When does the Berlin Security Conference 2026 take place?

The Berlin Security Conference 2026 is scheduled to begin in November.

Where is the Berlin Security Conference 2026 held?

The conference is held in the city of Berlin, DEU.

Berlin Security Conference 2026

Name: Berlin Security Conference 2026
Start: 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z
Location: Berlin

Nov 3, 2026Berlin, GermanyIn-person

Registration open

The Berlin Security Conference 2026 is a significant event focusing on security and defense within Europe. Hosted in Berlin, DEU, this conference serves as a platform for discussions on pressing issues relevant to the region. It brings together a diverse group of participants to engage in dialogue and strategic planning.

Committees & topics

General Assembly (GA)
General Assembly: Reforming Multilateralism in an Era of Great-Power Rivalry
Security Council (SC)
Security Council: Sudan, Cyber Norms, and the Crisis of Collective Security
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
Food and Agriculture Organization: Conflict, Climate, and the Global Food Security Crisis
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
UNHCR: Protecting the Displaced Amid Record Forced Migration
Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)
ECOSOC: Sovereign Debt Distress and Digital Public Infrastructure
UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC)
UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime: Combating Evolving Illicit Economies
United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA)
United Nations Environment Assembly: Plastics, Biodiversity, and the Triple Planetary Crisis

Why it matters

The Berlin Security Conference 2026 is a crucial forum for understanding the evolving security landscape in Europe. The discussions held in Berlin will likely influence policy directions and collaborative efforts among European nations and their partners. Given the dynamic geopolitical environment, such gatherings are essential for fostering stability and addressing emerging threats.

This conference provides an opportunity for various stakeholders to converge and exchange perspectives on complex security challenges. The outcomes of these discussions can contribute to shaping regional defense strategies and international cooperation frameworks. For those engaged in diplomacy and international relations, the insights gleaned from this event are invaluable for navigating the intricacies of European security.

How to prepare

To effectively engage with the themes of the Berlin Security Conference 2026, participants should consider a thorough review of contemporary European security challenges. Understanding the perspectives of key European nations and their allies will be beneficial. Familiarity with the broader geopolitical context, including the roles of major global powers, will enhance one's ability to contribute meaningfully to the discussions.

Delegates should prepare to analyze the various dimensions of security, from conventional defense to emerging threats such as cyber warfare and hybrid conflicts. Utilizing frameworks such as What Is Stakeholder Mapping? and Dynamic Analysis can help in understanding the complex interplay of actors and factors at play. Consideration of Engagement Strategies will also be vital for effective participation and networking during the conference.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Germany

As the host nation, DEU plays a central role in facilitating discussions on European security and defense, often advocating for multilateral approaches and regional stability.

Role in topic

DEU's position as a major economic and political power in Europe means its perspectives on defense spending, collective security, and international partnerships are critical to the conference's outcomes. Its leadership in regional initiatives will be a key focus.

United States

The USA is a key transatlantic partner, often emphasizing NATO's role in European security and advocating for burden-sharing among allies.

Role in topic

The USA's involvement is crucial for discussions on transatlantic security architecture, military cooperation, and responses to global threats. Its strategic interests and defense commitments significantly impact European security dynamics.

France

FRA often champions European strategic autonomy and a stronger, more unified European defense capability, sometimes distinct from or complementary to NATO.

Role in topic

FRA's views on defense integration, military interventions, and the future of European security initiatives will be a significant part of the dialogue, influencing the direction of European defense policy.

United Kingdom

GBR maintains a strong commitment to European security through NATO, while also pursuing independent foreign and defense policy objectives.

Role in topic

GBR's contributions to collective security, its perspectives on global threats, and its role in various international defense partnerships will be important for understanding the broader European security context.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

General Assembly (GA)

General Assembly: Reforming Multilateralism in an Era of Great-Power Rivalry

The UN General Assembly, established under the 1945 UN Charter, is the only universal-membership organ of the United Nations, with each of its 193 member states holding a single vote. While its resolutions are non-binding, the GA has historically served as the principal forum for setting normative agendas — from decolonization in the 1960s to the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals and the 2024 Pact for the Future. In recent years, repeated paralysis in the Security Council over Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan has pushed states to revive instruments such as the 'Uniting for Peace' procedure (Resolution 377A) and the April 2022 'veto initiative' (Resolution 76/262), which obliges the GA to convene whenever a P5 veto is cast. The core dispute today concerns the legitimacy and effectiveness of the post-1945 order. Developing states, organized through the G77 and the African Group, press for Security Council enlargement, reform of international financial institutions, and a stronger GA role in peace and security. Western states broadly defend existing structures while accepting incremental reform, whereas Russia and China increasingly frame Western-led initiatives as selective or interventionist. The Pact for the Future, adopted in September 2024, committed members to negotiate concrete reforms but left most disputes — including veto restraint and Council composition — unresolved. The GA's 2026 agenda will likely revisit Council reform, financing for development in the wake of the FfD4 conference, and the operationalization of the Global Digital Compact, all against a backdrop of declining trust in multilateral institutions.

