#rethink : OSCE, the space between silence and war
The OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) - under Swiss Chairpersonship in 2026 - was built for a world that no longer exists. What remains when the rules run out? Relevance 5.0
This article draws freely on the first day of the OSCE Swiss Chairpersonship 2026 conference “Anticipating Technologies for a Safe and Humane Future,” held in Geneva on 7-8 May 2026, which the author1 attended as accredited media. It also draws on independent research into OSCE institutional dynamics, the emerging technology-security nexus, the geopolitics of critical resources, and the evolving landscape of cognitive warfare. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent the OSCE, the speakers, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, or any participating State.
Key Insights
1. Geopolitical rivalry, technological acceleration, and cognitive warfare are not three parallel crises - they are a single, compounding disruption that no existing governance framework was designed to absorb.
2. NBICQ convergence is not a technical challenge awaiting a technical solution - it is a civilisational rupture demanding a political response at a speed multilateral institutions were never built to achieve.
3. The OSCE’s deepest value is not what it promotes or enforces, but the space it maintains - the organised absence of catastrophe between broken diplomacy and open war.
4. In a world where resources are weaponised and shared reality is dissolving, the only available foundation is not shared values or trust - it is the mutual recognition that the space itself is worth preserving.
5. Before redesigning architectures or reimagining multilateralism, 57 states should first do something simpler and harder: agree, honestly, on what still binds them today.
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Relevance at stake
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick imagined a machine that thinks - and decides2. In 1982, Ridley Scott drew a world where the line between human and artificial intelligence had dissolved. In 1999, in Matrix, the Wachowskis depicted a reality we no longer fully control, or even fully perceive. We called it science fiction. We watched it as entertainment. We left the cinema reassured that the real world operated by different rules.
Today, those films read less like fiction - and more like a warning we chose not to hear.
We are living through not two but three simultaneous disruptions, each historic in its own right, each amplifying the others.
The first is the return of hard geopolitics: war on European soil, contested international rules, eroding trust, and the progressive dismantling of the post-Cold War assumption that multilateral cooperation was the natural direction of history.
The second is a technological acceleration and convergence of unprecedented scope - artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, neurotechnology - (or the NBICQ convergence)3 reshaping the foundations of power and security faster than any governance framework can follow.
The third, less visible but perhaps most corrosive, is the combination of a global resources war and cognitive warfare: a simultaneous contest over the physical inputs that make civilisation run - minerals, water, energy, food, talent - and a systematic assault on the shared reality that makes cooperation possible at all.
These are not three crises running in parallel. They are a single, compounding disruption - and at its core lies the challenge of NBICQ convergence: the accelerating integration of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, cognitive science, and quantum computing into a unified technological transformation that no single governance domain can track, that transcends all existing legal and ethical categories, and that is unfolding in a geopolitical environment defined by maximum rivalry and minimum trust.
This convergence is posing an existential question to the institutions we built to manage exactly this kind of moment: can 20th-century multilateral frameworks, built on consensus and deliberation, operate at the speed required by 21st-century technological reality - and do so when the very technologies reshaping that reality are simultaneously being weaponised against the institutions debating how to respond?
The answer is not yet clear. But the urgency of finding one has never been greater.
The triple disruption
The return of hard geopolitics was not supposed to happen. After 1991, the dominant logic was one of convergence: liberal democracy had prevailed, markets would bind states together, institutions would resolve disputes, and military force would gradually recede as an instrument of policy. The Helsinki Final Act - the founding document of the OSCE4 - embodied this spirit: a political commitment resting on the belief that shared norms could substitute for raw power.
That belief has been shattered. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine did not merely violate a border - it violated the foundational architecture of European security, demonstrating that territorial conquest by force was back on the table and that the predictability underpinning four decades of European stability was not a permanent achievement but a temporary condition.
Simultaneously, the technological revolution is rewriting the rules of power itself. But this revolution has a physical foundation that is too often overlooked: it runs on rare earth elements, lithium, cobalt, and semiconductors whose supply chains are geographically concentrated and geopolitically contested. Control over these critical minerals has become as strategically consequential as control over oil in the 20th century. The data centres powering AI consume extraordinary quantities of water and energy. The researchers building quantum systems are themselves a scarce and actively contested resource. The technology race and the resources war are therefore not distinct phenomena - one is the infrastructure of the other. Whoever controls the physical inputs shapes the pace and direction of everything built upon them.
What makes this moment historically distinct is that these material contests are unfolding alongside - and being actively exploited through - cognitive warfare.
Beyond traditional propaganda, cognitive warfare is the systematic effort to shape, distort, and destabilise the perceptions, beliefs, and collective decision-making of target populations. Powered by AI-generated disinformation at industrial scale, deepfakes indistinguishable from reality, and micro-targeted messaging engineered to fragment shared epistemic ground, it attacks not territory or infrastructure but the human mind - and through it, the social cohesion and institutional trust on which any cooperative order depends.
