Though it has been a few weeks since I returned, my mind keeps drifting back to my time in Brussels, where I attended the CEPS Ideas Lab 2026 in early March. It was an experience that will stay with me for a long time.
As the flagship event of CEPS, the Ideas Lab stands out as one of Europe’s leading forums for policy debate, bringing together a diverse community of researchers, policymakers, institutional representatives, and — this year for the first time — a select group of graduate and PhD students participating through the Europaeum Ideas Programme.
Walking into the venue of the Square conference centre, I did not know what to expect as a student among seasoned scholars, diplomats, and policymakers. What I found was something far more generative than I had anticipated.
The two days were dense. Plenary sessions alternated with more interactive “lab sessions”, creating a balance between high-level strategic thinking and hands-on discussion. The programme moved with a sense of urgency. The war in Ukraine, like many others, grinds on. Just hours before the event, news had broken of American airstrikes on Iranian territory. Reminders, sharp and unsettling, that the rules-based international order many of the speakers were discussing in measured, diplomatic tones was simultaneously being rewritten — or perhaps ignored — elsewhere.
Topics such as European security, economic governance, artificial intelligence, and the energy transition were not treated in isolation, but rather as interconnected elements of a broader and complex system in which the EU could no longer remain in the background. As a Master’s student specialising in Conflict, Peace and Security, I found myself noticing the threads that connected these conversations: how geopolitical instability shapes domestic politics, how economic vulnerability feeds democratic backsliding, how technological disruption outpaces institutional adaptation. The Ideas Lab did not resolve these tensions. What it did, though, was force them into the same room, encouraging me to step beyond my own disciplinarycomfort zone and engage with unfamiliar viewpoints.
What I will carry longest from the event, however, is not a specific argument or panel, but the quality of the exchanges that happened in the margins, over coffee, during lunch, in corridors between sessions. Conversations with participants from think tanks, NGOs, and EU institutions reminded me that the work of understanding this continent is necessarily collective. No single discipline, no single perspective, holds enough of the picture. The Europaeum community added another layer to this: sharing the experience with fellow students from across the network of European universities made the reflections richer, and the questions that followed sharper. Some of those interactions have continued these past weeks, which feels like the best possible outcome.
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The Geneva Graduate Institute is part of the Europaeum, a network of leading European universities that value inter-connectedness and share a mission to give their students opportunities to develop professional qualities to shape the future of Europe for the better. As part of its Ideas Programme, the Europaeum organises a variety of workshops, seminars, conferences, and debates.
This article was published in Globe #37, the Graduate Institute Review.
