Events & Gatherings

1. The end of multilateralism and the return of power politics

Karim's intervention offered an unambiguous diagnosis: the world has already shifted towards an order marked by the primacy of force. Multilateralism is in deep crisis, while major powers adopt logics of direct confrontation.

The main consequence is structural instability, marked by heightened risks of regional fragmentation, particularly in the Middle East. This dynamic challenges the very foundations of the rules-based international order.

2. The structural crisis of development

The contributions of Alexandre and the UN expert highlight a deeper crisis: that of the development paradigm itself. Historically, development appears as a geopolitical instrument inscribed in the logic of the Cold War. From its very origins, it has been crossed by contradictions between political, economic and normative objectives.

More fundamentally, development is being transformed into a system of risk management, centred on the financialisation of aid, the use of instruments such as blended finance, and the transfer of risks onto local actors. This evolution marks the shift from a project of transformation to a logic of adaptation.

3. The centrality of sovereignty and agency

A central theme of the discussions is that of agency and sovereignty. Participants stress that the fundamental question is no longer that of development as such, but of the capacity of states and societies to act.

In a context of global predation, the priority becomes the preservation of capacities for action: the capacity to define autonomous strategies, to resist external pressures, and to anticipate transformations. This reflection leads to a relativisation of certain traditional priorities — notably democracy and governance — which appear secondary in the face of issues of survival and sovereignty.

4. Rethinking strategy in an unpredictable world

The discussions reveal a transformation in our relationship to time and strategy. In a world marked by uncertainty and volatility, traditional planning approaches appear ill-suited.

Strategy must now integrate the unpredictability of actors, the centrality of emotions and perceptions, the personalisation of power and the acceleration of technological transformations. This requires moving beyond linear approaches in favour of more flexible frameworks, capable of adapting to unstable environments.

5. Africa and North Africa as strategic spaces

Africa appears as one of the principal spaces of transformation on a global scale. It combines rapid demographic growth, strategic resources and significant economic potential.

North Africa, in particular, occupies a pivotal position at the interface between Europe, Africa and the Middle East. This position confers on it a strategic role in the ongoing reconfigurations. However, the region faces several challenges: economic stagnation, political fragmentation, external dependency and the absence of structuring projects.

Conclusion: rebuilding strategic thinking capacity

The roundtable highlights the need to rethink frameworks of analysis and action in depth. Inherited paradigms no longer make it possible to understand or act in today's world.

In this context, the role of initiatives such as PNT is crucial. The aim is to rebuild a capacity for strategic reflection by combining critical analysis, knowledge production and the networking of actors. The stakes are not only intellectual. They are political: the goal is to give societies back the capacity to define their own future in a world of recomposition.

The end of a normative order

The idea that the contemporary international system remains structured — even imperfectly — by a normative order inherited from 1945 is becoming increasingly untenable. The principles that formed the moral and legal architecture of post-war multilateralism — collective security, respect for sovereignty, refusal of annexation by force, centrality of international law — still exist on paper but no longer produce the organising effects once attributed to them.

What emerged through the exchanges is the idea of a post-normative order — not in the sense that all norms have disappeared, but in the sense that norms no longer effectively constrain the conduct of powers. They are invoked, selected, circumvented or suspended depending on the balance of power.

The geopolitical shift has already taken place. The monsters are no longer on the horizon; they are in power.

This formulation, which marked the discussion, does not simply refer to the rise of more brutal or cynical leaders. It points to a deeper mutation: the disappearance of the mediations that once allowed domination to be wrapped in a language of principles, rights or universality. We have not simply returned to classical realpolitik. We are dealing with a more unstable configuration that combines nineteenth-century power politics, neoconservative residues and unapologetic transactionalism.

The consequences of this shift are particularly visible in the Middle East, where war, radicalisation and dynamics of fragmentation have ceased to be anomalies and become ordinary modes of governing the region. What is alarming here is not only war as such, but the way fragmentation itself tends to become a fatality.

This change of context also forces us to revise the way we think about strategy. In a universe marked by post-truth, by the hyper-volatility of discourses and by the extreme personalisation of power, strategy can no longer be conceived as it was in a relatively predictable world. The rise of idiosyncrasy, the growing importance of leaders' psychology, the role of emotions, fear and sad passions are profoundly transforming the conditions of political decision-making.

Development as a political fiction in crisis

This crisis of multilateralism entails a parallel — but not separate — crisis of development. Development has never been a purely technical domain. From its origin, it was a geopolitical project. It was not first and foremost about organising shared prosperity, but about stabilising spaces deemed vulnerable, containing adversaries and structuring a global hierarchy in which certain states defined desirable trajectories for others.

The history of development is, in this respect, a history of successive displacements. First tied to colonial logics and then to the post-war order, it was reshaped by structural adjustment programmes, by economic liberalisation, then by discourses on good governance, the fight against corruption, human development, sustainable development and finally resilience. Each of these sequences shifted the terms of the problem without ever questioning the central one: who defines priorities, who bears the costs, and to whose benefit are these policies conducted?

It is precisely this vocabulary that is now wavering. Good governance, resilience, efficiency and strategic autonomy were presented as neutral, almost universal, management notions. Yet they belong to a managerial logic that transposes onto states categories designed for corporations. They obscure power relations, international hierarchies, material asymmetries and distributive conflicts.