Hard geopolitics, the resources war, and cognitive warfare are not running independently. Geopolitical rivalry fuels the competition for critical resources and turbocharges technological investment. Technological acceleration provides the tools for cognitive warfare at scale. Cognitive warfare, in turn, deepens the distrust that makes both resource diplomacy and technological governance nearly impossible to achieve.
The triple fractures
What breaks when speed meets distrust and disorientation meets competition? Three fractures are already visible - and deepening.
The illusion of control. States, companies, and institutions increasingly believe they are managing technologies and information environments they neither fully understand nor genuinely govern. Decision-making in critical domains is being progressively delegated to algorithmic systems whose logic escapes meaningful human oversight. Simultaneously, cognitive warfare is engineering a more subtle illusion: citizens believe they are forming independent opinions; governments believe they are responding to authentic public sentiment; institutions believe their decisions rest on accurate intelligence. Cognitive warfare is specifically designed to make all of these beliefs simultaneously feel true while being systematically compromised. The result is a layer of managed unreality over political life that is extraordinarily difficult to detect - and even harder to counter without adopting the very methods of control that undermine the open societies at stake.
The disorientation of institutions. Multilateral frameworks were designed for a different tempo. The OSCE’s consensus model - requiring unanimity among 57 participating States - was built for a world where the pace of change allowed for deliberation. That world is gone. The organisation went five years without an approved budget, paralysed by geopolitical vetoes, while the technologies reshaping its entire security environment evolved through multiple generations and while cognitive operations systematically targeted the democratic institutions of its participating States. Institutional disorientation is not a failure of will - it is a structural mismatch between the speed of the world and the speed of its governance, made worse by the deliberate exploitation of that mismatch by adversarial actors.
The erosion of predictability. Predictability is the silent foundation of security. Today, in domains from cyberspace to autonomous weapons to biological capabilities to information ecosystems, there are no established red lines, no clear deterrence logic, and no shared language for what constitutes an act of war. When a disinformation campaign can destabilise a government, when a cyberattack on an energy grid is simultaneously economic warfare and technological disruption, when the weaponisation of food supply chains cascades through the Global South to produce political crises that geopolitical actors then exploit - escalation pathways multiply invisibly, and the diplomatic circuits designed to interrupt them cannot operate fast enough.
Towards distributed multilateralism ?
Relevance, for the OSCE and for multilateralism more broadly, is not guaranteed. It must be actively rebuilt, reimagined. The path forward is neither the paralysis of the status quo nor the utopianism of comprehensive reform. It lies in a more honest, more agile, and more distributed conception of what international cooperation can achieve - and must achieve - under current conditions.
Three orientations stand out.
Focused multilateralism over universal ambition. The instinct of multilateral institutions is to seek consensus across all issues simultaneously. In a fragmented world, this produces deadlock. A more productive approach identifies the specific domains where interests still converge - even among adversaries - and acts decisively there, without waiting for broader agreement. Technology anticipation, resource security, and the governance of information ecosystems all offer such spaces. Even states in deep geopolitical competition share an interest in avoiding AI miscalculation, quantum disruption of global encryption, biological proliferation, or the collapse of the critical mineral supply chains on which all of their technological ambitions depend. Common interest in avoiding catastrophic outcomes does not require trust - it requires only a shared recognition of shared danger. The OSCE’s 2026 Geneva conference, which placed water and energy security in the digital age alongside AI and conflict prevention in the same agenda, pointed in exactly this direction.
Anticipation as political act. Technological foresight must become a core diplomatic function, not a technical exercise conducted at a remove from political decision-making. The same applies to cognitive threat assessment: understanding how information environments are being weaponised, where epistemic commons are fracturing, and which populations and institutions are most vulnerable to cognitive operations needs to be systematically embedded in the OSCE’s early warning architecture. The Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator model (GESDA) is instructive - bringing scientific and strategic intelligence into diplomatic conversations before technologies and information crises become irreversible, not after. States that share early assessments of emerging risks, even without agreeing on responses, begin to rebuild the epistemic common ground that trust eventually requires. In a world of cognitive warfare, restoring shared factual ground is itself a security function.
Distributed multilateralism as architecture. The most necessary conceptual shift is accepting that the centre may not hold - and building accordingly. Universal, binding multilateral governance of emerging technologies, critical resources, or information ecosystems is, for now, unreachable. But the alternative is not no governance. It is a distributed architecture: a dense network of bilateral agreements, regional frameworks, sectoral dialogues, and issue-specific coalitions that together constitute a functioning - if imperfect - system of restraint and cooperation. The OSCE need not be the single roof under which all conversations happen. It can be the connective tissue - linking these distributed efforts, providing a common normative reference, and offering, crucially, the rare space where adversaries can still speak to each other across all three layers of the current crisis: the physical contest over resources, the institutional contest over rules, and the cognitive contest over reality itself.
OSCE : the last defense ?
