2024 has been dubbed the "year of elections," and it comes as democratic backsliding is on the rise. Now that Donald Trump is returning to the White House, what does that spell for the fate of democracy worldwide? Piya Chattopadhyay moderates the 2024 Stanfield Conversation – a series focusing on critical challenges to democracy and imaginative and inspiring responses to them – at Dalhousie University in Halifax. This year's featured guests are The Globe and Mail's international affairs columnist Doug Saunders and McGill University political scientist and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies, Debra Thompson.

Host Piya Chattopadhyay speaks with international relations professor Fawaz Gerges about the consequences of the ICC's arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, associate professor of political science Maria Popova unpacks recent escalation in the Russia-Ukraine war, linguist Julie Sedivy talks about how language defines our lives, and we present the 2024 Stanfield Conversation about the U.S. election and democracy's global fate, featuring The Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders and McGill University political scientist Debra Thompson.

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After a beloved gorilla at the Toronto Zoo named Charles died last month, hundreds of people visited his enclosure to mourn and lay flowers. But did his fellow apes understand that he had died? Did Charles ever contemplate his own mortality? Susana Monsó has long contemplated questions like these as she seeks to understand how animals understand death. The philosopher joins Piya Chattopadhyay to talk about how all kinds of animals relate to mortality... and what we humans might learn from them.