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many actors that have been in war or are in
a conflict situation. When they do want to sit
down to talk peace, very often the first place
they think of is Geneva. It is a place where you
have a lot of the elements necessary for making
an environment conducive to peace talks. It is
an international city, a place where agendas
are not going to cut across your own, and
nobody shoots at you in the streets of Geneva!
The infrastructure is tried and true. We have
had it for many many decades, and it works.
As I have said, the neutrality of Switzerland
is an important element of that. I remember,
a couple of days after I arrived as Director
General back in 2013, we had the Iran talks,
and at a certain point we were having coffee,
and I asked the Foreign Minister, “Why did
you chose to come to Geneva?” His answer was
very quick: “We thought about a few places,
but very quickly we realized that Geneva was
the place we needed to come to and everybody
agreed to it.” So, there is this natural attraction
to the city. It is one of its strengths that it is
understood to be the City of Peace.

You are still one of the VIPs in International
Geneva. Could you please tell us about your
activities and undertakings?
I do a number of things. I was asked to be
the chairman of the Diplomacy Forum of
a new initiative created a little over two and
half years ago called the Geneva Science and
Diplomacy Anticipator. It was set up by the
Federal Government in collaboration with the governments, NGOs and other actors such
Canton and the City of Geneva. Its objective as the business community, civil society,
is to identify the sciences and technologies academia – we bring all these people together
of tomorrow by scanning what is happening and ask them to give us their views on which
in laboratories and universities across the issues we should concentrate on. Then we work
world. We invite scientists and bring them with them and accompany the conversations,
together with the potential end users of the enriching them by bringing in other actors
technologies they will come up with. We such as ethisists, philosophers, young people,
enable them to talk together, scientists and artists, a broad selection of society, to create
diplomats, scientists and politicians, scientists trust in that science. Then we help bring the
and international organisations. The goal is solutions that come out of these conversations
for them to agree on which of these many to market if we can and to make sure that they
technologies and scientific breakthroughs are being used for the benefit of humanity and
that are coming out with great speed would not the opposite.
be the most appropriate to translate into tools
for those whose job it is to make life better for There are three very important words
humanity. that are at the basis of what we do: ethics,
governance and equity. It is very important to
So, to sum up: international organisations, us that the ethical dimensions of all these new

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