War and Peace at ‘Valdai’

From October 19th to 22nd 2015, Sochi will host the 12th Annual Meeting of the International Debating Club ‘Valdai’.  The chairman of the board of the Development Fund and Support for the International Debating Club ‘Valdai’, Andrei Bystritsky, says that this year the forum is titled “War and Peace. The Individual and the State. The Threat of Large Conflict in the 21st Century.” Today's situation in the world is alarming indeed and causes serious talk about the way the threat will develop, what will control war and peace, and eventually, what is more natural and acceptable for a person – peace or war. The novel by Leo Tolstoy, the allusions to which are completely clear, was initially titled ‘War and Truce.’

129 people are expected to participate, including 88 foreigners and 41 from the Russian side. “This is the right balance, so by this, I want to emphasize that ‘Valdai’ is an international community of intellectual discussion. It is an organization that aims to become a kind of platform where ideas, thoughts and an understanding of what is happening are being produced. We will have several sessions. There will be, for example, the question ‘Does the world need war?’ We will have a session dedicated to the collision of reality pictures in the era of total communication, it is about the influence of communication on decision-making and behavior. We will have a session dedicated to the problems of the economy in a global interdependent world, and a session on diplomacy in the 21st century, whether it is possible to prevent a war,” Bystritsky said.

Among people who have agreed to come to ‘Valdai’, there are Wolfgang Schüssel, the Austrian Federal Chancellor, Dominique Dovlipen, Mustapha Tlili, director and founder of the center of dialogue ‘US-Muslim world, the West’, Timothy Colton, Feng Shaloey and many others.

Fyodor Lukyanov, director of the Foundation for Research Development and Support of the International Discussion Club ‘Valdai’, editor-in-chief of the magazine ‘Russia in Global Affairs’, says that “the war and peace theme appeared, of course, not a week ago in connection with events in the Middle East, it appeared somewhere at the beginning of the year. Of course, we did not expect that it would be relevant to that extent up to the time of the great ‘Valdai’, but even before the recent developments, it was obvious that the problem of war and peace as the central issue of diplomacy and international relations in general was back full scale.”

According to Lukyanov, the world is different: “We thought that global economic interdependence greatly reduced the military threat, but the era is over. We are seeing a renaissance of classic diplomatic issues of international life, the truth, of course, in a completely different reality. The starting point for the formulation of this theme was the 200th anniversary of the Congress of Vienna. That epoch was consonant with our era. Any parallels are conventional and lame, but nevertheless, the scale of the change that was happening in the Old World and that the uncertainty and the desire to find some mechanisms and institutions of life being in harmony, resonate with where we live now.”