CIRSD

Be part of Horizons Forum!

Applications are open until June 10.

This June, Belgrade becomes a bridge between China and Europe.

We are looking for motivated students and young professionals to join the organizational and media volunteer teams of the Horizons | Sustainability and Connectivity Forum.

We welcome volunteers with strong English skills, team spirit, motivation, and an interest in international cooperation, global events, communications, and social media.

Apply now: scforum2026.com/volunteers

Be part of Horizons Forum!

This June, Belgrade becomes a bridge between China and Europe.

We are looking for motivated students and young professionals to join the organizational and media volunteer teams of the Horizons | Sustainability and Connectivity Forum.

We welcome volunteers with strong English skills, team spirit, motivation, and an interest in international cooperation, global events, communications, and social media.

Apply now: scforum2026.com/volunteers

AI is sold as weightless code. It is, in fact, one of the most physically ravenous technologies ever built, consuming the electricity of Japan today and on track to double that by 2030. It draws on cobalt from the Congo, chips from Taiwan, and discards its waste in Ghana. Silvana Koch-Mehrin, Founder and President of Women Political Leaders, argues that between America’s tech oligarchy and China’s state control, Europe is the only actor treating AI as the infrastructure it actually is. The future of AI’s environmental footprint, she contends, will not be decided in Silicon Valley or Beijing, but in Brussels.

Three forces are now colliding to remake the world economy at its foundations: a globalization redrawn around the “Global Majority,” technologies that turn platforms into planners, and a demographic squeeze that breaks the post-war growth model. Maxim Oreshkin maps a new paradigm in which connector countries become strategic actors, algorithms quietly displace markets, and “fiscal cannibalism” forces aging societies to choose between the elderly and the future. The lasting question, he argues, is whether human beings remain independent decision-makers, or become managed participants in systems they no
longer see.

In an era of trade wars and snapping supply chains, the UAE’s foreign trade minister argues that influence is no longer about size or dominance. It’s about the capacity to connect. With 35 Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreements, $110 billion invested in Africa since 2019, and non-oil trade that just crossed $1 trillion, H.E. Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi makes the case that the country wedged between Asia, Africa, and Europe has built a model the fractured global economy badly needs: partnership over positioning, connectivity over control.