Dr Alexander Görlach
Former Research Associate
Dr Alexander Görlach
Former Research Associate
Alexander Görlach is a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, working with Luciano Floridi on the impact of AI on democracy. His work is on democracy in the digital age, with a special interest in the role technology plays in the systemic rivalry between autocracy and the free world. His forthcoming book (“The Two Chinas” (working title), Hoffmann&Campe 2022) will highlight this topic by comparing Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China, one a democracy, the other an autocracy.
Alex is the editor in chief of Conditio Humana, a magazine on AI, technology and ethics. In affiliation with the Vodafone Institute on Society and Communications he has also published expert papers on the impacts of AI on societies. He is a senior fellow on the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, a senior advisor to the Berggruen Institute, and an affiliate to the “In Defense of Democracy”-program at the F. D. Roosevelt Foundation at Harvard University. Alex also is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts
In the academic years 2014-2017 Alex was a visiting scholar and fellow at both Harvard Center for European Studies and Harvard Divinity School, in 2017-2018 he joined the Center for Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge as a fellow. In both places he worked on narratives of identity, and the future of democracy. “Homo Empathicus. On Scapegoats, Populists, And Saving Democracy” (Brookings, 2021) sums up this work. In 2017 and 2018 Alex also worked as a visiting scholar at National Taiwan University in Taipei and City University Hong Kong. In both places he looked into democracy under siege by autocratic China. In 2020 he published “Focus Hong Kong — why the future of the free world will be decided in China” (Hoffmann&Campe, 2020).
Alex is the founder of the debate magazine The European which he also ran from 2009 until 2015 as editor in chief. Today he is an op-ed contributor to the New York Times and Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He is further a columnist for Deutsche Welle, Germany’s BBC, and Wirtschaftswoche, a major business outlet.