsa Kirkhus asserted division of powers, regular elections and term limits, public trust, and a government that is representative of society.
What do you think of their answers to the question of what the essential infrastructure for democracy is? How would you answer the question?
SSL: Their answers are, in many respects, fine. It's not that I look at the list and go, oh, my gosh, what the hell? It's just a very limited vision of what democracy is or even what democratic infrastructure is.
If you look at that list, maybe with a few exceptions here and there, it's an infrastructure that's in place so that everyone else can get on with the rest of their lives without having to be too involved [in democracy]. And sometimes that's good, to be clear, not everyone wants to spend 17 hours at the local government meeting.
But the kinds of things that I'm focused on in my research that involves democracy are still very active forms of life. What you do day to day, whether you're regularly in a space with other people that are positioned as equals to you, even though they're different from you.
Whether you have material equality, which notably is not on either of those people's lists.
I’m a Marxian Sociologist. I want from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. When you look at the empirical research on how inequality affects people and their ability to relate to one another, it's devastating.
People lose social trust very rapidly once there's material inequality. People stop trusting the state, they stop trusting their neighbours, they stop collaborating with their neighbours.
For me, a meaningful democracy is one where, when there’s a big problem, the people can engage in collective action to solve it. Whether that's shifting the entire economic structure or replacing the government. We realistically cannot do that unless we have enough trust and social skills to collaborate with one another. Currently, in my research, I'm seeing a huge decline in the skills and the social relationships that would enable people to do that.
So, I'm not saying their list is wrong. I just think it's interesting to notice what's missing.
DWS: When I was interviewing these two politicians, I asked them whether they believed that the best or most truthful idea is the idea that sells best in the marketplace of ideas.
Hans Olav answered concisely, saying “that it depends on how we organize the marketplace,” which, in his view, is fundamentally a challenge for the media, academic institutions, and the government. They must be the arbiters of ideas, ensuring that people have enough education and enough trust in the state in order to be able to distinguish dishonest and unreliable sources from reliable and honest ones. Though he conspicuously did not advocate for censorship.
Kajsa said that while she had read research to the effect that the best idea wins, she said that she wasn't convinced by this in practise. She argued that if someone came from a background of privilege, particularly a position that conferred perceived relatability and respect, and was skilled in rhetoric, they would have a massive advantage in the marketplace of ideas.
What do you think of their answers? And if it would help, please feel free to introduce us to the concepts of reasoning as war and reasoning as commerce.
SSL: So those were just two phrases I used briefly in my book to talk about these two models of reasoning that are prevalent in liberal democracies. Most people reading this will understand them implicitly because they’re such a big part of how we think and talk about politics.
One is reasoning as war. When people say we should leave that up for debate, they're basically implying that there's a form of reasoning where ideas go to war and then the best idea will win.
For starters, there is zero evidence that watching debates shifts people's minds. It's remarkable, really, the researchers at Princeton who did this study, they compiled the effects of watching televised debates over 60 years in something like 27 countries.
And they found zero evidence that people's minds are shifted the day after a debate. And that undecided voters do not have their minds made up by watching debates.
So that's remarkable, right? It's just not true that ideas go to war and win, at least not in that sense. We might say that ideas get played out in practise later. And then we discover, as with Brexit, that the consequences aren’t so great .
Reasoning as commerce is this other thing, which may be more closely related to the question you've directly asked them. It’s the idea that in the marketplace of ideas, you don't have to attack the other party; you can just keep putting forward the best idea, and because everyone’s like “yeah, that makes sense”, the best idea will win.
There’s really very little evidence for this also, for lots of reasons. But one of the main reasons is that once you begin to look at why people hold the political views that they have, it's got very little to do with processes of reasoning. It's got a lot more to do with their own lived experiences, their own actions out in the world, and their relationships.
What that suggests is that it's just totally the wrong model; we're not actually living in a marketplace. When people are given new information, they do not necessarily shift their views. No matter how beautiful and slick your marketplace is, no matter how many stalls are open with different goods, [because] the person is not shopping. The premise is flawed.
I know some people will be thinking “oh, but I have a really, you know, conservative uncle, and he watched too much Fox News/GB News, and now he believes crazy things.”
But I want them to think about the causation of the belief pattern there. Very often, what happens when people get radicalized, so to speak, by media, is that really their own life is difficult and restricted and painful, often in ways they can't name. And then they find words and stories to attach to that. So, it's not that your uncle magically became conservative because he got indoctrinated, even if it feels like that.
If you and I started watching a load of Fox News/GB News, we wouldn’t start being conservative. We'd probably just have an annoying time and then still believe what we already believed. We'd find interesting ways to push against it in our heads mentally. We’d seek out other news stories and believe them instead.
DWS: Interesting. Let’s talk about protest and how you discuss the effectiveness of protests in your book.
For context, there was some trouble in Lillehammer during WEXFO. Trouble is kind of a humorous exaggeration of what it was really from my perspective. What transpired was that a couple of speakers on Day 1 were veterans of the Israeli military.
Their presence and, allegedly, some things they said, though I was not there and cannot say what those things might have been, triggered a division between the younger and older crowds of invited speakers and experts. The younger crowd protested the session run by the Israeli military veterans. On the second day of the conference, this younger crowd was so dissatisfied that they staged a three-minute silence during the closing address and even held their own parallel conference called Reclaim WEXFO in a different area of the hotel.
What do you think of these protest actions? What would you argue was their effectiveness?
SSL: Obviously, I'm an anti-Zionist Jew. I’m broadly in favour of protesting what Israel is doing in Palestine. It is a very unfortunate reality that pretty much everybody who lives in Israel goes through the military. But assuming that those speakers were broadly in favour of the state and/or the IDF, yeah, we should protest that absolutely.
There’s something funny in the darkest possible way about the idea that the Israeli state is pro-free speech in any way. It’s not like Israel has an amazing record with that, even within itself. And obviously, they're destroying endless academic institutions and other forms of communication and speech in Gaza and other places.
That's not actually the interesting thing to say here regarding my specific research, but I just think it’s worth saying.
So, it sounds like the things that happened at WEXFO were demonstrations, rather than strikes or boycotts. In my research, I look at whether demonstrations have persuasive effect.
DWS: Do people who see demonstrations, or even governments of countries where demonstrations occur, change their minds based on demonstrations?
SSL: Basically, there's no evidence that happens, not in the long run. Sometimes you see a short shift in public opinion that ends basically when the protest ends, probably because the salience of the thing goes away. But hardly so.
I think some people who are really attached to demonstration-led protests as a form of political action get upset reading my book. They read what I’m saying and think I mean “no one should ever demonstrate ever”. But that’s not what I’m saying; what I'm saying is that the main positive effects for a demonstration are recruitment, retention and motivation.
I’m saying that the people who are changed by protests are the protesters themselves.
Empirically, people who join protest movements are changed for life in a whole range of ways: they get divorced more often, they go to graduate school more often, which they shouldn’t. I’m kidding - but not entirely.
They live different lifestyles altogether, but most of all, their political beliefs change, and they become entrenched far beyond the lifespan of that particular protest movement.
So, the goal of a protest should be to recruit people who are basically on board with you anyway, making them into more active members of your movement and then funnelling their energies into something else.
SSL: Ideally, in the case of the demonstrations at WEXFO, they would be a great way to recruit people into a different movement where they try to preserve the cultural heritage of Palestine. Or where they try to protect the free speech of people related to the Palestine Solidarity Movement, which is a huge threat around the world right now. There's lots of censorship in all kinds of ways, including horrifyingly by the German state. And as a German citizen, I'm appalled, especially by the way that civil servants, including academics, are effectively totally silenced because they can get fired for almost any statement in solidarity with Palestinians. I could go on and on.
