From 07/10/2026 To 08/10/2026
On October 7 and 8, the Palais Neptune hosts the fifth edition of the Rencontres Stratégiques de la Méditerranée (RSMED) 2026. Two days to read a world that is undone, and a conviction that has held us since the first hour: thinking the world is not enough, it must still be transmitted.
RSMed 2026: crossing eyes, transmitting the world
Never have our societies produced so much strategic analysis, and never have they been able to send it so badly to those who will inherit it. We stack the reports, we multiply the scholarly symposia, we refine maps of chaos, while thirty kilometers from the amphitheater a Terminale student learns geopolitics in the scrolling of a news feed, between a viral intox and a calibrated indignation. It is very exactly this hiatus that the RSMed refuse. Under the vault of the Palais Neptune, the most advanced expertise agrees to be watched by high school students, and high school students agree to be pushed by her. Let’s cross our eyes on the World: the watchword of this edition is not an ornament, it is a program.
A world that escapes those who inherit it
Fifteen round tables, five cycles, more than seventy experts, researchers, military, diplomats and industrialists: the fifth edition takes the measure of a planet where the locks jump one after the other. We will follow the aftermath of the war launched in February 2026 against Iran, the Strait of Hormuz transformed into a strategic faucet and the energy crisis that followed; the Baltic under pressure and the Arctic that melts while arming itself; the Indo-Pacific where the Sino-American part is played; and until the American midterms, this test on which the order of the world depends.Three threads stretch the whole: geopolitical recompositions, technological disruptions, security challenges that no longer know borders. To talk about it, the FMES has brought together a plateau that goes without superlatives: Pierre Razoux, Christine Ockrent, Valérie Niquet, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, Frédéric Pierucci, Bill Hayton, and many other voices from the FRS, the IFRI, Chatham House or the GCSP.Jean-Marc Jancovici will play the role of great witness, Admiral Pierre Vandier, supreme commander Allied Transformation of NATO, that of the strategic word that engages, before the chiefs of staff come to name the new conflicts in a contested environment and the Minister of the Armed Forces, Catherine Vautrin, closes these two days. Clausewitz would have recognized his intuition there: war is a chameleon, and Toulon paints the most faithful portrait of it of the year.
The look that was missing
Still, we can gather the best and not come across anything at all. A symposium, alone, does not meet any eyes: it juxtaposes them.Between the amphitheater where the admiral speaks and the classroom where the student doubts, there is a distance that no one magically crosses, and it is precisely this distance that the Clionauts have given themselves the job of abolishing. The Geopolitical Pathway of High School Students, conducted with the FMES and the magazineDiplomatie, is the most concrete translation. There were more than four hundred of them last year to rush into it, a certificate that can be valued on Parcoursup, proof that the generation is considered captive of its screens thirsts, as soon as it is given the opportunity, to understand the century that is bequeathed to it. The Course does not test knowledge, it deposits a grammar: a way of reading a map, of sniffing a rigged story, of distinguishing the fact of its staging. In a world where information has become a weapon and lies an industry, arming a critical-minded high school student is not an additional pedagogical soul, it is already defense. This is a commitment that we also carry outside the walls of the Rencontres, alongside those who watch over our information space, and to which we will return soon. Hannah Arendt knew it: a democracy does not die first of its enemies, but of the day when its citizens no longer distinguish the true from the plausible.
A second life, then a class life
That’s why our presence doesn’t stop when the spotlights go out. Once again this year, with a notebook in hand, the Clionautes will report on round tables on their site, not to deliver a hasty summary, but to feed the reflection and draw tracks directly usable in class. We do not cover the Meetings, we extend them. Whether we want to measure what this means, it is enough to reopen the report of the previous edition devoted to space as a field of confrontation: a ninety-minute round table becomes a faithful synthesis up to the quote, closed on a formula that is retained (« war will not be won in space, but it could be lost there »), then turns into a turnkey pedagogical sequence for the Terminale, anchored in the conclusive object of the program, up to the bridge to For All Mankind and L’Étoffe des héros. A one-day symposium, a resource for a whole year. The relay is not a politeness, it is an ecology: upstream the Course prepares the student and makes him enter the amphi, on site we listen, downstream the words of the experts finally find their way to the classroom. The eyes, again this year, will not cross for the time of a symposium. It will cross before, during, and throughout the following year.
What awaits us in Toulon
So yes, see you on October 7 and 8 at the Palais Neptune, free admission, as it should be for a reflection that is intended to be a matter of citizenship before being a matter of experts. Our colleagues from History-Geography, from HGGSP, will find something to renew their classes; their students, enough to think of themselves actors and not spectators of a world that concerns them. And if we put so much obstinacy in this adventure alongside the FMES, it is because we share a simple certainty, which is worth repeating it from one edition to the next: the world that these experts decipher, it is our students who will inhabit it, so much so that they enter it by having understood it. The next generation will not wait until we have formed it to inherit the century. It’s all the more reason to start in Toulon.
