2026 Trip to Geneva: Institutions Built for Stability, Tested by Strain

This article provides an account of the Grimshaw Club's trip to Geneva in June 2026. It reflects on conversations held across eight institutions spanning security, development, finance and trade, and considers what a week inside them reveals about how each is adapting to a period of global realignment. This piece was written by Majduleen Al Ali.

Introduction

From 24 to 30 June 2026, fourteen of us travelled from London to Geneva with the LSE Grimshaw Club for International Relations. Over the week we visited the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, UNDP, the ILO, the World Economic Forum, Lombard Odier, KPMG, the World Trade Organization, and the UN Portail des Nations, with a weekend detour to the Swiss Alps and Annecy.

Geneva is an unusual city to study up close. Within a few square kilometres sit the institutions that were built, at various points across the last two centuries, to manage the parts of international life that no single state can manage alone: security, labour standards, development finance, trade rules. Visiting eight of them in six days makes the comparisons impossible to avoid. Each institution is answering some version of the same question: how to keep functioning when the assumptions it was built on come under pressure. The answers differed more than expected.

The Same Corridor

The week began at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, where we spoke with Annika Hilding Norberg, Head of Peace Operations and Peacebuilding at GCSP and an LSE alumna. The conversation covered the centre's work on security policy training, but what made the idea of Geneva as neutral ground concrete was something we saw rather than heard: a group of Swiss army officers and a group of Saudi army officers, in the same corridor, taking the same course.

Neutrality is easy to discuss as an abstraction. It is a different thing to watch it operate as an organising principle inside a single building, where officers from states with very different security postures sit through the same curriculum on the same day. For a week spent thinking about how smaller and mid-sized states navigate great power competition, it set the terms for everything that followed.

Development and Labour, Tested by Time

The next two visits, to UNDP and the ILO, sat with a harder version of the same question: what happens to institutions built for a slower world when the world stops cooperating at that pace?

At UNDP, Seán O'Connell walked us through the organisation's work on a just transition, including the tension between where transition minerals are located and where the renewable energy built from them is consumed and financed. Francesca Pacchiarotti had organised the visit. What stood out was less the content than the honesty in how it was delivered. Development work is not a straightforward mandate at the best of times, and multilateral institutions are currently working under real financial and political pressure. Nobody in the room pretended otherwise, and everybody was still doing the work.

The ILO offered a different register entirely. Remo Becci, Head of the ILO Archives, gave us a sense of what it means to work inside one of the oldest international organisations still functioning largely as designed, built on standard-setting rather than crisis response. In an environment where multilateralism is under near-constant strain, it was a useful reminder that some of the most consequential work in global governance happens slowly, over decades, largely without headlines.

Connecting the Dots

The World Economic Forum was the sharpest turn in the week, from institutions built on decades-long time horizons to one explicitly built to anticipate the next cycle. We met Mauricio Báez Sedeño, Tatiana Aguilar Londoño, Ignacio M. and Régis Coles across different teams, and the conversation kept returning to a single idea: the skill in highest demand inside WEF right now is not technical depth in any one field, but the ability to connect fields that do not usually speak to each other, particularly as artificial intelligence reshapes what expertise means in practice.

A few details were new to us. We were told that seventy per cent of WEF roles are permanent contracts, which runs against the assumption that a forum built around an annual meeting must be a project-based organisation. Staff described the institution as deliberately "anticyclical," structured to think in longer cycles rather than react to whichever crisis is dominating the news. And regardless of team, almost everyone we spoke with described their actual daily work as relationship-building and stakeholder management, more than subject-matter analysis.

Rethinking Everything Without Losing It

Lombard Odier and KPMG gave the week its private-sector counterpoint, and the contrast with the public institutions was instructive rather than stark. Lombard Odier was founded in 1796 and remains independently owned today, having endured more than two centuries of financial crises. Its motto, "Rethink Everything," is not simply a branding line. At its Geneva headquarters, where we met Maria Giovanna Pugliese, Rosa Perez Esteve, Kim Chatting and Federico Quinto, it became clear that the phrase describes how the bank has survived for over two centuries: by holding its core values fixed while treating almost everything built around them as open to question. The building makes the same point architecturally, holding the historic and the contemporary in the same structure rather than choosing between them.

At KPMG Switzerland, where Marc Kilcher and Sabine Ragy hosted us, the pressures described were strikingly familiar from the public-sector visits earlier in the week: adapting to regulatory change, managing stakeholders across very different contexts, building trust that has to be re-earned continuously rather than assumed. Advisory work sits at the point where policy and implementation actually meet, which is not a uniquely private-sector problem, even if the incentives around it are structured differently.

An Order Under Test

The week's final institutional visit was the World Trade Organization, organised by Maryna Katiukha. My dissertation looks at how technology governance and economic statecraft are being reshaped by strategic competition between the United States and China, and the WTO sits close to the centre of a lot of that pressure: an institution built on a specific postwar vision of multilateral trade, being tested in ways its architects did not anticipate. Walking through the building with that research question already in mind made the visit feel considerably less abstract than the reading behind it.

We closed the week at the UN Portail des Nations, an immersive experience inside the Palais des Nations that had opened only a fortnight before our visit. We were among its first groups to go through it, a strange way to end a week otherwise spent talking to institutions with three-figure histories.

Conclusion

One thread ran through the entire week that none of us had planned for. At nearly every institution we visited, someone on the other side of the table turned out to be an LSE alumnus. It was a consistent, slightly disorienting reminder of how far a network actually reaches once you are standing inside it, and how much it demands in return, in terms of what you are willing to maintain and eventually give back.

The week also arrived at a useful point for me personally. As a Chevening Scholar finishing an MSc in International Political Economy and heading to Yenching Academy at Peking University this September, spending a week inside institutions built for long-term thinking, in a period when long-term thinking is precisely what is under strain, was a good place to end one degree and begin thinking seriously about the next one.

Thank you to Madison Brown, Alisa Borisova and the LSE Grimshaw Club for International Relations for organising a week that gave all of us a great deal to think about.