Where is the "Geopolitical Update 2026" event taking place?

The event is scheduled to take place in Eindhoven, NLD.

What is the primary focus of the "Geopolitical Update 2026" conference?

The conference focuses on the global shift from civil production to military production, examining its geopolitical implications.

What city hosts this geopolitical update?

This geopolitical update is hosted in the city of Eindhoven.

Geopolitical Update 2026 – From Civil Production to Military Production

Name: Geopolitical Update 2026 – From Civil Production to Military Production
Start: 2026-06-08T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-06-08T00:00:00Z
Location: Eindhoven

Jun 8, 2026Eindhoven, NetherlandsIn-person

Registration open

The "Geopolitical Update 2026 – From Civil Production to Military Production" event, held in Eindhoven, NLD, focuses on the significant global shift from civilian-oriented manufacturing to military production. This transformation is a critical response to evolving geopolitical landscapes and heightened security concerns worldwide. The conference aims to explore the multifaceted implications of this industrial reorientation. This event serves as a crucial platform for understanding the economic, strategic, and societal impacts of this pivot. It brings together experts to discuss how nations are adapting their industrial bases to meet new defense requirements, and the challenges and opportunities that arise from such a fundamental change in production priorities.

Committees & topics

Topics
Geopolitical Developments and the Shift Toward a Militarized World Economy · International Trade in an Era of Strategic Competition · Industry and the Return of Strategic Industrial Policy · The Geopolitical Annual Trade Risk Index (GATRI) · Dual-Use Industries and the Blurring of Civil-Military Boundaries · Geopolitical Risks and the New Risk Landscape · Trade Developments and the Reorganization of Global Commerce · Strategic Resilience: Securing Supply Chains, Energy, and Critical Materials

Why it matters

The transition from civil to military production is a profound geopolitical development with far-reaching consequences. It signifies a global re-evaluation of security priorities, where national defense and strategic autonomy are increasingly influencing economic policy and industrial output. This shift can lead to significant reallocations of resources, labor, and technological innovation, impacting both domestic economies and international trade relations.

Understanding this industrial transformation is vital for policymakers, industry leaders, and analysts. It sheds light on the future of global supply chains, the potential for technological advancements in defense sectors, and the implications for international stability. The event's focus on this topic underscores its relevance in a world grappling with persistent and emerging security challenges, making it a key area for informed discussion and strategic planning.

Furthermore, this reorientation has implications for international cooperation and competition. As countries invest more in military production, it can alter power dynamics, create new alliances, and intensify existing rivalries. The event provides a timely opportunity to analyze these complex interactions and their potential to reshape the global order.

How to prepare

To effectively engage with the discussions at this event, participants should consider the broader context of industrial policy and its intersection with national security. A foundational understanding of how economic structures can be adapted for strategic objectives, as discussed in lessons such as "engagement-strategies" and "dynamic-analysis," will be beneficial. This includes examining the historical precedents of such industrial shifts and their long-term economic and social effects.

Attendees should also prepare by researching the concept of dual-use technologies – innovations that have both civilian and military applications. Understanding the challenges and opportunities associated with converting civil production capabilities to military uses, and vice versa, will be crucial. This involves considering the technological, logistical, and ethical dimensions of such conversions.

Finally, it is important to consider the various stakeholders involved in this transition, from government agencies and defense contractors to civilian industries and labor forces. Applying concepts from "what-is-stakeholder-mapping" and "hidden-stakeholders" can help in anticipating different perspectives and potential areas of collaboration or conflict.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Netherlands

As the host nation, NLD is likely interested in the economic and security implications of this industrial shift for European stability and its own defense industry.

Role in topic

NLD, as a member of international defense alliances, plays a role in adapting its industrial base to meet collective security needs while balancing economic interests. The event's location in Eindhoven highlights its potential as a hub for technological and industrial innovation in this context.

Topics & background

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

Geopolitical Developments and the Shift Toward a Militarized World Economy

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the post-Cold War assumption that economic interdependence would dampen great-power conflict has eroded. NATO has expanded to include Finland and Sweden, defense budgets across Europe have risen above the 2% of GDP benchmark for the first time in a generation, and the United States has formalized strategic competition with China as the organizing principle of its national security policy. Parallel conflicts in Gaza, the Red Sea, the Sahel, and the South Caucasus have reinforced the perception that the international order is fragmenting into competing blocs. This fragmentation is accelerating a transition from civil to military production priorities. Governments that spent three decades optimizing supply chains for cost efficiency are now restructuring them around security, sovereignty, and surge capacity. Defense primes in the U.S. and Europe are reopening munitions lines closed after the Cold War, while China continues the fastest peacetime military buildup since 1945. The Indo-Pacific, with flashpoints around Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the Korean Peninsula, has become the second major theater of strategic concern alongside Europe. The debate today is not whether rearmament is occurring, but how durable it will be, how it will reshape industrial policy, and whether arms-control architecture — already weakened by the lapse of the INF Treaty and the suspension of New START obligations — can be rebuilt before a new arms race becomes self-sustaining.

