Timothy Snyder in Brussels.

Rockstar for a free society.

On the evening of Friday, January 16, 2026, the vast Henry Le Boeuf Hall in Bozar, Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, was filled for a rare appearance by American historian Timothy Snyder. The event drew an audience of over 2,000 people eager to hear one of the most incisive voices on freedom, democracy, and historical responsibility.

Snyder, best known for his global bestselling On Tyranny (2017) and his recent book On Freedom (2024), took the stage with Belgian historian Pieter Lagrou, steering an urgent conversation about what it means to be free in a time when democratic norms are under pressure across continents.

Unlike the dense style of his books, Snyder’s live presence was sharp, wry, and deeply engaging. For ninety minutes, he tied historical insight to pressing contemporary challenges with clarity and wit, and left many in the audience visibly moved, inspired, and provoked.

A few themes stood out that resonate far beyond the Brussels hall:

• Freedom is not a given.
  Snyder reminded the audience that freedom is not a default setting in modern societies, it’s a discipline. It must be practiced, shared, and defended in common. Framing freedom as merely the absence of restriction leads to passivity. Real freedom, he argued, is built through civic responsibility and solidarity. It grows in the spaces where people resist domination together, not in private bubbles of comfort.

• Democracy depends on citizens.
  Snyder warned against confusing democratic stability with permanence. Democracies survive only when citizens act, vote, organize, speak out, and refuse normalization of authoritarian language or behavior. Political disengagement is no longer benign; it’s a risk. Autocratic forces thrive not just on strength, but on the laziness of others. Democracies fall when people assume someone else will save them.

• History matters.
  For Snyder, history is not an archive but a battleground. He showed how authoritarian regimes, from Putin’s Russia to Trump’s America, rewrite or manipulate the past to justify violence or erode truth. Understanding history critically is a form of resistance: it reclaims agency, shatters myths, and opens the door to alternative futures. The choice isn’t between remembering or forgetting, but between weaponized memory and emancipatory history.

• Universities and civil society must not retreat.
  Reflecting on the failure of American universities to confront the Trump-era assault on academic freedom, Snyder lamented their tendency to hide behind neutrality, damage control, or institutional decorum. In doing so, they cede ground to those who weaponize ignorance. He urged academic and civic institutions to embrace their historical role: not as neutral observers, but as engines of democratic culture, spaces where truth, dissent, and dialogue are protected and projected outward.

What emerged from Bozar that night was less a lecture than a call to collective engagement, an insistence that freedom, like democracy, must be actively tended by citizens and scholars alike.

For anyone who missed the event or wants to revisit Snyder’s full remarks and the rich exchange on stage, the entire evening is available in video form here: