Each Academic Year since 2025, the ESSEC Institute for Geopolitics & Business runs a Tricontinental Dialogue, drawing on ESSEC’s unique footprint in Europe, Africa, and Asia. This initiative fosters a cross-continental conversation between business leaders, policymakers, and academics, offering a comparative and forward-looking perspective on how companies can navigate a fractured global order.

THE 2026 / 2027 THEME

The weaponization of economic interdependence has emerged as one of the defining features of the contemporary geopolitical landscape. Trade restrictions, export controls, investment screening mechanisms, sanctions regimes, and the strategic use of critical dependencies have transformed economic ties into instruments of power. In this new environment, companies can no longer assume that global markets will remain predictable, open, or politically neutral.

The 2025–2026 Tricontinental Dialogue explored how intensifying US–China rivalry is reshaping the global business environment. Beyond strategic competition between two great powers, this rivalry is increasingly fostering the emergence of competing geo-economic spheres of influence, structured through industrial policies, technology standards, investment flows, trade agreements, development finance, and infrastructure initiatives. As states and companies are confronted with growing pressures to align, diversify, or hedge, these dynamics have exposed significant vulnerabilities in the economic security frameworks of governments across Europe, Africa, and Asia-Pacific, as well as in the business models of firms that remain heavily dependent on open and frictionless globalization.

As governments seek to secure supply chains, technological leadership, access to critical resources, and strategic infrastructure, economic security has become a central concern for both public authorities and private actors. The 2026–2027 Tricontinental Dialogue will therefore examine how companies can build economic security without retreating from international markets. Bringing together leaders from Europe, Africa, and Asia, it will explore how businesses can strengthen their resilience, reduce excessive dependencies, and adapt their strategies to a world in which economic interdependence remains indispensable, yet increasingly fragmented, contested, and weaponized.

This edition will unfold in three stages:

• A European Conference, to be hosted on ESSEC’s Cergy campus on September 16, 2026
• An African Conference, to be hosted at ESSEC Africa in Rabat on April 2027
• An Asian Conference, scheduled for June 2027 at ESSEC Asia Pacific in Singapore

Through this tricontinental approach, the Institute seeks to provide global business leaders and public authorities with rigorous insights and actionable perspectives on the weaponization of economic interdependance emerging in the contemporary geopolitical landscape.