From May 18 until May 21, 2026, 16 fellows from the 2025-26' cohort of the Arms Control Negotiation Academy (ACONA) took part in their final week-long boot camp in Reykjavík. Christopher Daase and Sascha Hach led the event, while Timothée Hillier-Davis and Jan Quosdorf took care of the event organization. During the boot camp, the fellows developed a negotiation campaign applying the knowledge they gained from the policy briefs they wrote throughout the past year. To finalize their negotiation skills training, they participated in a day-long multi-layered negotiation exercise. On top of that, the fellows met with Halla Tómasdóttir, the current president of Iceland, and went to the Parliament of Iceland, where they met with two parliamentarians.
On the last day of the boot camp, the fellows went to Höfði House, the iconic location where former US President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union met in 1986 for the Reykjavík Summit. There, Sascha Hach, the Managing Director of ACONA, and Pia Hansson, the Director of the Institute of International Affairs at the University of Iceland, awarded the participating fellows their ACONA Fellowship certificates.
After the boot camp, the fellows stayed in Reykjavík for another day as the 5th ACONA Conference took place on Friday, May 22, 2026. Ambassadors from Finland, Germany, Canada, high-ranking diplomats, and experts joined the ACONA fellows. During the conference, four different panel discussions provided insights into various topics related to this year’s theme “Negotiating Security Risks and Opportunities in the Era of AI”: The ambassadors, who were part of the first panel, talked about the middle powers’ role in a new and changing world order. The second panel touched upon history as it brought forth some first-hand accounts of the iconic Reykjavík Summit in 1986 mentioned above. In contrast, the third panel, moderated by Christopher Daase, dealt with emerging technologies as its focus was on AI’s potential effects on arms control. Lastly, the fourth panel, the ACONA Invitation Roundtable, was a venue for ACONA fellows to present their results of another boot camp exercise: the “Design Thinking Workshop”. They talked about possible diplomatic solutions concerning up-to-date issues, such as the Arctic as a geopolitical hot spot. Additionally, this year’s winners of the Negotiation exercise and of the best ACONA policy brief, titled “Leveraging Nuclear Disarmament Verification for Diplomatic Breakthrough in Multilateral Disarmament,” were awarded before the conference ended.
Sascha Hach, Timothée Hillier-Davis, and Jan Quosdorf, organizers of both the boot camp and the conference, concluded that the week in Reykjavík was a “successful endeavor” which was made possible thanks to the support of their colleagues in Iceland.
Applications to be part of the ACONA 2026-27' cohort are still running until May 31, 2026. For further information follow this link: https://www.armscontrolnegotiationacademy.org/application
