The present lectures were held as part of the public lecture series of the Europa Institute at the University of Zurich. A variety of current political developments were addressed, such as "Armenia and the Velvet Revolution" (Tatevik Bahdassarian), "Does Russia Have a Future?" (Mikhail Khodorkovsky), "Brexit: New Realities and Lessons Learned for Europe" (Michel Barnier), "Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free: And Other Paradoxes of the Broken US Legal System" (The Hon. Jed S. Rakoff), "Immigration and European Leading Culture" (Prof. Dr. Günter Krings), and "The European Union Exists for the Sake of Humanity" (Federal Constitutional Judge Prof. Dr. Peter M. Huber). The lectures were conducted under challenging conditions during the COVID years of 2020 and 2021, many of them in a virtual format. We thank the speakers for their enriching contributions and the participants for their interest.