Ivan Krastev

Ivan Krastev is one of Europe's most influential political thinkers — a mind that connects the deep structures of democracy, sovereignty, and institutional trust to the forces reshaping the 21st century. Born in Bulgaria and based in Vienna, he chairs the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and serves as the Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM). He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and a member of the global advisory board of the Open Society Foundations.

What makes Krastev essential to the Human × AI conversation is a reality that his work helps us see clearly: technology — especially artificial intelligence — is no longer a sector. It is a geopolitical force. The companies building large language models, controlling cloud infrastructure, and shaping information flows — OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft — are now geopolitical actors with more influence over democratic processes, economic structures, and public discourse than most nation-states. Krastev's decades of work on European democracy, sovereignty, and the mechanics of trust provide the intellectual framework to navigate this shift.

Krastev is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and regularly publishes in the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and the Journal of Democracy (where he serves on the editorial board). His books have shaped the European political conversation: The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (co-authored with Stephen Holmes, winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize), After Europe (European Book Prize finalist), Is it Tomorrow Yet? Paradoxes of the Pandemic, Democracy Disrupted, and In Mistrust We Trust (TED Books).

His analysis reaches American audiences through appearances on The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, and The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk. He has held fellowships at St. Antony's College Oxford, the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C., and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Europe's AI governance challenge cannot be understood through technology alone. It requires the kind of political and institutional analysis Krastev has spent three decades refining. His work on democratic resilience, European sovereignty, and the mechanics of trust speaks directly to the conference's core questions: How does Europe build AI systems that serve democratic values? What happens when the companies controlling AI infrastructure become more powerful than the governments trying to regulate them? And what does sovereignty mean when your most critical infrastructure runs on someone else's cloud?