Valdai Club

On March 3–5, the Valdai Discussion Club will hold its first Youth Conference, titled “The Valdai Club: The World in 2040,” as part of the World Youth Festival. The conference will be held in the Sirius Federal Territory, at the Park of Science and Art.

The Youth Conference will be attended by Russian and foreign experts, as well as young specialists, graduate students and graduates of leading universities in the field of international relations from Brazil, China, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, and South Africa.

For the first time, the Valdai Club focuses on the participation and expertise of young international relations researchers aged below 35. These are specialists of the new generation who will represent policy-making circles and the expert community of their countries in the coming decades.

The goal of the Valdai Club is to ensure the continuity of generations in world processes understanding.

“We want to test our hypothesis that the opinion of the older generation of experts resonates with the opinion of the new generation of experts,” Andrei Sushentsov, the Club’s Programme Director, explains.

Young professionals, together with more experienced colleagues, will try to imagine the world in 2040. First, on March 3 and 4, in a workshop format new to the Valdai Club, participants will compare assessments of key international processes. Then on March 5, they will share their forecasts at three thematic sessions and an open discussion “Valdai 2040: Looking to the Future.”

During the conference, experts will discuss the following issues:

• The future of world politics in 2040;
• Dialogue of cultures in a polycentric world;
• Technological development as a challenge and opportunity.

Especially for the Youth Conference, a team of young researchers from different countries prepared a new Valdai Club report titled “Charting the 2040: Younger Generation Insight on the World in the Making.” The report authors address the forks that the world faces today, as well as the possible scenarios for the development of current trends in world politics, economics, science, technology and culture by 2040.
The conference will be attended by: Nourhan ElSheikh, Professor of Political Science at Cairo University (Egypt); Arvind Gupta, head and co-founder of the Digital India Foundation (India); Ahmed Bening, Secretary General of the Pan-African Youth Union (Ghana); Rasighan Maharaj, General Director of the Institute for Economic Research in Innovation at the Tshwane University of Technology (South Africa); Wang Wen, Professor, Executive Dean of the Chongyang Institute of Financial Studies, People’s University of China (China); Bakrie Connie, Director of the Maritime Department of the State Archives of Indonesia Rahakundini (Indonesia); Nelson Wong, Vice Chairman and President of the Shanghai Center for Strategic and International Studies (China); Ilya Semerikov, Deputy Head of the Scientific Group of the Russian Quantum Center; Oksana Sinyavskaya, Deputy Director of the Institute of Social Policy of the National Research University Higher School of Economics; Fyodor Lukyanov, Research Director of the Valdai Discussion Club; Oleg Barabanov, Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club; Timofey Bordachev, Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club; Ivan Timofeev, Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club; Andrei Sushentsov, Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club and others.

Working languages: English, Russian.

Information for the media: Dear journalists, access to the event is possible for World Youth Festival participants and journalists accredited at the Festival.

The third day of the Valdai Club Youth Conference will be open for the media — March 5.

Sessions 1–3 will be held in the Dostoevsky conference hall, Sirius Science and Art Park (11:30 — 17:00).

Open discussion — in the Atom hall, Terminal F, Sirius Science and Art Park (17:30 — 19:30).