Key players

Security Council (SC)

Security Council: Sudan, Cyber Norms, and the Crisis of Collective Security

The Security Council, composed of five permanent members with veto power and ten elected members, holds primary responsibility under Chapter VII of the Charter for the maintenance of international peace and security. Its post-Cold War activism — sanctions regimes, peacekeeping mandates, and referrals to the ICC — has given way since 2014 to growing paralysis, with vetoes cast over Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza, and rising abstentions on Sudan and the Sahel. Resolution 2728 (March 2024) on a Gaza ceasefire and repeated failures on Ukraine have intensified debate over the Council's credibility. Two issues are likely to dominate the 2026 docket. The first is Sudan, where the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, ongoing since April 2023, has produced the world's largest displacement crisis and credible findings of atrocities in Darfur. The Council's Darfur sanctions regime under Resolution 1591 (2005) remains poorly enforced, and panels of experts have documented sustained external arms flows. The second is cybersecurity and critical infrastructure: following the conclusion of the Open-Ended Working Group on ICTs, states are negotiating how the existing UN framework of responsible state behavior applies to ransomware, attacks on hospitals and energy grids, and AI-enabled operations. Underlying both files is a deeper structural question: whether a Council designed in 1945 can produce binding action when its permanent members are themselves parties or patrons to the conflicts under discussion.

Key players

Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

Food and Agriculture Organization: Conflict, Climate, and the Global Food Security Crisis

Founded in 1945 and headquartered in Rome, the FAO is the UN specialized agency charged with leading international efforts to defeat hunger and improve nutrition and food security. For decades, its work centered on agricultural productivity and rural development; since the 2007–08 food price crisis, it has increasingly operated at the intersection of conflict, climate, and trade. The 2022 disruption of Black Sea grain exports following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the 2023 collapse of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, and successive droughts in the Horn of Africa pushed acute food insecurity to record levels: FAO and WFP have repeatedly warned of famine conditions in Sudan, Gaza, Yemen, and parts of the Sahel. The core disputes are threefold. First, how to reconcile open trade in agricultural commodities with national food-security export restrictions, particularly on rice, wheat, and fertilizers. Second, how to finance adaptation for smallholder farmers facing climate shocks, including through the FAO's work on the Koronivia joint work on agriculture under the UNFCCC. Third, how to address conflict-driven hunger, where Security Council Resolution 2417 (2018) condemned starvation as a method of warfare but enforcement has been minimal. FAO's 2026 agenda will be shaped by the Committee on World Food Security's review of the Voluntary Guidelines, ongoing reform of agrifood systems following the 2021 and 2023 Food Systems Summits, and persistent funding shortfalls for humanitarian food assistance.

Key players

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

UNHCR: Protecting the Displaced Amid Record Forced Migration

UNHCR was established by the General Assembly in 1950 to address post-war displacement in Europe; its mandate, grounded in the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol, has since expanded to cover refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced persons, stateless people, and, increasingly, those displaced by disasters. As of 2024, UNHCR reported over 120 million forcibly displaced people worldwide — a historic high — driven by conflicts in Sudan, Ukraine, Syria, Myanmar, the eastern DRC, and Gaza, alongside protracted situations in Afghanistan and Venezuela. The core disputes center on burden-sharing and the integrity of the asylum system. Low- and middle-income countries host roughly three-quarters of the world's refugees, yet face shrinking humanitarian budgets; the 2023 Global Refugee Forum pledges remain only partially funded. In high-income states, asylum politics have hardened, with externalization arrangements (UK–Rwanda, EU–Tunisia and Egypt), pushback practices, and tightened temporary protection regimes raising serious questions about compliance with the principle of non-refoulement. Meanwhile, the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees called for more equitable responsibility-sharing, but its review cycles have produced modest results. A further front concerns climate-driven displacement: there is no binding international framework, and UNHCR's 2024 Strategic Framework for Climate Action seeks to clarify protection gaps for those displaced across borders by environmental factors — a debate also alive at the UNHRC and the IOM.

