What is the primary focus of the conference?

The conference focuses on understanding cognitive superiority, encompassing its various dimensions and implications.

Understanding Cognitive Superiority Conference

Name: Understanding Cognitive Superiority Conference
Start: 2026-09-15T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-09-16T00:00:00Z
Location: Oslo

Sep 15–16, 2026Oslo, NorwayIn-person

Registration open

The 'Understanding Cognitive Superiority' conference, held in Oslo, NOR, convenes experts to explore the multifaceted concept of cognitive superiority. This event serves as a critical forum for discussing the implications and advancements in this rapidly evolving field, bringing together diverse perspectives from various disciplines. Participants will engage with cutting-edge research and strategic considerations surrounding cognitive capabilities.

Committees & topics

Topics
Cognitive Superiority in Modern Strategic Competition · Professional Judgement in Military and Strategic Decision-Making · Learning and Adaptation in Military Organizations · Professional Military Education and Institutional Design · Reaffirming the Global Commitment to Eliminating Anti-Personnel Landmines · Prohibiting the Targeting of Civilians by Armed Drones in Armed Conflict · Reducing Global Trade Tensions and Lowering Tariff and Non-Tariff Barriers · Mitigating the Impact of Artificial Intelligence and Automation on Workers

Why it matters

The pursuit of cognitive superiority represents a significant paradigm shift in strategic thinking, impacting national security, technological development, and international relations. As advancements in cognitive science and artificial intelligence accelerate, understanding how these capabilities are defined, developed, and deployed becomes crucial. This conference addresses the complex interplay of human cognition and technological augmentation, examining both the opportunities and challenges presented by enhanced cognitive functions.

The discussions at this event are particularly relevant given the global landscape where various actors are exploring and investing in cognitive enhancements. The outcomes of such research and development have profound implications for future conflicts, economic competitiveness, and societal structures. Therefore, a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach, as fostered by this conference, is essential for navigating this complex domain responsibly and effectively.

How to prepare

To prepare for engagement with the conference themes, participants should consider the ethical frameworks surrounding cognitive enhancement and the potential dual-use nature of related technologies. Understanding the various interpretations of 'cognitive superiority' across different national and cultural contexts will be beneficial. Additionally, familiarity with current debates on artificial intelligence in strategic contexts and the integration of human-machine interfaces will provide a strong foundation for contributions.

Delegates should also reflect on the broader geopolitical implications of cognitive advancements, including potential impacts on power dynamics and international stability. Considering how different states might approach the development and application of cognitive superiority, and the potential for both cooperation and competition, will enrich discussions. Engaging with the Model Diplomat lesson on "what-is-stakeholder-mapping" can help in identifying key actors and their interests in this domain, while the "gender-dynamics-across-cultures" lesson offers insights into diverse human factors that might influence cognitive capabilities and their application.

Country perspectives

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

Norway

As the host nation, NOR facilitates international dialogue on critical security topics, often emphasizing ethical considerations and responsible innovation.

Role in topic

NOR provides a neutral and respected platform for discussions on sensitive topics like cognitive superiority, promoting collaboration and shared understanding among diverse international stakeholders.

Topics & background

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

Cognitive Superiority in Modern Strategic Competition

Cognitive superiority has emerged as a central concept in contemporary defense and strategic studies, referring to the ability of an organization, military, or state to think, decide, and adapt faster and more effectively than its adversaries. The idea draws on a long lineage running from Sun Tzu through John Boyd's OODA loop and Cold War-era studies of command and control, but it gained renewed urgency after the 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy reframed great-power competition as a contest of decision-making as much as firepower. Allied doctrine — including the U.S. Joint Warfighting Concept, the UK's Integrated Operating Concept, and Australia's Accelerated Warfare framework — now treats cognitive advantage as a precondition for success in multi-domain operations. The core dispute is over how cognitive superiority should be cultivated and measured. Some scholars and practitioners stress technological enablers — AI-assisted decision support, data fusion, and human-machine teaming — while others insist that the decisive variables are human: education, judgment, organizational culture, and the willingness to decentralize authority. China's pursuit of "intelligentized warfare" and Russia's reflexive control doctrine have pushed Western militaries to consider whether their own institutions, optimized for industrial-age efficiency, can keep pace cognitively. Today the debate sits at the intersection of force design, professional military education, and emerging technology policy. NATO's 2022 Strategic Concept and subsequent warfighting capstone documents identify cognitive advantage as a key line of effort, yet implementation remains uneven, and there is no consensus metric for what cognitive superiority actually looks like in practice.

