Where will the NOLS event be held?

The NOLS event will be held in Oslo, NOR.

When does the NOLS event take place?

The NOLS event is scheduled from June 23 to June 25.

What is the format of the NOLS event?

The event is a conference format, designed for discussions and collaborations on global issues.

NOLS 2027

Name: NOLS 2027
Start: 2027-06-23T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-06-25T00:00:00Z
Location: Oslo

Jun 23–25, 2027Oslo, NorwayIn-person

Registration open

The NOLS event is scheduled to take place in Oslo, NOR, from June 23 to June 25. This gathering serves as a platform for discussions and collaborations on pressing global issues, bringing together participants from various backgrounds to engage with contemporary challenges and opportunities. The event's location in NOR underscores the nation's role in fostering international dialogue and cooperation.

Committees & topics

Topics
Literature and Conflict · Literary Preparedness: Reading, Resilience, and Civic Capacity · Artificial Intelligence and the Reading Crisis · Literature About War and Conflict · Art and Quality in Confrontation with the Market · Conflicts Over Reading in a Digital Society · Conflict as a Precondition for Literature · Fiction, Reality, and Ethics in Novels and Non-Fiction

Why it matters

This event is significant for several reasons. Firstly, its focus on critical global issues provides a forum for diverse perspectives to converge, which is essential for developing comprehensive solutions. The discussions held here can influence policy directions and foster greater understanding among different stakeholders. Secondly, the gathering in Oslo, NOR, highlights the importance of neutral ground for international discourse, allowing for more open and constructive exchanges.

Furthermore, the event contributes to the ongoing effort to build consensus and partnerships on complex topics. By bringing together individuals and organizations, it facilitates networking and the formation of alliances that can drive progress on shared objectives. The insights and strategies developed during the event can have far-reaching implications, impacting how various actors approach global challenges. The emphasis on collaboration is particularly relevant in an increasingly interconnected world, where multilateral approaches are often necessary to address issues effectively.

How to prepare

To prepare effectively for this event, participants should consider engaging with relevant background materials and understanding the key themes likely to be discussed. Researching the current geopolitical landscape and the specific challenges facing countries like UKR, RUS, and ISR would be beneficial. Familiarity with concepts such as "hidden-stakeholders" and "engagement-strategies" can provide a robust framework for understanding the dynamics of international relations.

Delegates should also consider how different national perspectives might shape discussions. For instance, understanding the foreign policy priorities of countries like USA, GBR, and CHN can offer valuable insights. Reviewing lessons on "dynamic-analysis" and "what-is-stakeholder-mapping" will enhance one's ability to critically assess information and contribute meaningfully to the dialogues. Preparing specific questions or points for discussion related to the event's overarching themes will also ensure a more productive engagement.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 3 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Norway

As the host nation, NOR is committed to facilitating international dialogue and cooperation on global issues.

Role in topic

NOR provides a neutral and supportive environment for international discussions, often playing a mediating role in global affairs.

United States

The USA generally advocates for multilateral solutions and democratic principles in addressing global challenges.

Role in topic

The USA is a significant global actor whose policies and perspectives often influence international discussions and outcomes.

United Kingdom

The GBR seeks to maintain its influence on the global stage through diplomatic engagement and international partnerships.

Role in topic

The GBR contributes to international efforts on various issues, often emphasizing security and economic stability.

Topics & background

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

Literature and Conflict

The relationship between literature and conflict is as old as the written word itself. From the Iliad's account of the Trojan War to the trench poetry of Wilfred Owen, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and the testimonial literature emerging from the Holocaust, the Yugoslav wars, and more recently Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza, writers have served simultaneously as witnesses, mourners, propagandists, and moral interrogators of organized violence. Literature has shaped how societies remember wars, who is counted as a victim, and which causes are deemed just. In the twentieth century the question sharpened as totalitarian regimes weaponized literature for state ends, while dissident writers — Solzhenitsyn, Akhmatova, Havel, Mahfouz — used it to resist. International instruments such as UNESCO's mandate on culture and the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions implicitly recognize literature as part of the cultural infrastructure that conflict damages and that helps societies recover. Today the debate centers on the writer's responsibility in wartime: whether literature should take sides, how translation shapes which conflicts the world reads about, and how states should protect writers, publishers, and libraries in conflict zones. The PEN International Case List and recent attacks on cultural heritage in Ukraine, Yemen, and Mali have brought renewed urgency to these questions.

