In collaboration with GRAM, PRIO is co-hosting the annual GRAM conference, bringing together experts to explore new coalitions and multilateral cooperation in the Trump era.
2026 started off with several events sending shock waves into the traditional hallways of international diplomacy and multilateral cooperation. First, the US intervention in Venezuela ousting and capturing President Maduro, which was soon thereafter followed by an escalation of statements around the Trump administration’s seeming intentions to take over Greenland. It was against this background that Mark Carney’s speech at the Davos Forum later in January 2026 emphasized the urgent need to build coalitions, as “Middle powers (…) have the most to lose in a world of fortresses and the most to gain in a world of genuine cooperation”. Faced with a US foreign policy that no longer intends to support a liberal international order, Washington’s traditional allies or other western States are operating within a multilateral framework largely built with and around US backing, and now partly abandoned by it. In response, partly out of necessity and partly in defense of the multilateral institutions set up to keep the international order, new initiatives to reform the UN and to rethink multilateral cooperation across several areas and political agendas have been launched.
The aim of this annual GRAM conference is to assess this call for the formation of coalitions within the current international system from three States because of their specific positions in the system: Norway as a go-between with countries from the Global south, France as a permanent member of the Security Council, and Switzerland as Member of the Security Council in 2023-2024. The roundtable adopts three complementary angles for exploring coalitions within traditional intergovernmental organisations: notably coalitions within the United Nations; within other frameworks falling under ‘club diplomacy’; and the extension of coalitions to public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder approaches.
Speakers:
- Auriane Guilbaud, Associate Professor, GRAM/University Paris 8 (Co-chair)
- Simon Reid-Henry, Research Professor at PRIO, (co-chair)
- Christian Syse, Norwegian Ambassador to OECD
- Flavia Keller, PhD Candidate, University of Lausanne
- Frédéric Jung, Deputy Director for the United Nations, International Organizations, Human Rights and La Francophonie, French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs.
