International Geneva and the Biden-Putin Summit

Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP)

International Geneva and the Biden-Putin Summit is episode 14 in this GCSP podcast series. Dr Paul Vallet interviews Ms Alexandra Matas, Head of Effective Governance at the GCSP. Welcome to the Geneva Centre for Security Policy weekly podcast. I'm your host, Dr Paul Vallet, Associate Fellow in the Global Fellowship Initiative. For the next few weeks, I'm talking with subject matter experts to discuss issues of peace, security and international cooperation. Thanks for tuning in. Early last week, it was confirmed that the presidents of the United States and of the Russian Federation Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin will hold their first summit meeting since Biden's inauguration here in Geneva on June 16. This has been hailed in Switzerland as a new occasion for Geneva to play an important role in US-Russian relations, as it often has in the past. The current state of tension between the two powers and the many issues of global scale, which they need to discuss, especially on arms control and counter proliferation, also mean that the Geneva Summit will be closely watched by international observers. It is also worth recalling that the 1985 Summit held also in Geneva between Mikael Gorbachev for the USSR and Ronald Reagan for the United States, served as another epiphany for Swiss diplomacy, and was the origins of the launch of the International Training Course around which the GCSP itself would be formed a decade later. Our podcast will discuss this in a forthcoming edition. To discuss the importance of this forthcoming summit. I'm joined today by Ms Alexandra Matas, the Head of the Effective Governance cluster at the GCSP. Alexandra Matas, who is originally Russian, trained in both Public Relations and International Affairs at the Russian State University of Physical Education, Sports and Tourism and at the Geneva Graduawte Institute of International and Development Studies, and she joined the GCSP staff full time in 2011. She has coordinated the activities of the programmes on Security and Law and WMD and disarmament respectively. She's been a short course coordinator, and more recently, the course director in Effective Governance in either English or French language courses for state officials from different countries. She also designs dialogue events in Geneva and internationally on the topic of European Security, OSCE conflict prevention mechanisms, and post war reconstruction in Syria. Her research interests include the European security architecture, Russia and the post-Soviet states. She joins us in the midst of a busy agenda this week. So we're very fortunate to have her as a guest. Welcome to the podcast, Alexandra.