Key players

Literary Preparedness: Reading, Resilience, and Civic Capacity

"Literary preparedness" frames reading and literary competence as part of a society's resilience infrastructure, alongside health, civic, and digital preparedness. The concept draws on long-running concerns documented by UNESCO and the OECD's PISA assessments, which show declining sustained-reading capacity among adolescents in many high-income states, and persistent literacy gaps in lower-income countries despite progress under SDG 4. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, several governments and library associations — notably in the Nordic countries — have argued that deep reading is a form of cognitive and democratic preparedness: a citizenry that cannot follow long, complex arguments is more vulnerable to disinformation, polarization, and manipulation. Norway's national reading strategy, Sweden's Läsrådet, and the Netherlands' Leesoffensief explicitly tie reading promotion to democratic health. The contemporary dispute is over instruments and responsibility. Should states mandate physical books in schools, regulate screen time, fund public libraries as critical infrastructure, or require platforms to support long-form reading? Critics warn against cultural paternalism and note that literary preparedness cannot be separated from broader inequalities in education and language access.

Key players

Artificial Intelligence and the Reading Crisis

Large language models have arrived in the middle of an already-documented decline in sustained reading. PISA 2022, the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress, and multiple European studies record falling reading comprehension and a shift away from book reading toward short-form digital content. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini now offer instant summaries, paraphrases, and analyses of texts, raising fears that students and general readers will increasingly outsource the cognitive labor that reading was meant to develop. At the same time, AI systems are trained on vast corpora of copyrighted literature, often without authors' consent, prompting lawsuits from the Authors Guild, the New York Times, and major publishers, and legislative responses in the EU AI Act and national copyright reviews. Writers' organizations in France, Germany, the UK, and the US have argued that AI threatens both the economic base of literary production and the readerly habits that sustain it. The policy debate now spans education ministries, copyright regimes, and platform regulation: how to preserve deep reading as a developmental and democratic good, how to compensate authors whose work trains models, and whether AI-generated text should be labeled in publishing and education.

Key players

Literature About War and Conflict

War writing forms one of the oldest and most contested branches of world literature. The First World War produced a canon — Owen, Sassoon, Remarque, Barbusse — that fundamentally changed how Western societies imagined battle, moving from heroic to disillusioned registers. The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Gulag generated testimonial traditions (Primo Levi, Imre Kertész, Varlam Shalamov) that shaped postwar human-rights consciousness. Decolonization, Vietnam, the Balkan wars, and the post-9/11 conflicts each produced their own bodies of work, increasingly written from the perspective of civilians and the formerly colonized rather than soldiers of great powers. The current moment is marked by an explosion of war writing from Ukraine (Serhiy Zhadan, Victoria Amelina), the Middle East, and the wider Global South, much of it published in near-real time and circulated through translation networks and social media. This has reopened older debates: the line between literature and propaganda, the ethics of aestheticizing violence, and the responsibilities of writers who are also combatants or refugees. Debate today concerns translation policy, prize culture (the International Booker, the Nobel), state funding for war writers, and protection of authors under international humanitarian law — particularly after the killings of writers and journalists in Ukraine and Gaza.

Key players

Art and Quality in Confrontation with the Market

The tension between artistic quality and market logic predates modern publishing but has sharpened with the consolidation of the global book industry. Five conglomerates — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster — dominate Anglophone trade publishing, while Amazon controls a large share of distribution and a growing share of self-publishing. The blocked 2022 merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster in the United States illustrated regulators' concern that further concentration would narrow what gets published and how authors are paid. States have long intervened to protect literary ecosystems: fixed book-price laws in France (the Lang law of 1981), Germany, and much of continental Europe; public funding bodies such as Arts Council England, NORLA in Norway, and the Dutch Foundation for Literature; and VAT exemptions for books. These instruments aim to preserve independent bookstores, small presses, translation, and writing that would not survive on pure commercial logic. The debate today extends to streaming-style subscription models, algorithmic recommendation, AI-generated books flooding marketplaces, and prize economies. The core question is whether literary quality and diversity are public goods that require active state and international support, or whether such support distorts a market that should reward what readers actually choose.

Key players

Conflicts Over Reading in a Digital Society

The shift from print to screen has restructured how, where, and what people read. Time-use surveys across the OECD show declining minutes spent on book reading, especially among adolescents and young men, while time on short-form video and social platforms has risen sharply. National library data from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Nordics show declining youth borrowing of long-form fiction even as audiobook and e-book use grows. The conflicts are multiple. Educationally, states dispute whether to keep paper textbooks or move to screens — Sweden notably reversed parts of its digitalization push in schools in 2023. Politically, book bans and library censorship have surged in parts of the United States, while authoritarian states tighten controls on imported books and online text. Commercially, platforms such as TikTok ("BookTok") have become dominant tastemakers, reshaping which books reach mass audiences. Legally, the EU's Digital Services Act and various national online-safety laws now intersect with reading habits. The core dispute is who governs the reading environment: schools, families, libraries, publishers, platforms, or states — and how to protect both intellectual freedom and a population's capacity for sustained, complex reading.