Key players

Professional Judgement in Military and Strategic Decision-Making

Professional judgement — the capacity of officers and officials to make sound decisions under uncertainty, time pressure, and incomplete information — has long been considered the defining attribute of competent command. Clausewitz called it coup d'oeil; modern literature, drawing on Kahneman, Klein, and naturalistic decision-making research, frames it as expertise built through deliberate practice, mentorship, and exposure to consequential problems. Western militaries institutionalized this through mission command doctrine, which devolves authority to subordinates trusted to exercise judgement within a commander's intent. The core contemporary dispute is whether professional judgement is being eroded or augmented by current trends. Critics point to risk aversion, zero-defect cultures, centralization enabled by real-time communications, and over-reliance on algorithmic decision aids as forces hollowing out judgement at the tactical and operational levels. Defenders of recent reforms argue that data, AI, and structured analytic techniques actually free human decision-makers to focus on the genuinely ambiguous problems where judgement matters most. The lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the war in Ukraine have sharpened these debates, particularly around the consequences of over-managed campaigns and brittle bureaucratic processes. The issue now extends well beyond uniformed services into intelligence assessment, diplomacy, and crisis management, where the same tensions — between expertise and process, between human intuition and machine analytics — are reshaping how states cultivate and trust the judgement of their professionals.

Key players

Learning and Adaptation in Military Organizations

Organizational learning has become a defining concern of modern defense establishments. The post-9/11 wars exposed how slowly large bureaucracies absorb battlefield lessons, while Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 produced a brutal real-time demonstration that the side that adapts faster — in drone tactics, electronic warfare countermeasures, logistics, and command — gains decisive advantage. Scholars such as Williamson Murray, Eliot Cohen, and more recently Frank Hoffman and Aimée Fox have shown that wartime adaptation is the norm, not the exception, and that peacetime learning systems determine whether forces enter conflict with adaptable cultures or rigid ones. The dispute centers on how to institutionalize learning. Lessons-learned systems, after-action reviews, red teaming, and experimentation units exist across most major militaries, but evidence suggests they often fail to translate insight into doctrinal, training, or procurement change. Ukraine's decentralized, software-enabled feedback loops between front-line units and developers have become a reference case, contrasted with Russia's slower, more centralized adaptation. Western militaries are now actively studying both. The issue today is whether large industrial-age defense institutions can restructure themselves for continuous learning at the speed of relevance. This intersects with acquisition reform, talent management, classification policy, and the integration of commercial technology — all areas where bureaucratic incentives often work against adaptation.

Key players

Professional Military Education and Institutional Design

Professional Military Education (PME) — the system of war colleges, staff colleges, and service academies that develops officers — has been under sustained criticism for at least two decades. The 2009 Skelton Panel in the United States, repeated UK and Australian reviews, and more recent assessments such as the U.S. House Armed Services Committee's PME study have argued that curricula are too often risk-averse, insufficiently rigorous, and disconnected from strategic challenges like great-power competition, AI, and complex deterrence. Institutional design questions — who teaches, who attends, how careers reward intellectual development — sit at the heart of the debate. The core dispute is between those who view PME as a credentialing and socialization function tightly controlled by the services, and reformers who argue it must become a genuine engine of strategic thought, comparable to elite civilian graduate programs. Related questions include the role of civilian faculty, joint versus service-specific education, the integration of allies and partners, and whether PME should focus on producing tactical proficiency, strategic literacy, or both. Allied institutions face similar pressures, with NATO Defense College, the UK Defence Academy, and Australia's reformed ADC each experimenting with new models. Today the issue extends to institutional design more broadly: whether ministries of defense, general staffs, and combatant commands are structured to generate, reward, and act upon strategic thinking. Reformers argue that without redesigning incentives and career paths, even excellent PME will fail to produce cognitively superior institutions.

Key players

Reaffirming the Global Commitment to Eliminating Anti-Personnel Landmines

Anti-personnel landmines emerged as a major humanitarian concern in the 1990s, when the ICRC and a coalition of NGOs documented the devastating long-term effects of mines on civilians in countries such as Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, and Afghanistan. The campaign culminated in the 1997 Ottawa Convention (Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention), which prohibits the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer of anti-personnel mines and requires destruction of stockpiles and clearance of mined areas. The treaty now has more than 160 states parties and is widely credited with stigmatizing the weapon, reducing global production, and mobilizing billions of dollars for mine action. The core dispute concerns universalization and backsliding. Major military powers including the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel have never joined the convention, citing border defense or strategic requirements. Russia's extensive use of anti-personnel mines in Ukraine since 2022, and reports of new use by other actors, have raised concerns about erosion of the norm. In 2024–2025, several frontline NATO states — including Finland, Poland, and the Baltic states — announced intentions to withdraw from or reconsider Ottawa obligations, citing the Russian threat, marking the most serious challenge to the treaty regime since its entry into force. The issue today is whether the international community can reaffirm the humanitarian norm against landmines while addressing the legitimate security concerns of frontline states, sustain funding for clearance in heavily contaminated countries, and bring major non-signatories closer to compliance with the convention's humanitarian standards.

