GCSP Annual Report 2025

The Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP) presents its 2025 Annual Report. As we reflect on the past three decades, we recognise that the world has grown exponentially more complex. Our era is defined by a deeply interconnected array of issues and challenges, where a once bipolar world order has given way to a multipolar reality. Various power actors, each with conflicting interests, ideologies, and objectives, now shape the global landscape and agenda.

In this evolving landscape, the GCSP has remained steadfast in its mission of building peace, security, and international cooperation through the ability to adapt, innovate, and anticipate the interlinked and far-reaching security challenges the world faces.  

The Centre strategically embraces the Swiss principles of independence, impartiality and inclusivity. For three decades, these principles have enabled us to bring together both likeminded and non-likeminded individuals, fostering an environment where dialogue thrives and mutual understanding is possible. Whether through executive education courses, dialogues, research, or our community of alumni, experts and partners, the GCSP excels at creating open communication channels and safe spaces in an increasingly more fragmented and polarised world.

President and Executive Director’s Anniversary Message

On 19 November 1985, US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met in Versoix, near Geneva, in an effort to slow the nuclear arms race and reopen dialogue between their rival blocs. The Geneva Summit did not end the arms race, but did restore something essential: the practice of engagement between adversaries. It was from this historical moment that the logic of the GCSP’s mission emerged.

A decade later, Switzerland transformed this insight into an institutional commitment. In 1995, Federal Councillor Adolf Ogi initiated the creation of an international foundation in Geneva to extend the impact of this dialogue-focused approach and anchor it in a permanent framework. Conceived as a Swiss contribution to peace and security in Europe, the GCSP was designed to expand executive education and serve as a platform for exchange among security practitioners.

This mission was further consolidated in 1996, when Switzerland joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP). The GCSP became Switzerland’s practical contribution to this initiative and is today recognised as a Partnership Training, Education and Dialogue Centre, embedding the Swiss logic of dialogue and inclusion within a broader framework of peace and security cooperation.

Today, the geopolitical environment is again marked by rivalry, mistrust and the return of hard security concerns. But unlike during the Cold War, today’s challenges are more interconnected: conventional warfare, technological disruption, climate stress and geopolitical competition now reinforce one another. In this context, the GCSP’s founding logic from 30 years ago remains as relevant as ever: dialogue, education and trust-building are key contributions to security. By bringing together practitioners from different political and strategic cultures, the GCSP continues to invest in the professional relationships and shared understanding that reduce miscalculation and sustain cooperation in times of tension.  

In 2025 alone, the GCSP supported 1,960 experts from more than 130 countries in 85 executive seminars and workshops. Each year, training programme participants such as these come to the Centre with questions – and leave with new perspectives, which they take back to their countries and institutions.

In a polarised world, mediation between conflicting parties is an essential pillar of rebuilding peace and security. Through our diplomatic dialogues, we provide informal spaces and bring decision-makers, practitioners, and experts together in structured and discreet exchanges. In these settings, what is often missing in formal forums can emerge: trust, clarity and, at best, a genuine understanding of the other side’s position.

We dared to start reflecting on a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war when it was still considered to be taboo. We brought together leading experts from around the globe to identify modalities of a state-of-the-art ceasefire and made the results available to the relevant parties.

This principle has also shaped our engagement in the High North. At a time when relevant stakeholders stopped talking to each other for political reasons, we created the informal space that allowed dialogue to continue among all Arctic stakeholders. Recent developments have only confirmed the value and foresight of this approach.

Our GCSP fellows have carried what we call the “GCSP Way” forward in many ways. Some have tested new ideas; others have built new institutions; still others have challenged established ways of thinking. This mindset is formed through sustained engagement and the discipline of serious reflection.

It is this mindset that allows us to look ahead with confidence, even amid today’s many crises. Because of the people who make up the GCSP, we do not think in short cycles, but in long-term perspectives. This long view gives us the steadiness and resolve required for what lies ahead.

Anniversaries are moments for reflection; they are also moments of recommitment.

We reaffirm our dedication to the purpose for which the GCSP was founded: to be a place where leadership is shaped, where dialogue is nurtured, where strategic thinking is reflected, and where complexity is met with clear and innovative thinking.

This spirit continues to guide the GCSP today, and will do so in the future, whatever it brings.

Ambassador Jean-David Levitte, Foundation Council President

Ambassador Thomas Greminger, Executive Director