Key players

Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)

ECOSOC: Sovereign Debt Distress and Digital Public Infrastructure

ECOSOC, one of the six principal organs created by the UN Charter, coordinates the economic, social, and related work of the UN system and its specialized agencies. Comprising 54 elected members, it convenes the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development and oversees most of the UN's normative work on development finance. With the SDGs badly off-track at the 2023 midpoint review, ECOSOC has become the principal arena for debating the post-COVID development finance crunch and the architecture of digital cooperation. Two issues dominate. First, sovereign debt: more than half of low-income countries are in or at high risk of debt distress, while the G20 Common Framework — launched in 2020 — has produced slow and uneven restructurings (Zambia, Ghana, Sri Lanka). African and Latin American debtors, supported by UNCTAD and UN DESA analyses, increasingly call for a UN-led sovereign debt workout mechanism, an idea resisted by major creditor states and the IMF. The Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in 2025 placed the issue squarely on the multilateral agenda. Second, digital public infrastructure (DPI): following the Global Digital Compact adopted as part of the 2024 Pact for the Future, ECOSOC is focused on inclusive deployment of identity, payments, and data-exchange systems, with disputes over interoperability standards, data governance, and financing for low-income adopters.

Key players

UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC)

UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime: Combating Evolving Illicit Economies

The UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, known as the Palermo Convention, was adopted by the General Assembly in 2000 and entered into force in 2003. With over 190 states parties, it is the principal global legal instrument against organized crime and is supplemented by three protocols: on trafficking in persons (especially women and children), smuggling of migrants, and illicit manufacturing of and trafficking in firearms. The Conference of the Parties (COP), serviced by UNODC in Vienna, oversees implementation and in 2018 finally adopted a peer review mechanism after years of negotiation. The contemporary landscape has shifted dramatically since Palermo's drafting. Synthetic drugs — particularly fentanyl and methamphetamine — have overtaken plant-based narcotics in many markets; cyber-enabled fraud compounds in Southeast Asia have created industrial-scale human trafficking; environmental crimes (illegal logging, mining, wildlife and waste trafficking) have grown into one of the largest illicit economies; and illicit financial flows tied to sanctions evasion and crypto-assets challenge traditional anti-money-laundering frameworks. The 2024 adoption of the UN Convention against Cybercrime in New York added a parallel instrument, though its human-rights implications remain contested. Core debates within the UNTOC framework concern strengthening the review mechanism, mainstreaming gender and human rights in law enforcement cooperation, and updating protocols to address new forms of trafficking and cyber-enabled crime.

Key players

United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA)

United Nations Environment Assembly: Plastics, Biodiversity, and the Triple Planetary Crisis

The UN Environment Assembly, established in 2012 following the Rio+20 Conference, is the world's highest-level decision-making body on the environment, with universal membership of all 193 UN states. Convened biennially in Nairobi by UNEP, it has become the principal venue for setting the global environmental agenda around what UNEP terms the 'triple planetary crisis' of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. UNEA-5.2 in 2022 launched negotiations on a legally binding global instrument on plastic pollution; UNEA-6 in 2024 advanced resolutions on critical minerals, sand mining, and chemicals management. The most prominent current file is the Global Plastics Treaty. The Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) was tasked with concluding text by end-2024, but the INC-5 session in Busan ended without agreement, with a coalition led by Rwanda, Norway, and the EU pushing production caps and a 'High Ambition' approach, while major petrochemical producers — Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, and others — resist supply-side measures. Negotiations have continued into 2025–26 and remain a central UNEA concern. Other key debates include implementation of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted under the CBD in 2022, the science-policy interface on chemicals and waste following the establishment of a new dedicated panel in 2024, and the relationship between UNEA's normative work and the COP processes under the UNFCCC and CBD.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for Berlin Security Conference 2026.

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Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

Germany November 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

Berlin Security Conference 2026

Nov 3, 2026Berlin, GermanyIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

General Assembly (GA)
General Assembly: Reforming Multilateralism in an Era of Great-Power Rivalry
Security Council (SC)
Security Council: Sudan, Cyber Norms, and the Crisis of Collective Security
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
Food and Agriculture Organization: Conflict, Climate, and the Global Food Security Crisis
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
UNHCR: Protecting the Displaced Amid Record Forced Migration
Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)
ECOSOC: Sovereign Debt Distress and Digital Public Infrastructure
UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC)
UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime: Combating Evolving Illicit Economies
United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA)
United Nations Environment Assembly: Plastics, Biodiversity, and the Triple Planetary Crisis

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Germany

As the host nation, DEU plays a central role in facilitating discussions on European security and defense, often advocating for multilateral approaches and regional stability.

Role in topic

United States

The USA is a key transatlantic partner, often emphasizing NATO's role in European security and advocating for burden-sharing among allies.

Role in topic

France

FRA often champions European strategic autonomy and a stronger, more unified European defense capability, sometimes distinct from or complementary to NATO.

Role in topic

United Kingdom

GBR maintains a strong commitment to European security through NATO, while also pursuing independent foreign and defense policy objectives.

Role in topic