The OSCE still offers something genuinely rare. In a world where major power bilateral relationships have largely broken down, where the UN Security Council is paralysed, and where new multilateral initiatives struggle to achieve universality, it remains one of the only forums where Russia, the United States, European states, and Central Asian nations sit in the same room. That is not nothing. In conditions of deep mutual distrust, the mere existence of a shared institutional space has value that is easy to underestimate - until it disappears.
But rarity is not the same as relevance. A forum that exists but cannot act, that convenes but cannot anticipate, that deliberates but cannot keep pace with the speed of the crises it was designed to manage - such a forum risks becoming a monument to a world that no longer exists.
The deepest argument for the OSCE’s future relevance may therefore be this: in a world where the resources war is materialising geopolitical competition, and where cognitive warfare is dissolving the shared reality that cooperation requires, an institution that still brings adversaries into the same room - committed, however imperfectly, to a common normative framework - is not a relic. It is one of the last remaining defences against a world in which neither physical nor cognitive commons exist at all.
As Swiss Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis stated in its opening remark at the OSCE conference “Anticipating Technologies for a Safe and Humane Future” in Geneva:
“Technology will not wait for us. Geopolitics will not slow down.
If we want to remain relevant, we must anticipate - not react.” 5
Yet the pressure is not merely external. Cognitive operations are running, right now, against the very institutions debating how to respond. The most dangerous illusion, in a world of compounding disruptions, is the belief that existing frameworks will hold by inertia alone.
The deeper challenge is structural. NBICQ convergence means that the question facing institutions like the OSCE is no longer simply “how do we govern AI?” or “how do we govern quantum?” It is something far more vertiginous:
How do we govern a technological transformation that is simultaneously biological, cognitive, computational, physical, and quantum - converging faster than any single governance domain can track, producing capabilities that transcend all existing legal and ethical categories, and doing so in a geopolitical environment defined by maximum rivalry and minimum trust?
That question does not yet have an answer. But naming it precisely - as NBICQ convergence forces us to do - is the necessary first step toward one.
Now what ?
The window for finding new answers may be narrower than we think.
And yet, perhaps the first step is simpler - and more honest - than any of the grand proposals above suggest. Before anticipating technologies, before redesigning governance architectures, before reimagining multilateralism, the OSCE’s 57 participating States might need to do something far more elementary: agree, explicitly and publicly, on what still binds them. Not what they aspire to share. Not what they once committed to in Helsinki. But what, today, in 2026, remains genuinely invariant - the irreducible minimum that every State, regardless of regime type, geopolitical alignment, or level of distrust, cannot afford to abandon.
That common ground may be narrow. It may be uncomfortable to name. It may look nothing like the ambitious normative framework of 1975. But it is real - and in a world of compounding disruptions, a small piece of solid ground, honestly identified and genuinely held, is worth more than an elaborate architecture built on the illusion of consensus.
Start there. Build from there. Everything else follows - or it doesn’t.
References & footnotes
Anticipating Technologies for a Safe and Humane Future - Swiss FDFA, 2026
The Age of AI: And Our Human Future - Kissinger, Schmidt & Huttenlocher, 2021
Author : Christopher H. CORDEY, futurist-maieuticist, strategic facilitator, international speaker. Founder of futuratinow and prosilience.ch. Partner at Gamingthefuture.world. Co-founder of Terracognita2089.eu. Author of “Le Congrès de 2049” (2025) and Le Congrès de la paix systémique (2026).
Opening address by the OSCE Chairman-in-Office, Swiss Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis, at the conference organised by the Swiss OSCE Chairmanship on anticipating technologies at CERN – check against delivery
NBICQ convergence refers to the accelerating integration and mutual amplification of five transformative technology domains: N - Nanotechnology, B - Biotechnology, I - Information technology and Artificial Intelligence, C - Cognitive science and neurotechnology, Q - Quantum technologies. The concept builds on the original NBIC framework proposed by Mihail Roco and William Sims Bainbridge in their landmark 2002 report for the U.S. National Science Foundation - “Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance” -fr to which Quantum has since been added as a fifth pillar, reflecting the maturation of quantum computing, quantum communications, and quantum sensing as a genuinely transformative technology cluster.
OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) With 57 participating States from Europe, Central Asia, and North America, the OSCE is the world's largest regional security organization, working for stability, peace, and democracy through political dialogue, shared values, and joint action. Its geographic reach is often described as stretching from "Vancouver to Vladivostok."
“Anticipate to remain relevant”. A position the author has consistently advocated for over a decade - through publications, articles, and public interventions at various institutional levels in Switzerland and beyond - long before it became an institutional priority. See in particular Heidi réveille-toi ! La Suisse est-elle tombée dans les pièges du succès ? (Slatkine, 2014), Intelligence 5.0 : Le nouvel enjeu de prospérité nationale, RMS, 2018), Le Congrès de 2049 (mutators, 2025) and Le Congrès de la paix systémique (mutators, 2026), as well as the foresight and strategic anticipation resources available at futuratinow.com , gamingthefuture.world and prosilience.ch.