Across Europe, rising repression is reshaping daily life

SEMINAR

Speaker: Professor Brian Dooley, Institute Honorary Professor, Senior Advisor at Human Rights First

Chair: Professor Louise Mallinder, Queen’s University Belfast

Across Europe, rising repression is reshaping daily life. Local people helping others are targeted and criminalized for exposing corruption, helping refugees and acting out of kindness.

In today’s climate of increasing fear and intimidation, some refuse to look away.

In this seminar, award-winning activist and Institute Honorary Professor Brian Dooley will present eleven true stories of people who chose courage over safety, based on his forthcoming book Defiant (Humanitas Media, 2026): a former violinist in Ukraine driving an ambulance at the eastern front of the war on Ukraine; a family in eastern Poland secretly sheltering migrants hunted in the border forest; and a Turkish scientist risking prison to expose toxic contamination threatening children’s health. In the Czech Republic, a woman transforming how sexual violence is understood and prosecuted, while volunteers in Italy treat and assist refugees arriving along the Balkan route. Communities in Bosnia and Northern Ireland resist environmentally destructive mining projects. Polish activists expose homophobia, and anonymous Baltic volunteers counter Russian propaganda, while in England, a lawyer spends decades challenging wrongful terrorism convictions.

None of these people set out to become activists. They were musicians, scientists, and neighbours who saw injustice and acted to stop it.

Drawing on decades of frontline reporting, Dooley will detail how imagination, persistence, and moral clarity can defy repression and change people’s lives.

Defiant reminds us that the defence of human rights begins not with institutions, but with what ordinary people can achieve when they choose to stand up for one another.

Biographies

Professor Brian Dooley

Brian Dooley is an Honorary Professor of Practice at Queen’s Institute for Peace, Security and Justice and a Senior Advisor at Human Rights First, a US-based NGO. He specialises in working with Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) in conflict and post-conflict contexts, and was senior advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on HRDs, Mary Lawlor, from 2020 to 2023. His most recent work has been in the Hong Kong revolution and on Russia’s war on Ukraine. He has also written two books related to the conflict in Northern Ireland, including a comparative study of the civil rights movements in the US and Northern Ireland.

Professor Louise Mallinder

Louise Mallinder is Interim Director of the Queen’s Institute for Peace, Security, and Justice and a Professor of Law and at Queen’s University Belfast. At the University of Chicago she is a Faculty Affiliate of the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, and was the 2024 Pozen Professor of Human Rights. She holds a PhD in law, an LLM in human rights law, and BA in economic and social history and politics, all from Queen’s University Belfast.

Louise’s book Amnesty, Human Rights and Political Transitions: Bridging the Peace and Justice Divide was awarded the British Society of Criminology Book Prize and the Hart Socio-Legal Studies Association Early Career Prize. She is co-editing The Elgar Concise Encyclopedia on Law and Peace, and co-authored Lawyers in Conflict and Transition (2022).

Louise is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Higher Education Academy. She is also a member of the Institute for Integrated Transitions Law and Peace Practice Group, and of the ESRC and AHRC Peer Review Colleges. She was Chair of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, a human rights non-governmental organization based in Belfast, during 2015-2020, and was Vice-Chair during 2013-2015 and 2020-2024.

Description supplied by the event organiser.