Christian Bueger


Italian Seapower Symposium focuses on the seabed as new frontier

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.

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The Royal Navy’s Quest for Seapower in the 21st Century – A conference visit

The First Sea Lord’s Seapower Conference is the Royal Navy’s annual flagship event, and I had the pleasure to attend and speak at this years iteration.

The 2024 edition was titled “Future navy: Maritime in the 2040s” and the debate firmly focused on the question of what mid-term challenges the Royal Navy faces and through what posture it could address them.

The event was co-organized with the Council on Geostrategy. The Council, founded in 2001, is a relatively young think tanks — if compared to the traditional British intellectual power houses, such as RUSI or Chatham House. The Council’s mission is “to strengthen Britain and re-assert [its] leadership” and it wants to “promote robust ideas” to boost the countries “discursive, diplomatic and military power”.

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