Key players

Prohibiting the Targeting of Civilians by Armed Drones in Armed Conflict

Armed unmanned aerial vehicles moved from a niche U.S. capability after 9/11 to a globally proliferated technology over the past two decades. Turkish Bayraktar TB2s, Iranian Shahed loitering munitions, Chinese Wing Loong and CH-series platforms, and an explosion of small commercial drones repurposed for combat have transformed conflicts from Nagorno-Karabakh and Libya to Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, and the Sahel. International humanitarian law — particularly the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution under the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I — already prohibits deliberate attacks on civilians regardless of the weapon used, but states and analysts dispute how well existing rules constrain drone operations in practice. The core dispute has several strands: the legality and transparency of targeted killings outside recognized battlefields; civilian harm in dense urban environments where drone strikes have produced significant casualties; the use of one-way attack drones against energy infrastructure and population centers, particularly in Ukraine; and the responsibilities of exporting states. Successive UN Human Rights Council reports, work by special rapporteurs Philip Alston, Christof Heyns, and Agnès Callamard, and ongoing GGE discussions on emerging weapons have pushed states toward greater transparency, but no drone-specific treaty exists. Today the issue intersects with arms-export controls (notably the MTCR), the LAWS debate on autonomy, and accountability mechanisms for civilian harm. Proposals range from a binding protocol on armed drones to non-binding political declarations, codes of conduct on exports, and strengthened investigation and reparation regimes.

Key players

Reducing Global Trade Tensions and Lowering Tariff and Non-Tariff Barriers

The post-1995 WTO trading system delivered decades of tariff reductions and global integration, but has been under acute strain since the mid-2010s. The collapse of the Doha Round, the U.S.–China tariff war launched in 2018, paralysis of the WTO Appellate Body since 2019, and a surge in industrial policy and export controls have eroded multilateral discipline. Subsidy races in semiconductors, electric vehicles, and clean energy — embodied in the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act, the EU's Green Deal Industrial Plan, and China's Made in China 2025 — have blurred the line between legitimate industrial strategy and protectionism. The core dispute is over how to reconcile open trade with national security, supply-chain resilience, and climate objectives. Non-tariff barriers — including carbon border adjustments, foreign subsidy regulations, investment screening, and data-localization rules — have grown faster than tariffs in many sectors. The return of broad-based tariff measures in 2025, including significant U.S. tariff increases on major trading partners and retaliatory measures by others, has raised fears of a deeper fragmentation of the global trading system, while developing countries warn of disproportionate harm to their export-led growth models. WTO reform discussions, the revival of plurilateral initiatives (e.g., on e-commerce and investment facilitation), and competing visions of "friend-shoring" versus genuine multilateralism define the current agenda. The central question is whether members can recommit to rules-based liberalization in a more contested geopolitical environment, or whether managed trade and bloc-based arrangements will become the new normal.

Key players

Mitigating the Impact of Artificial Intelligence and Automation on Workers

Concerns about technology displacing workers are not new, but the rapid diffusion of generative AI since 2022 has sharpened the debate. Studies by the ILO, OECD, IMF, and World Bank estimate that between a quarter and 40 percent of jobs globally are exposed to AI-driven transformation, with white-collar and middle-skill roles particularly affected — a notable departure from earlier waves of automation that primarily hit routine manual work. Platform work, algorithmic management, and the gig economy have meanwhile raised distinct concerns about worker surveillance, wage compression, and the erosion of labor standards. The core dispute is over the appropriate policy mix. Proponents of light-touch regulation argue that AI will, as past technologies did, ultimately create more jobs than it destroys and that interventions risk slowing productivity gains needed to fund social spending. Labor advocates, many European governments, and the ILO counter that without active labor-market policy, collective bargaining rights for platform workers, transparency obligations on algorithmic management, and significant investment in reskilling, the gains will accrue to capital while displacement falls on vulnerable workers — and disproportionately on the Global South, where business-process outsourcing and call-center work are highly exposed. The EU's AI Act and Platform Work Directive, the U.S. executive orders on AI, and ILO discussions toward a possible instrument on decent work in the platform economy mark different regulatory paths. Today the issue sits at the intersection of labor rights, education and skills policy, social protection reform, tax policy, and AI governance. Key questions include the future of social safety nets, the global distribution of AI's productivity gains, and whether international labor standards need updating for an era of algorithmic work.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for Understanding Cognitive Superiority Conference.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Japan's Dilemma Over Hormuz Mine Clearance

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North Korea's Nuclear Navy Ambitions

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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

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

Country dossier

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Norway September 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

Understanding Cognitive Superiority Conference

Sep 15–16, 2026Oslo, NorwayIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Cognitive Superiority in Modern Strategic Competition · Professional Judgement in Military and Strategic Decision-Making · Learning and Adaptation in Military Organizations · Professional Military Education and Institutional Design · Reaffirming the Global Commitment to Eliminating Anti-Personnel Landmines · Prohibiting the Targeting of Civilians by Armed Drones in Armed Conflict · Reducing Global Trade Tensions and Lowering Tariff and Non-Tariff Barriers · Mitigating the Impact of Artificial Intelligence and Automation on Workers

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.

Norway

As the host nation, NOR facilitates international dialogue on critical security topics, often emphasizing ethical considerations and responsible innovation.

Role in topic