“The spirit of our endeavour is, To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”

Alessandro Minuto-Rizzo, President

The panorama of international security is changing in a profound way.
International security is experiencing an unprecedented rise in complexity because on the one hand all usual issues that have arisen after the end of the Cold War remain current (instability, insurgencies, regional wars, proxy conflicts, peacekeeping intervention, nuclear proliferation, terrorism etc.). On the other hand, issues that are crosscutting and involve both public and private actors have an increasingly growing importance in the international agenda and are confirming a long-standing evolution of security towards a multidimensional nature, including societal resilience.
Three subjects stand out for their concrete relevance: Climate Change with competition for scarce resources, Health in its transatlantic implications and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
While each subject merits a full conference on its own, the goal of this event is to put them with more clarity in the international security context and sketching some of their reciprocal correlations.
Climate change and resources scarcity is much more than protest movements. The first panel will discuss: how foreseeable climate change will influence strategic variables relevant for military operations; what is the impact of these changes on the control and competition for water resources in crisis areas and finally how crop scarcity, land grabbing and droughts can affect migratory crises and regional conflicts (a practical case is the controversy on the new Nile dam).
The second panel will try to assess the impact and the consequences of the pandemic on the Euro-Atlantic collaboration and relationship. The NATO Strategic Concept (para 15) had already anticipated health emergencies that need a protection of health beyond national borders, while affecting the Alliance’s planning and operations. Reality has at the same time confirmed and overcome the intuition. The panel will on the one hand see how the pandemic has affected transatlantic relationships, how theyr can be enhanced and what lessons can be learned, also at operational level, where contingents in out of area operations are called to alleviate complex emergencies while protecting their force in fragile countries.
AI (among other initiatives, the projects of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience), apart from media hype, is beginning in its early stages to have an impact on political and hence on security processes. Clear examples are: computer-controlled processes in influencing electoral audiences, recognise visual patters for intelligence and security tasks and systems capable to correlate intelligently vast amounts of unstructured data. The third panel will explore in a lively debate the pros and cons of Artificial Intelligence and its impact on international security, among which deterrence management, autonomous systems and cyber operations.
Three agile conversations, over two days,
addressing these topics, trying to sketch the ways ahead.
According to the current rules, the event will be organised without the public.
Speakers only will be set on stage and the discussion will take place and be live streamed on a new engaging, interactive digital arena.
 

PARTNERS

WHEN
10th and 11th December 2020

WHERE
Live-streamed from the
Rome Cavalieri, A Waldorf Astoria Hotel

#GameChangers2020

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