Blog posts from the year 2025

“We find a correlation between the role of anti-pluralist parties and declining academic freedom”

Dr Angelo Vito Panaro is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg. He is involved in the “Academic Freedom Index” (AFI) research project which measures and compares academic freedom worldwide once a year. In this interview, he explains how the negative trend in Germany’s AFI values is to be understood, why there are so much more countries with declining than increasing AFI values and what can be learned from the developments in Argentina, Poland and the United States.

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“Despite the uncertainty, young people generally aspire to study and live in Ukraine”

Anuja Desai is a Senior Soft Power Analyst at the British Council. She oversees the British Council’s commissioned research on soft power in relation to development, peace, and security. In this interview, we talk to her about the concerns, needs and hopes of young people…

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“Germany is one of the most trusted countries in the G20”

Every two years for over a decade, the British Council has conducted the Global Perceptions Survey, a worldwide survey of young people of university age. They are asked not only about their image of the United Kingdom, but also about their image of many other countries, including Germany. To mark this year's survey, Alistair MacDonald, Senior Policy Analyst and Project Officer at the British Council, explains the objectives and methodology behind the survey project, what the key findings of the last survey were, what he expects from this year's survey and how Germany's ratings have developed over the last two rounds of the survey.

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