Key players

International Trade in an Era of Strategic Competition

The rules-based trading system built around the WTO is under sustained pressure. The Appellate Body has been paralyzed since 2019, tariffs have proliferated as instruments of industrial and security policy, and major economies are openly embracing 'de-risking' from rivals. U.S.-China trade relations remain governed less by WTO commitments than by export controls on advanced semiconductors, restrictions on outbound investment, and tariffs on electric vehicles, batteries, and solar components. The EU has followed with its own anti-coercion instrument, carbon border adjustment mechanism, and countervailing duties on Chinese EVs. Meanwhile, trade flows are reorganizing along geopolitical lines. 'Friend-shoring' and 'near-shoring' have shifted manufacturing toward Mexico, Vietnam, India, and Poland, while South-South trade — particularly within BRICS+ — has expanded. Russia's pivot to Asian markets following Western sanctions has accelerated this reordering, as has the weaponization of chokepoints from the Strait of Hormuz to the Red Sea. The central question is whether the global system is bifurcating into two loosely coupled blocs or whether a more multipolar, transactional trade order is emerging in which middle powers hedge between Washington and Beijing.

Key players

Industry and the Return of Strategic Industrial Policy

Industrial policy, long out of fashion in OECD economies, has returned to the center of economic strategy. The U.S. CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act commit hundreds of billions of dollars to semiconductors, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing. The EU has responded with the Chips Act, the Net-Zero Industry Act, and the Critical Raw Materials Act. Japan and South Korea are subsidizing domestic fab capacity, and India is using Production-Linked Incentives to build out electronics and pharmaceuticals. The driver is not only competitiveness but security. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of just-in-time supply chains, and the war in Ukraine demonstrated that industrial base depth — particularly in munitions, energy, and basic chemicals — is a strategic asset. China's dominance in processing critical minerals, batteries, and rare earths has prompted Western governments to treat industrial capacity as a national security variable rather than a market outcome. The open question is whether parallel subsidy races will produce resilient capacity or wasteful overbuild, and whether climate-driven and security-driven industrial policies can be aligned rather than working at cross purposes.

Key players

The Geopolitical Annual Trade Risk Index (GATRI)

Composite indices measuring geopolitical risk to trade have proliferated as firms and ministries seek to quantify a more uncertain operating environment. Tools such as the BlackRock Geopolitical Risk Indicator, the Caldara-Iacoviello GPR index, and various private GATRI-style frameworks aggregate signals including sanctions intensity, export-control density, shipping-lane disruption, tariff escalation, and the frequency of state interventions in cross-border investment. The post-2022 environment has pushed most of these indices to multi-decade highs. The analytical challenge is that geopolitical risk is no longer episodic but structural. Sanctions regimes against Russia, Iran, and parts of China's tech sector are now permanent fixtures. Shipping disruptions in the Red Sea following Houthi attacks have rerouted a meaningful share of Europe-Asia container traffic around the Cape of Good Hope, with knock-on effects for emissions, delivery times, and inventory costs. Insurance markets, particularly Lloyd's syndicates, have repriced war-risk premiums across multiple corridors. For governments, the policy question is how to translate index signals into actionable resilience measures — stockpiling, diversification mandates, or sovereign reinsurance — without overreacting to short-term volatility.

Key players

Dual-Use Industries and the Blurring of Civil-Military Boundaries

Dual-use technologies — those with both civilian and military applications — have become the central battleground of strategic competition. Semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, space systems, drones, and advanced materials all fall into this category. The U.S. October 2022 and October 2023 export controls on advanced chips and lithography equipment to China marked a decisive turn toward treating compute as a strategic commodity, and the Netherlands and Japan have aligned with key elements of that regime via ASML and Tokyo Electron restrictions. Ukraine has demonstrated how commercial technologies — Starlink terminals, DJI-class drones, satellite imagery, and open-source intelligence — can be rapidly militarized. This has compressed the traditional separation between defense primes and commercial tech, forcing governments to update export-control lists, investment-screening regimes (such as CFIUS and the EU FDI framework), and research-security policies for universities and national labs. The debate now centers on how to maintain open innovation ecosystems while protecting genuinely sensitive capabilities, and how to coordinate controls multilaterally so that restrictions are not simply circumvented through third countries.

