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Sunday 22 November 2009

IISS - International Institute for Strategic Studies

Global Strategic Review

Conferences

Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski delivers the Keynote Address at Global Strategic Review 2009

The IISS is pleased to announce that its 7^th annual Global Strategic Review (GSR) will be held on 11-13 September 2009 at the Intercontinental Hotel Geneva in Switzerland.

The GSR is the principal international venue for policy-relevant analysis of global foreign, defence and security policy by IISS members, officials, diplomats, military personnel, academics, commentators, media and business. Interdisciplinary in approach and cosmopolitan in its participants, the GSR each year audits the forces that are shaping international security conditions and anticipates the new factors that seem likely to come into play. It provides assessments of where new tensions may arise, but also points to areas that contain the possibility of progress towards conflict resolution. It generates original and useful thinking about the tools and structures – diplomatic, military, economic and bureaucratic – that national security establishments, regional security institutions and supra-national organisations will need in order to effectively pursue their priorities and discharge their mandates.

The theme of the GSR in 2009 is ‘The New Geopolitics’. Captured here is the sense that policy-makers are

confronted by some genuinely novel challenges and departures, but that more traditional modes of geopolitics and statecraft have acquired new life, too. The GSR will examine with what success the Obama administration is meeting the sweeping foreign policy objectives it has defined for itself. Close consideration will be given to the manner in which the global financial-economic crisis is affecting conflicts and state fragility. Transnational threats emanating from climate change and resource competition, as well as from terrorism and proliferation, will receive prominent attention. But so too will the emergence of apparently classical balance-of-power politics in Asia, and the perennial problem of what concepts and capabilities defence forces and alliances need to equip themselves with, if they are to meet current and prospective threats.

The event consists of a two-day conference spread over an opening dinner on the Friday, to a closing luncheon session on the Sunday. This is broken up into two formal dinners, six plenary sessions in front of the full audience on grand strategic subjects, and a half day of smaller break-out sessions that concentrate on very specific security challenges facing the international community.