FRF 2024 Forum – 14 & 15 October 2024, Central London

Forum 2024

Future Resilience Forum will be returning in 2024, focused on four key themes:

Resilient Democracy 

Hostile state actors using online, digital tools to subvert democracy, with the backdrop of key elections in 2024.

If our democracies look chaotic, how can we expect to sell democracy to the world?  We need a pragmatic approach that seeks to reset our polities and that lays the foundations of a stable future. 

Resilient Economy 

Global supply chains as the communicant vessels of economies.

The Middle Corridor that links China via land through Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus, to the Black Sea and Türkiye offers huge, unrealised potential.  

The term was coined by the US State Department. The trade route became especially relevant after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Houthi actions in blocking the Suez Canal route. It describes the mainly land route that goes from the Chinese border via Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan and Georgia, and out to the Black Sea and Türkiye. It also connects Uzbekistan, the most populous country in Central Asia, and other landlocked Central Asian countries to maritime trade routes, and it reduces their reliance on Russia. The states along the route are developing the rail and especially port infrastructure that would realise the huge potential the route has to deliver goods between China and Europe quickly and securely, as well as connect Central Asian economies to the Western world.

Resilient Development 

How the West does business with the Global South.

The East and the West have different approaches to the Global South.  The West is not good at listening and explains to some extent why we are losing the competition of influence with the East.  The ‘Middle Powers’ have different values to us, but they are crucial to global stability and to the resilience of our supply chains. 

Resilient Planet 

Critical minerals and their importance to the green transition. 

China currently dominates the critical minerals industry, without which we cannot make the green transition in the West. How do we secure our access to them and also have an honest conversation with our electorates about the costs of green transition, as well as about the limited supply of critical minerals? 

This is an age of transition... which is more difficult to categorise and define, and because of that, the power of words and narratives is amplified in a way that wasn't before.

When we talk about North and South, we are talking about a world order that was created when we did not exist as countries and decision-makers in the world... We are a continent of resources, that's why there is a 'Scramble for Africa'... If you look at aid that has been given to Africa, it was well meant, but has it been successful? I don't know any country that has developed because of aid.