This evolution is particularly visible in the rise of the resilience paradigm. Whereas development still claimed — even if often illusorily — to transform economic and social structures, resilience merely seeks to make shocks bearable. It no longer promises emancipation; it organises the capacity to absorb pain.

From aid to risk management

The contemporary turn of the international aid system can be summarised as the shift from a paradigm of transformation to a paradigm of risk management. In practice, the aim is no longer to produce development in the strong sense, but to mitigate shocks, secure investments and maintain environments stable enough to remain integrable into the global economy.

Within this framework, aid is becoming financialised. The dominant instruments are now guarantees, insurance schemes, blended finance arrangements and first-loss coverage mechanisms. The stated aim is to mobilise the private sector — to move from billions to trillions. But the real logic lies elsewhere: it is less about funding social needs than about reducing investors' exposure to risk.

This transformation is accompanied by a profound shift in the distribution of responsibility. The decisive question is that of agency. Who acts? Who decides? Who is held accountable? The emerging system has the peculiarity of transferring the burden of adaptation onto local societies while keeping decision-making centres outside. Local communities become responsible for managing risks they neither created nor have the means to address at their structural roots.

The growing reliance on the private sector is presented as a pragmatic response to the exhaustion of public funding. Yet there is no indication that it can meet the needs of the most fragile contexts. What appears at this stage, on the contrary, is a concentration of flows towards intermediate contexts, extractive sectors and spaces deemed profitable or strategic, while the most vulnerable regions remain structurally underfunded.

Politicising: what does repoliticising mean?

One of the most fruitful questions raised during the discussion was: what exactly does politicising mean? Politicisation does not merely mean reintroducing ideological discourse where supposed neutrality reigns. It first consists in re-establishing the links between decisions presented as technical and the power relations they organise.

To politicise the energy transition, for instance, is not to moralise the debate; it is to ask the questions that technocratic language tends to evacuate: who pays the cost of the transition, who captures the green rent, which productive fabric is reinforced, what energy or industrial sovereignty is being pursued, and on which social and political coalitions such a transition can be built.

To be political today means seeking to regain agency and to restore sovereignty — not in the sense of authoritarian hardening, but in the sense of reclaiming real margins of decision.

Sovereignty, stagnation and survivalism

Sovereignty emerged as the central concept of the moment. But the exchanges also showed how saturated with ambiguity this term has become. Today, there are sovereigntisms without sovereignty, anti-imperialist discourses without real autonomy, and resistance rhetoric devoid of productive, institutional or social capacity.

A crucial point of the debate was the insistence that a state does not protect its sovereignty through authoritarianism alone. On the contrary, authoritarianism — when combined with economic stagnation, structural inefficiency and the closure of horizons — fuels exponential instability. Sovereignty requires capacities, flexibility, strategic insertion in the regional context and the preservation of vital interests.

The notion of stagnation makes it possible to understand violence, fragmentation and disenchantment not only as products of political conflicts, but also as effects of an exhaustion of historical promises. North African societies live in an in-between space where the old narratives of progress have lost their credibility, without new structuring projects having emerged. This is what was meant by countries without a project.

At the same time, certain regional contexts — notably the Levant — already operate under a logic of survival. While the Levant faces an existential threat and lives in the immediacy of survivalism, North Africa still has, despite worsening conditions, a space in which to project itself. This relative "luxury" creates a particular responsibility. It makes all the more urgent the construction of a strategic thinking capable of preventing the region from also sliding into pure survival mode.

Africa and North Africa as strategic spaces

Another important contribution of the discussion was to shift the gaze towards Africa — not as a mere periphery of crises to manage, but as one of the principal spaces of growth, resources and recomposition on a global scale. This perspective requires a break with a linear vision of development.

The contributions emphasised the disruptive nature of certain African dynamics: the rapidity of social transformations, the rise of new generations with direct access to global knowledge, the growing role of Euro-African diasporas, and the emergence of forms of entrepreneurship, innovation and circulation of knowledge that escape old patterns.

However, this opening is not automatic. It runs up against major structural blockages, particularly in the fields of energy, critical technologies, water, infrastructure and industrial alliances. One cannot seriously speak of artificial intelligence, technological transition or reindustrialisation without raising fundamental questions: who controls energy, who owns the chips, who masters supply chains, who secures water, which inputs are strategic, and which regional resources may serve as geopolitical leverage.

North Africa, in this perspective, is neither a simple extension of Europe nor an appendix of the Middle East. It must be thought of as a distinct strategic space, located at the intersection of the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab neighbourhood and the Mediterranean. The point is no longer to think the Maghreb solely through a European lens, but to reflect on its place in a world where its relations with Africa, the Middle East and the Global South are becoming decisive.

What is to be done?

The final question that runs through the entire seminar is the question of "what is to be done?". It received no simple answer — and that is fortunate. But the debates allow us to sketch a few guiding lines.

The word emancipation, proposed in conclusion, is essential here. It allows us to overcome the sterile alternative between technocratic resignation and empty radical rhetoric. It reminds us that the central question is not only that of survival, but that of the capacity of societies to once again become the actors of their own trajectory.

The specific task of a space such as the Policy Network for Transitions: not to produce yet another commentary on the crises of the present, but to contribute to reformulating the terms of the debate, clarifying concepts, connecting issues too often fragmented, and making thinkable what dominant language renders invisible.

At a time when the old myths are unravelling and instruments outlive their ends, strategic thinking once again becomes a condition of action — and perhaps, more fundamentally, a condition of sovereignty.