The rules that make cooperation durable
At CERN, the cohort moved from the heat and security dilemmas of Geneva into one of the most enduring institutional experiments in modern science: a laboratory built not only to study particle physics, but to make cooperation durable across politics, borders and generations.
Rudiger Voss, Retired Senior Physicist and Head of International Relations at CERN and Past President of the European Physical Society (EPS), set out the institutional architecture behind that endurance. CERN now has 25 full member states, associate member states including major scientific partners outside Europe, observer states and cooperation agreements with more than 50 countries. Its annual budget, he noted, has remained around 1.2 billion Swiss francs, with fewer than 3,000 staff and a far larger community of users and associates who remain affiliated with home institutes around the world.
That distinction matters for science diplomacy. CERN is not a universal organisation trying to collect as many flags as possible. “Its membership policy,” Voss explained, “is designed around the scientific mission itself: countries need a scientific community capable of contributing visibly to CERN’s research projects, and an industrial and technological base able to participate in procurement and technical work.“
The discussion made concrete a question that had followed the cohort from WHO to GCSP: who gets to participate, and under what conditions? At WHO, mirror biology raised the issue before the science was settled. At GCSP, autonomous weapons raised it after deployment had already begun. At CERN, the same question appeared through membership categories, voting rights, industrial return, cooperation agreements and in-kind contributions.
In the questions that followed, participants pressed the model from several directions. One asked how far back CERN’s data goes and what discoveries had come from it. Voss pointed to the Large Hadron Collider, which began operating in 2008, and to the Higgs boson, whose discovery resolved one of the long-standing mysteries of particle physics by explaining the mechanism that gives elementary particles mass.
Others asked about gender balance, non-European participation and whether contributions from the United States should be understood as foreign investment in Switzerland or France. The answer was more practical than symbolic. “US contributions“, Voss said, “are almost never cash transfers. They come largely as in-kind equipment, built in national laboratories and shipped for use in CERN accelerators or experiments“. CERN, in that sense, is less a place where science is simply hosted than a structure through which many countries build one project together.
The session showed one of the quieter principles of science diplomacy: cooperation survives when it is made operational. It needs treaties and councils, but also procurement rules, technical standards, budget cycles, industrial capacity and a shared sense of what counts as contribution.
How a 3,000-person experiment decides
Pippa Wells, Physicist at CERN, carried the morning from institutional membership into the machinery of collaboration itself. Her subject was not only the accelerator, but the governance required to make very large experiments work.
She began with the CERN Council, the organisation’s supreme decision-making body, which determines scientific policy, approves the medium-term plan and appoints the Director-General. “Since 2006,” she explained, “the European Strategy for Particle Physics has been updated every six or seven years through a process launched by the Council but involving the wider European particle physics community. That strategy sets the scientific programme; the budget decisions make it possible.“
Wells then turned to the difference between what CERN runs as an organisation and what the experimental collaborations organise themselves. The accelerators, detectors and computing infrastructure are the three technologies needed for the research. Around them sit collaborations such as ATLAS and CMS, each involving thousands of scientists from more than a hundred institutes, with governance structures of their own.
For the cohort, this made the word collaboration less abstract. A detector is not only a machine. It is a political and organisational object: proposed, reviewed, funded, built, upgraded, governed and interpreted by people who must agree on responsibilities before they can agree on results.
The strongest image was scale. ATLAS and CMS are general-purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, with ATLAS located close to the site the cohort visited and CMS across the ring. Each is vast in physical size and human complexity. The research collaboration has grown from small groups of around ten people in the 1960s to collaborations with thousands of members, where every published result depends on shared data, common standards and internal review.
That gap matters for science diplomacy because it shows what multilateral cooperation looks like when it has to produce evidence, not just statements. The same week that participants debated whether governance can keep pace with mirror biology, AI and autonomous weapons, CERN offered a slower but harder-won lesson: some forms of speed are created by decades of trust.
Resilience, continuity and the next tunnel
The questions after Wells’s presentation turned the session toward resilience. One participant asked what had allowed CERN to develop over more than 70 years with relatively little change to its founding convention, even as its governance mechanisms, national mandates and collaboration models evolved.
Wells gave three answers.
- The first was the international governmental organisation itself: a convention signed by countries that creates a long-term commitment beyond the life of any single government. “A typical government is a few years, maybe four or five, maybe four weeks,” she said, but the contract with an international organisation lasts longer than the political cycle.
- The second was infrastructure. CERN’s accelerators have grown larger over time to reach higher energies, but the older accelerators have not simply disappeared. They now feed particles into the Large Hadron Collider, like cogs in a larger machine. The LHC, in this account, was not a greenfield project but an extension of a laboratory, technical base and culture already in place.
