Speakers

Dr. Jean-Marc Rickli  is the Head of Global and Emerging Risks and the Founder and Director of the Polymath Initiative at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP) in Geneva, Switzerland. He is also the co-chair of the NATO Partnership for Peace Consortium (PfPC) Emerging Security Challenges Working Group. He is the co-curator of the International Security Map of the Strategic Intelligence Platform as well as a member of the Global Foresight Network of the World Economic Forum. He is also a member of the committees for ethical research at the University of Geneva and at the European Research Council as well as of the advisory board of Tech4Trust, the first Swiss startup acceleration program in the field of digital trust and cybersecurity. He represents the GCSP at the Governmental Group of Expert on Lethal Autonomous Weapons at the United Nations. He is non-resident fellow in modern warfare and security at TRENDS Research and Advisory in Abu Dhabi and at Gulf States Analytics in Washington. He is also member of various advisory boards: on digitalization of the Chief of the Swiss Armed Force; on Next Generation Security at IE University in Madrid; for Pour Demain think tank and for The Swiss Cyber Security Days in Bern. Prior to these appointments, Dr. Rickli was an assistant professor at the Department of Defence Studies of King’s College London and at the Institute for International and Civil Security at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi. In 2020, he was nominated as one of the 100 most influential French-speaking Swiss by the Swiss newspaper Le Temps and was selected as one of the 29 visionaries selected by the French magazine L’Express in October 2025. Dr. Rickli received his PhD in International Relations from Oxford University. His latest book published by Georgetown University is entitled Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the Twenty-first Century