On June 17, the Valdai Discussion Club will hold a roundtable in Saint Petersburg, in the run-up to SPIEF, titled “Homo Perplexus: How to Stop Fearing and Learn to Love Change”. The participants of the first session will discuss, whether the state is capable of pursuing policy without strategy and whether tactics can be made strategic in an era of dramatic change.
Live broadcast on the website (Moscow Time):
09:50 – 10:00 Opening of the conference
10:00 – 11:30 Session 1. Navigating in a Thickening Fog: Are Strategies Feasible When Everything Is in Flux?
Can policy be effective without a strategy? The instinctive answer is, of course, no. But what if the sheer scale of change makes foresight impossible? That is precisely the reality we face today. Yet, states cannot afford to drift passively on socio-political currents – or can they? And if not, what path should they take when the situation can shift suddenly and radically? In other words, how can tactics become strategic?
Read the Programme for details.
The roundtable will initiate a broader discussion planned by the organisers on the origins and methods of ensuring security in the modern world – first, through the individual human experience. The second part, on how individual states can ensure internal stability as the main prerequisite for their own security, will be discussed the next day during the Valdai Club session at the SPIEF site.