But the point is, you should use this kind of protest to recruit people and to keep them motivated. And hopefully it did that. But what it won't do is persuade someone who disagrees with you. And that’s ok; we just need to use things like demonstrations strategically.
DWS: Fascinating. Just one more thing.
Where does a space like WEXFO fit into the way you and I seem to think about discourse and democracy?
SSL: I don't know what WEXFO is in detail, so I'm just going to broadly talk about it as an institution that is protecting speech.
I want speech to be protected too, but that is not where the political struggle is right now.
I obviously wasn't at the event, so maybe some successful strategies were discussed. I don't want to be completely dismissive, but I would say that thinking about things in terms of free speech right now, rather than having bigger, broader, material frameworks, is just misrecognizing the nature of the problem and therefore it's likely to limit us to terribly ineffective solutions.
Now, don't get me wrong, there are many forms of censorship happening in this world right now, and they are bad, but very often what needs to be addressed is the whole underlying socio-economic structure that created a government that would do something like that, rather than just the censorship on its own.
What I tend to see in movements that talk about free speech is pretty much a very narrow, somewhat legalistic focus with a lot of idealism. They seem to think that once the right ideas are out there in the world, everything will be fine. And that's simply not true.
Interview abridged for clarity.
It’s important to give WEXFO its flowers. Indeed, the focus of WEXFO is freedom of expression because it is the view of the organisation that such a freedom is the axis on which democracy spins. While Marxists such as Sarah and I might disagree that it is the ultimate axis, we recognize without contest that it is a key pillar of a healthy society. It is certainly a canary in the coal mine: its gradual death a warning to the West to turn away from its descent into fascism.
In response to Sarah’s acknowledgement that she doesn’t know WEXFO in detail, let me provide a few important details. The forum does specifically serve as a space where a broad range of effective strategies are shared with participants. For example, at the 2026 edition, there were:
The latter two point most clearly to what I think is the greatest value of a space like WEXFO: community.
A dedicated space where young radical people from across the world can meet (flights and hotel paid for), and are able to organize together, even in a small way. WEXFO created the conditions for these people to be connected. Connections create collaborations like books and articles, and sometimes even whole movements.
It is only thanks to WEXFO that an assembly of young people from Indonesia, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Kenya, Spain and Germany were given a chance to sit down with two journalists from Nigeria. And through one of those journalists, have their ideas connected with those of their peers in Nigeria.
To see that connection illustrated, please read Youth Perspectives from Africa and the wider world at WEXFO, scheduled to be the opening essay of Volume 5 of the Living Sustainably Here anthology, edited by Olatoun Gabi-Williams and published by Selina Publications.
Ultimately, I agree with Sarah that a material approach addressing the structural forces that create outcomes like censorship is more effective than trying to empower individuals to navigate censorship. This co-exists with my belief that there is a vital place for institutions like WEXFO. If democracy is sustained through relationships as much as through ideas, then WEXFO's greatest political contribution may lie not simply in the conversations it hosts, but in the communities and collaborations those conversations make possible.
Sarah Stein Lubrano makes a convincing case that democracy is sustained not by better arguments, but by better relationships. Forums like WEXFO can serve as one space where those relationships can be built.
Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano can be found via her Website or Instagram
Her thoughts are available via her Substack and her Podcast
Don’t Talk About Politics is available from bookshops and publishers such as Waterstones, Blackwells, The British Library Shop, and Bloomsbury.
It is also available as an audiobook (read by the author) via Spotify and Audible.
Damilare Williams-Shires is an arts and entertainment journalist. He graduated from the University of Surrey with a BA (Hons) in English & Creative Writing. He holds a Master's degree in Cultural and Creative Industries from Cardiff University. An emerging filmmaker, his award-winning short film, Together. Apart., has received critical recognition. His second film, the short feature The Politician, is currently in post-production.
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