- The third was people. Staff, users and scientific communities bring continuity, Wells said, because they are committed to the science and to the laboratory that makes it possible.
Looking ahead, she pointed to the European Strategy for Particle Physics and its recommendation of a Future Circular Collider as CERN’s next flagship project. The proposed 91-kilometre tunnel would extend further into France and could begin with a high-energy electron-positron collider before a future hadron collider operating at five or six times the energy of the present LHC.
The question led participants back to anticipation, but now in a different register. At WHO, the window of anticipation opened because mirror organisms do not yet exist. At CERN, anticipation reveals itself in feasibility studies, multi-decade sequencing and the willingness of states to commit before the full scientific return is known.
That exchange sharpened a practical lesson from the morning. Scientific capacity is not built only by training scientists. It also depends on the people who know how to manage laboratories, budgets, procurement, collaboration agreements and the boundary between research ambition and administrative reality.
Open science as diplomatic infrastructure
Kamran Naim, Head of Open Science at CERN, placed the morning’s institutional and experimental detail inside a broader question: how can scientific cooperation be maintained in a less cooperative world? He began from the pressures the cohort had been discussing all week: geopolitical tension, technological competition, strategic autonomy, knowledge security and declining public trust. “The challenges humanity faces,” he said, “do not stop at borders“. Pandemics, climate change, energy transitions, food security, cyber security, emerging technologies and public health all require cooperation. Yet cooperation itself has become more fragile.
To answer that paradox, Naim returned to CERN’s founding after the Second World War. Only nine years separated the end of the war from the establishment of CERN. That transformation, he said, should not be taken for granted. “Cooperation is not the natural state of affairs,” he said. “It is something that must be intentionally designed, built, and maintained.“ CERN, in his account, was never only a particle physics laboratory. From the beginning, it was a diplomatic project, built on the idea that science could create a mutual space where nations worked together despite political differences. “Scientific cooperation,” he said, “does not require political uniformity. It requires trusted frameworks.“
Open science was part of that framework from the start. The CERN Convention’s commitment that the results of scientific work should be made generally available was not merely a technical choice. “Openness was always understood as a mechanism of trust,” Naim said. “Transparency reduces suspicion. Shared knowledge creates accountability.“
The discussion moved from institutional diplomacy to knowledge diplomacy and then to what Naim called infrastructure diplomacy: shared digital repositories, standards, services, governance frameworks and computing systems through which knowledge flows. Zenodo, the multidisciplinary research repository operated by CERN, became one example. SCOAP3, the open access publishing cooperative for particle physics, became another.
The point was not openness for its own sake. Naim argued that equitable scientific systems must answer three questions: who has access, who can participate and who benefits. Open science, in this view, is an ecosystem of infrastructure, policy, incentives, software, hardware, data, culture and governance.
Trust, industry and who gets access
In the afternoon the group moved from the simulation to the practical work of the Open Quantum Institute (OQI). Tim Smith, Coordinator of the Open Quantum Institute, described OQI as an attempt to build a common incentive around quantum computing before the field narrows around a small number of owners, supply chains or national champions. The problem is also what happens when one exists, who can use it, and whether access is shared broadly enough for quantum technologies to serve public-interest problems rather than only strategic or commercial advantage. Smith pointed to water leakage detection as one example of the discipline required: the work begins not with the machine, but with cities, local authorities, domain experts, data holders, classical computing specialists and quantum researchers trying to define a real problem together. Building teams across disciplines, creating a common language, and developing use cases before the technology becomes mature enough for its benefits and asymmetries to harden. “That is anticipation at its best,” he said in effect: preparing not only for future machines, but for the future teams that will have to work with them.
Christian Sarra-Bournet, Executive Director of the Institut quantique at the Université de Sherbrooke, drew the distinction between near-term and longer-term promise. “Quantum sensing“, he suggested, “is already closer to practical use, including for underground water, flooding, wildfire and chemical detection“. Quantum computing may show usefulness in the coming years, but the larger claims remain uncertain. “The science alone“, he added, “will not solve sustainability challenges. It has to be combined with what societies choose to do”. The security question remained close by. Sarra-Bournet noted that the consequences of quantum computing for cryptography have been visible since the 1990s, yet migration to post-quantum cryptography still takes countries years. In many places, he warned, the delay has already begun. That made quantum a different version of the same policy lag the cohort had discussed at WHO and GCSP: not a distant future waiting politely for institutions, but a known governance problem whose timetable is already running.
