Peter Grk, Secretary-General of the Bled Strategic Forum
The 19th International Conference Bled Strategic Forum will take place in Bled on 2 and 3 September. This year’s event is titled “A World of Parallel Realities”.
The focus of the Bled Strategic Forum 2024 will be a call to work together for the common good: by listening, by hearing, and by going beyond one’s own views.
This year, more than half of the world’s population went to the polls. In November, we have the US elections, in June we saw the EU elections, and before that India and other countries that have a major impact on geopolitical and geostrategic realities and futures.
The fact is that we are witnessing a rather rapid and, at times, brutal disintegration of the global multilateral system, with the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the Middle East conflict, which has become a humanitarian catastrophe, demonstrating the utter impotence of the international community to make the appropriate moves towards ensuring global security and stability. Multilateralism has been replaced by multipluralism, or the regional and interest-based integration of different countries in competition with each other and with less and less cooperation.
Sustainable solutions are needed at a time when international society is confronted with a cycle of competition, insecurity and antagonism, manifesting itself in instability, violence and conflict. The awareness that we live in a world of parallel realities encourages us to bring these realities together for the common good.
We are living in a time of great global transformation, which has the potential to shape our common future profoundly. At such a time, the ability to hear and listen in the international community is crucial if we are to find effective and sustainable solutions. This is what this year’s Bled Strategic Forum offers – an inclusive platform where the different voices, perspectives and reflections of key players in the global multilateral environment are heard and taken into account. We believe that constant and constructive dialogue is the only way to build a multilateral system that operates on universally accepted norms.
This year, BSF will once again host a wide range of interesting guests from the worlds of politics, business and civil society. It will touch on all the most crucial challenges of global society, while also raising themes that have the potential to shape our common future. The most interesting panels will therefore include a panel on the (dys)functioning of the global multilateral framework (including Slovenia’s experience in the work of the UNSC so far), a panel on the Middle East, preparations for the Future Summit, the Indo-Pacific, India, disinformation, food security, energy and much more.
As one of the novelties of the Bled Strategic Forum 2024 programme, an innovative concept of “Living library” will be introduced. This is an interactive event where people with different experiences and backgrounds on a chosen topic act as “books”. Conference participants (“readers”) talk to them and learn about their stories and perspectives on the topic.
The Bled Strategic Forum continues to strengthen its partnerships and this year is working with more than ten key global thinkers from different continents to shape the programme. It continues its long-standing collaboration with leading organisations such as the Atlantic Council, the Nelson Mandela Center and the BMW Foundation, and this year for the first time is working with the Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity and the Oxford Process on International Law Protections in Cyberspace. Collaborating with global partners allows for a broader understanding of global issues, a wider range of speakers and topics, and the inclusion of new perspectives.
This year, for the 13th time, the Young Bled Strategic Forum will take place on the sidelines of the Bled Strategic Forum. This year, 42 selected young people from all over the world will take part in the event, which will take place in Pokljuka between 30 August and 1 September. They will focus on the causes of the existence of different realities and on ways to reunite them in a programme entitled “Restoring Common Ground“. This year, the participants of the Young Bled Strategic Forum will also be actively involved in the Bled Strategic Forum International Conference. They will have the opportunity to participate as speakers in the debates, the priority to ask questions in the debate (the so-called first question opportunity) and the possibility to organise their own debates within the Forum.