Month: June 2025

Despite not having been able to see much of the city, it was incredible to be in Prague for the 20th annual GLOBSEC Forum last week. As a performance scholar, it was a fascinating event—full of technological spectacle in the form of enormous digital scenography, sharply executed stage management and event coordination, and social performances of personal security, political speeches, and hushed diplomacy in the “bilateral corridor.” All washed down with some excellent Czech beer, of course.

More importantly, GLOBSEC 2025 included reflections on and from the arts for the very first time, with the panel Cultural Frontlines: An Artist’s Toolkit. As Sally Painter (Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at Blue Star Strategies) put it in her opening remarks for the panel, the “GLOBSEC Forum has brought together key opinion leaders to discuss the most urgent challenges in Europe and around the world” to engage in “high-level discussion” and policy development for twenty years. However, she added, if we are genuinely to seek global security solutions, then the conversation:

“Requires genuine engagement with communities themselves, these are the true protagonists in decision making about resilience, healing and rebuilding after conflict and disaster.”

In that context, then, it really matters that such a significant summit as GLOBSEC would programme the arts as offering new strategic perspectives for the conference:

“This is not just a symbolic gesture, it is a vital recognition that the voices of artists and the communities they represent are essential for meaningful restoration and rehabilitation. Art not only reflects on shared experiences but also empowers to envision new possibilities and take collective action.”

Our panel sought to bring that recognition to life. Jan Gilbert spoke about her decades of work creating deeply collaborative, place-based art in post-disaster New Orleans—acts of memorialization, and mechanisms for community healing. Yuliia Manukian brought insight from wartime Ukraine, where her curatorial practice creates ephemeral yet powerful public art interventions that reclaim urban space and reassert cultural identity amidst ongoing violence. Kathy Randels shared the grounded, emotionally resonant work of ArtSpot Productions in New Orleans and beyond, showing how ensemble performance processes with incarcerated and displaced people generate spaces of trust, dignity, and political voice. And I reflected on the ways performance might act as strategic tool in reimagining the future, how arts organisations should be considered critical strategic security partners, and how artists need paid for the expertise they bring to critical problem solving.  

In all these ways, the arts were not simply being represented—they were being recognised as a critical part of the future of global security and resilience. That GLOBSEC is beginning to engage with this reality is no small thing. It signals a welcome shift in how we think about security, power, and the ways we collectively imagine, perform, and build more resilient futures.

A video recording of the panel can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gdFEHN1GkQ

Delighted to have been invited to sit on a panel at the 20^th annual GLOBSEC conference, #GLOBSEC2025 in Prague. The conference opened with urgent addresses from Róbert Vass (President and Founder of GLOBSEC) and Petr Pavel (President of Czechia) on the importance of unified approaches to global challenges, and looking at what we mean by ‘resilience’ and ‘defence’ in holistic ways. Directly followed by a compelling and charismatic online address from Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Although the complexity of global challenges are writ large at a summit like this, all the conversations this morning have reflected in some way on “resilience” as a force for hope

This is at the centre of Performing City Resilience. If we do not understand the arts and cultural production (across multiple practices) as strategically important to societal resilience, then we run the risk of losing sight of their power as drivers of hope, as providers of fantastical and innovative solutions to complex problems, and as means of imaging and planning for better new worlds. A utopian idea? Maybe, but our research has evidenced the strategic advantage leveraged by approaching resilience challenges with and through the arts time and again. This is not to say the arts should be put into the service of resilience – quite the opposite in fact: let’s understand artists, culture bearers, and cultural organisations as strategic resilience leaders because of the work they are already engage in… and let’s value that work accordingly.

As part of this, and in response to a fascinating panel on ‘Free Media in Resilient Cities’, I’d argue that we need to think much more strategically about the role of education in how we imagine global security going forward. Indeed, education has only been mentioned once in the panels I’ve been to today, but it must be at the core of all aspects of the questions being asked at GLOBSEC this week. In the context of free media and the challenges posed by dis- and mis-information, AI, and malign representations of multiple kinds do we not need much more carefully to think about the role of education as a critical aspect of resilience development? If we are to think strategically about the future of free media, do we not need to invest much more fully in digital literacy, the development of critical thinking and tools for the analysis of the representations we receive? Disciplines like cultural studies, digital communication, media theory and performance studies (I would say this) need to be part of the fabric of our educational strategies from primary education onwards if we are to provide the skills needed to address the resilience challenges that are posed by dis- and mis-information, state sanctioned propaganda, and unregulated or unthinking development of AI.

While possibly something of a disciplinary/industry outlier, it’s fascinating to be at GLOBSEC25 to represent Performing City Resilience and to bring forms of performance practice and analysis to the conversations here. I’m speaking on Saturday at 9.40am on the panel ‘Cultural Frontlines: An Artist’s Toolkit’ on the Albright Stage – come along if you are at the conference!