Key players

Geopolitical Risks and the New Risk Landscape

The contemporary risk landscape is defined by the simultaneous activation of multiple, interconnected geopolitical fault lines. Europe faces a protracted war in Ukraine and the prospect of a longer confrontation with Russia regardless of how that war ends. The Middle East has seen the most intense regional escalation in decades following the October 2023 Hamas attacks and Israel's subsequent operations in Gaza and Lebanon, with direct Israel-Iran exchanges in 2024 marking a new threshold. The Indo-Pacific carries the highest-consequence tail risk through a potential Taiwan contingency. Layered on these are systemic risks: cyber operations targeting critical infrastructure, the weaponization of financial systems, climate-driven instability in vulnerable states, and the disruptive potential of generative AI in elections and information environments. The IMF and World Bank have repeatedly flagged 'geoeconomic fragmentation' as a material drag on global growth, with estimates of long-run output losses ranging from roughly 0.2% to over 7% of global GDP depending on the depth of decoupling. The core challenge for policymakers is managing correlated risks: a single escalation — in the Taiwan Strait, the Persian Gulf, or the Baltic — could simultaneously disrupt energy, semiconductors, shipping, and financial markets.

Key players

Trade Developments and the Reorganization of Global Commerce

Global trade is being reshaped by three concurrent forces: geopolitical fragmentation, the energy transition, and the disruption of key shipping corridors. WTO and UNCTAD data show that while overall trade volumes have remained resilient, the composition is shifting. Trade between geopolitically aligned blocs is growing faster than trade across blocs, particularly in strategic sectors such as semiconductors, batteries, and critical minerals. The China-Russia trade relationship has expanded sharply, while Western trade with China is plateauing in key categories. Maritime trade has faced unusual stress. Houthi attacks in the Red Sea have cut Suez Canal transits by more than half at points in 2024, drought has constrained the Panama Canal, and sanctions enforcement has created a large 'dark fleet' moving Russian and Iranian oil. New trade agreements — the African Continental Free Trade Area, RCEP, and the expanded CPTPP including the United Kingdom — are reshaping regional integration even as the multilateral system stagnates. The coming period will test whether trade growth can continue to decouple from globalization in its 1990s form, or whether fragmentation eventually imposes a binding cost on global output and inflation.

Key players

Strategic Resilience: Securing Supply Chains, Energy, and Critical Materials

Strategic resilience has emerged as a unifying policy concept across OECD governments and increasingly in emerging economies. It encompasses the security of energy supplies, critical minerals, food, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and the digital and logistics infrastructure that connects them. The 2021–2023 shocks — pandemic-era shortages, the European gas crisis following the loss of Russian pipeline supply, and repeated semiconductor bottlenecks — demonstrated that efficiency-first supply chains are not robust to systemic shocks. Responses have included strategic stockpiling (notably the coordinated SPR releases by IEA members), the EU's REPowerEU plan, the U.S. Defense Production Act invocations for critical minerals, allied minerals partnerships such as the Minerals Security Partnership, and the buildout of LNG import and export capacity across the Atlantic basin. Australia, Canada, and several African and Latin American producers have become focal points for diversifying away from Chinese mineral processing dominance, which exceeds 60% globally for several key inputs to the energy transition. The policy debate centers on the appropriate balance between market mechanisms and state intervention, the cost of redundancy, and how to share resilience burdens equitably among allies and with developing producer states that supply the underlying resources.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for Geopolitical Update 2026 – From Civil Production to Military Production.

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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

Netherlands June 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

Geopolitical Update 2026 – From Civil Production to Military Production

Jun 8, 2026Eindhoven, NetherlandsIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Geopolitical Developments and the Shift Toward a Militarized World Economy · International Trade in an Era of Strategic Competition · Industry and the Return of Strategic Industrial Policy · The Geopolitical Annual Trade Risk Index (GATRI) · Dual-Use Industries and the Blurring of Civil-Military Boundaries · Geopolitical Risks and the New Risk Landscape · Trade Developments and the Reorganization of Global Commerce · Strategic Resilience: Securing Supply Chains, Energy, and Critical Materials

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Netherlands

As the host nation, NLD is likely interested in the economic and security implications of this industrial shift for European stability and its own defense industry.

Role in topic