Italy hosts the most important European gathering of navies every two years. The 14th Transregional Seapower Symposium took place in Venice last week. 🚢

🌍 67 navies and over 50 heads of navies from across the globe attended and were joined by representatives from industry, academia and international organizations.

📅 The symposium started in 1996 as a meeting for the Mediterranean but soon assumed its current global profile and has been growing into a major global dialogue and agenda setting event.

🌊 This year’s iteration, which I had the pleasure to attend, was focused on the seabed as a new strategic frontier. For a number of years, and specifically since the 2022 attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea, Italy and its navy has been spearheading much of the discussion of how to respond to the new uncertainties at sea.

📺 The recording of the events is available on Youtube.

🏗️ As participants highlighted, the seabed increasingly hosts important infrastructures, such as pipelines, power and data cables, but also holds prospective resources such as minerals or genetic resources. As a strategic domain, the seabed is gaining in importance and how to secure it seen as a new frontier.

🇮🇹 At the symposium, Italy presented its impressive programme of underwater security, and speakers from navies, industry, and academia reflected on strategic implications and responses.

🎤 In my own contribution (at 5:07), I stressed the need for close cooperation between civil and military actors and the industry to deliver critical maritime infrastructure protection. I drew on our recent book “Understanding Maritime Security” and our research on Critical Maritime Infrastructure Protection in the SafeSeas network (www.safeseas.net/cmip)

🤝 The symposium is also an important site for bilateral meetings, and specifically a meeting place for navies in South America, Africa and Asia to engage with their European counterparts. Ample time was given to such meetings which are vital to ensure mutual understanding, awareness, trust, and often also inter-operability between naval forces.

🍷🍝 The event was also true to the original Greek meaning of a symposium – a feast of eating and drinking together. The Italian hospitality and the historic location of the city of Venice and the naval base of the Arsenale was a spectacular showcase of Italian food, wine, art and music.