Workshop: “Saving the Furniture: Which Elements of the Multilateral System Must Be Sustained – and How?”
Sep 22, 2025 — 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Please note that registration is required to attend in-person or online. See registration link below.
Event Description
This workshop will take place in English.
In a burning house, sometimes only part of the furniture can be saved. Today’s multilateral system faces mounting pressure from multiple directions: rising populist nationalism, intensifying geopolitical competition, demands for greater representativeness, institutional paralysis, and the deliberate erosion of cooperative norms—exemplified by the “America First” doctrine and its global counterparts. As confidence in international institutions falters, this daylong workshop will explore which elements of the multilateral order can or should be rebuilt, reformed, or protected. The morning will focus on frameworks for evaluating what is worth preserving and why; the afternoon will turn to two critical domains—global trade, tax and finance, and global climate governance—to examine concrete strategies for sustaining cooperation in an increasingly fractured world.
The workshop, co-hosted by the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) and Centre for International Policy Studies (CIPS) at the University of Ottawa together with the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), is part of the EU-funded NAVIGATOR project (), a global consortium of researchers examining how Europe should navigate the increasingly complex institutional spaces of global governance to advance a rules-based international order.
Registration is required. Register through the link in the sidebar.
For more details about the schedule, please visit the .