The EUTOPIA Science Diplomacy Global Summit took place on 29 May in Brussels, at the Fondation Universitaire. For a full day, researchers, diplomats and representatives of university alliances debated a central question: whether universities can still play a credible role in managing the fractures of an increasingly hostile world.
The Fondation Universitaire stands a short walk from the royal palace and the parliament — arranged so that the king of Belgium might once have strolled between power and money without getting his feet wet. The choice of venue carries a history. So did the conversations inside it.
Jan Danckaert, rector and leading figure of the EUTOPIA alliance, opened without ceremony. “We find ourselves in an era of profound turbulence,” he told an audience of diplomats, academics and students. “The rules-based international order is under strain. Multilateralism is fraying at the seams. Trust between nations is eroding.” He pressed beyond the diagnosis: the challenges bearing down on humanity — climate change, pandemics, artificial intelligence — are universal and scientific in character, while political responses remain fragmented and turned inward. Precisely in that gap, he argued, science diplomacy must do its work.
A Framework Takes Shape
The opening session acquired particular weight when Ágota Dávid, Policy Officer at the European Commission’s DG Research and Innovation, took the floor. She presented the European Union Framework for Science Diplomacy — years in the making and, as she reminded her audience, adopted by the Council of the EU that same morning.
The framework emerged from the co-creation of 130 experts across all 27 member states, working in five groups each co-chaired by a scientist and a diplomat. Their recommendations span three instruments: strategic ones to set priorities and define the balance between openness and restrictiveness; operational ones to strengthen science and technology in diplomatic representations; and enabling ones to train practitioners and connect science diplomacy communities. A third European Science Diplomacy Conference is already planned for Athens in 2027. Science diplomacy, Dávid noted, was building on solid ground: the values embedded in the EU’s Global Approach to Research and Innovation — academic freedom, open science, reciprocity, evidence-informed policymaking — form the foundation of the new framework.
An Old Practice, a New Label
Jean-Claude Burgelman, emeritus professor at VUB and a veteran of twenty years at the European Commission, captured the paradox neatly. “We were doing science diplomacy every day,” he said of his time in the Barroso cabinet, “but the term did not exist.” Luk Van Langenhove (VUB) has since supplied much of the conceptual architecture, including what he calls the “fourth dimension”: diplomacy within science itself. Danckaert drew on this with characteristic directness. “Every international research collaboration is an act of diplomacy. Every co-authored paper is a peace treaty.”
Concrete Cases, Uncomfortable Edges
James Hammond, professor of geophysics at Birkbeck University of London, described fifteen years of working with North Korean scientists — navigating UN sanctions, shifting government positions on two continents, and the requirements of doing science in the world’s most closed country. “I would say I am starting to become a science diplomat,” he told the room, “rather than just a scientist.” Christopher Strelluf, from the University of Warwick, offered a deliberately local example: his work with East London communities unsettled by academic claims that Cockney was dying out raised the same questions of trust, legitimacy and reciprocity that reappear in every international scientific negotiation. The local, he suggested, is often where the real lessons are.
What Alliances Are For
Two fault lines ran through the day’s discussions. The first: the tension between scientific openness and research security, now politically explicit in ways it has never been before. The second: the risk that institutionalising science diplomacy strips it of the informality and patience that have always made it work. Rasmus Gjedssø Bertelsen, professor at the Arctic University of Norway, put it plainly — at Nordic-Chinese Arctic events, he is often among the youngest on the Nordic side. The craft takes time to learn and longer to pass on.
Marina Cino Pagliarello, Research Fellow at the European University Institute, presented survey data from 52 alliances showing that universities already function as informal diplomatic infrastructures — collaborating regularly with EU bodies, embassies and civil society. Their added value is operational: joint education, research collaboration, and crisis response. The remaining challenge is governance structures and stable funding to formalise what is already happening.
Danckaert had framed it at the outset. Universities are perhaps the oldest genuinely international institutions on earth — crossing borders and extending trust long before Westphalia. “We have effectively practised science diplomacy for centuries.” On a day when the European Union finally gave that practice a formal framework, the claim rang true.
Barbara Curyło, Assistant Professor, University of Opole; FORTHEM Institutional Coordinator
Eric Piaget, EUTOPIA Science Diplomacy Coordinator (VUB)