Key players

Conflict as a Precondition for Literature

A long line of critics and writers — from Hegel and Lukács to contemporary novelists — have argued that literature is constitutively bound to conflict: dramatic, social, psychological, or political. Narrative theory from Aristotle's Poetics onward treats conflict as the engine of plot, while sociological accounts (Bourdieu's analysis of the literary field, postcolonial criticism) see literary value as forged in struggles over recognition, language, and power. Wars, revolutions, exile, and censorship have repeatedly catalyzed major literary movements: Russian modernism around 1917, Latin American Boom literature amid Cold War upheaval, post-apartheid South African writing, post-Yugoslav literature. The inverse claim — that peaceful, prosperous societies produce thinner literatures — is contested. Critics point to rich literary cultures in stable Nordic and East Asian democracies and warn against romanticizing suffering as a creative resource, a tendency that can shade into the exoticization of writers from conflict zones. The debate matters for policy: how international literary institutions, residencies, and translation programs should treat writers from conflict zones; whether "peace literature" can be cultivated; and how to avoid an extractive global market that values stories of suffering while neglecting the conditions that produced them.

Key players

Fiction, Reality, and Ethics in Novels and Non-Fiction

The boundary between fiction and non-fiction has been contested since the rise of the novel, but recent decades have intensified the dispute. The "autofiction" wave associated with writers like Karl Ove Knausgård, Annie Ernaux, and Rachel Cusk; the prominence of literary reportage (Svetlana Alexievich's Nobel in 2015); and high-profile scandals — James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, fabrications in journalism, and disputed memoirs — have pushed publishers, courts, and readers to ask what duties writers owe to fact and to the people they depict. Legal regimes differ sharply. French and German privacy and personality-rights law impose strict constraints on identifiable depiction of real persons, while U.S. First Amendment doctrine is more permissive. Recent cases — including the Lila Hadid and Anna Wiener disputes, defamation suits against memoirists, and challenges to true-crime works — illustrate the unsettled terrain. Generative AI now compounds the problem by enabling plausible synthetic "non-fiction." The ethical debate concerns informed consent of subjects, the rights of vulnerable people depicted in literary journalism, labeling standards for hybrid works, and the responsibilities of publishers to fact-check. Industry bodies, PEN centers, and some national legislatures are now weighing voluntary codes versus binding rules.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for NOLS 2027.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

India's 131st Amendment Bill

US Job Openings at 6.7M

Bhagwant Mann Launches Punjab Campaign Summit

Punjab Politics

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

Conflict Resolution

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Country dossier

Belarus

Country dossier

Norway June 2027

By committee

Frequently asked questions

NOLS 2027

Jun 23–25, 2027Oslo, NorwayIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Literature and Conflict · Literary Preparedness: Reading, Resilience, and Civic Capacity · Artificial Intelligence and the Reading Crisis · Literature About War and Conflict · Art and Quality in Confrontation with the Market · Conflicts Over Reading in a Digital Society · Conflict as a Precondition for Literature · Fiction, Reality, and Ethics in Novels and Non-Fiction

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 3 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Norway

As the host nation, NOR is committed to facilitating international dialogue and cooperation on global issues.

Role in topic

NOR provides a neutral and supportive environment for international discussions, often playing a mediating role in global affairs.

United States

The USA generally advocates for multilateral solutions and democratic principles in addressing global challenges.

Role in topic

The USA is a significant global actor whose policies and perspectives often influence international discussions and outcomes.

United Kingdom

The GBR seeks to maintain its influence on the global stage through diplomatic engagement and international partnerships.

Role in topic

The GBR contributes to international efforts on various issues, often emphasizing security and economic stability.

Topics & background

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

Literature and Conflict

Key players

Literary Preparedness: Reading, Resilience, and Civic Capacity

Key players

Artificial Intelligence and the Reading Crisis

Key players

Literature About War and Conflict

Key players

Art and Quality in Confrontation with the Market

Key players

Conflicts Over Reading in a Digital Society

Key players

Conflict as a Precondition for Literature

Key players

Fiction, Reality, and Ethics in Novels and Non-Fiction

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for NOLS 2027.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

India's 131st Amendment Bill

US Job Openings at 6.7M

Bhagwant Mann Launches Punjab Campaign Summit

Punjab Politics

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

Conflict Resolution

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Country dossier

Belarus

Country dossier

Norway June 2027

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

Oslo Security Conference 2026

Arctic Frontiers 2026

A Norwegian Reflection on Human Security in a Changing Geopolitical Landscape

Words Matter! 2026

Poland and Norway facing turbulent times – how can they improve their cooperation?

Navigating the new world order. Are we in a middle power moment?

Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

Oslo Security Conference 2026

Arctic Frontiers 2026

A Norwegian Reflection on Human Security in a Changing Geopolitical Landscape

Words Matter! 2026

Poland and Norway facing turbulent times – how can they improve their cooperation?

Navigating the new world order. Are we in a middle power moment?

Frequently asked questions