Category: NATO

Of things NATO, 2: The Second Allied Foresight Conference, and beyond

Image of Emperor Marcus Aurelius statue in Rome

While the process of researching and writing the paper described in the previous post was going on, I was also in contact with another part of the strategic foresight branch at ACT who were beginning to co-organise the second allied foresight conference, thus fulfilling SACT General Lavigne’s wish from the 2024 Helsinki conference for these conferences to become a “tradition”. While that first conference in Helsinki was held in a hotel, which had certain security implications associated with it given the proximity of that city to a fairly staunch NATO adversary, the second one was being planned to be held at NATO Defense College in Rome, which is located inside a military base. Thus, security was going to be both more and less of an issue this time around.

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Of things NATO, 1: The future of the rules-based international order

Animated radar by Futures Platform of the FRBIO

I mentioned a while ago that I was working on a paper on the not-at-all scary little topic of “the future of the rules-based international order”, having been commissioned by NATO to write it. Well, it was finally published online in early November last year, having been submitted just before Easter (ie early April). The full reference with link is given below. Here I want to describe something of the background to the paper as well as the process of getting it to print, which took about 18 months from the initial email canvassing the idea to the final version appearing on the internet. Much of this post was written late last year and only very recently completed.

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NATO’s First Allied Foresight Conference

Last week, I was invited to attend and present at the First Allied Foresight Conference, organised by NATO’s Allied Command Transformation in conjunction with the Finnish Ministry of Defence. This follows a very successful Foresight Symposium held in Washington DC around this time last year.

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NATO’s Strategic Foresight Analysis 2023

Last year I contributed to the development of the Strategic Foresight Analysis 2023 (SFA23), undertaken by the Strategic Foresight Branch of NATO’s Allied Command Transformation. This was a more-than-year-long effort combining the expertise of some 800 workshop participants, together with the experience of around 20 or so members of a core reference team who got to see, comment upon, and make suggestions for inclusion into, earlier draft versions of the Report (see page 98 of the SFA23 to see their names). It was amazing to see the document take shape over that time.
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