A seminar titled «Sapere Aude: Civic Education for a Society of Citizens,» held in Segovia in cooperation with Fundación Valsaín para la Promoción y la Defensa de los Valores Democráticos, partnership with Stockholm School of Economics, and supported by the Swedish Institute (Detta projekt finansieras av Svenska institutet) and the Council of Europe, convened the IX cohort of the programme — more than 30 participants — representatives of civil society from the post-soviet space and Europe — experts, journalists, human-rights defenders, diplomats, and academics from the EU, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Georgia, and Azerbaijan — to address urgent societal challenges.
Across four days participants engaged in courses, workshops, labs roundtables and discussions on themes including constitutions and why they matter; the state as a machine of exclusion and political violence in Russia; classical theories of social revolution; the role of the rule of law in securing peace; populism and radicalization; security dimensions of transitions and regime change; and the humanities as a foundation for democracy and the rule of law. Speakers included Miguel Beltran de Felipe, Ilya Shumanov, Vasily Zharkov, Irina Borogan, Andrey Soldatov, Tomás de la Quadra‑Salcedo, Ekaterina Schulmann, Maksim Kurnikov, Pilar Bonet and José Manuel López Benítez.
Participants also developed theories of change, peer‑reviewed project ideas in Project Rig sessions led by Anton Pominov, and practiced negotiation and communication tools in a Retreat Lab on Harvard Principles of Negotiation. The seminar closed with reflections on justice, civic agency and the need to uphold universal values of freedom, dignity and human rights.