Zug — The OSCE’s flagship cybersecurity conference of the Swiss chairmanship opened in Zug today, bringing diplomats, engineers and officials together for two days on the question that has quietly moved to the centre of European security: how to keep states’ digital confrontation below the threshold of war when the battlefield has no line of contact and no observers to patrol it.
The conference, running 29 and 30 September, was opened by Swiss Defence Minister Martin Pfister and the head of the National Cyber Security Centre, Florian Schütz, with Chairman-in-Office Ignazio Cassis due to close the proceedings tomorrow. “Cybersecurity is a shared responsibility – of the state, the economy, and society,” Pfister told participants, framing the agenda around the OSCE’s own instruments: the cyber confidence-building measures its states have been adopting, clause by clause, since 2013.
Those CBMs — transparency commitments, communication channels, incident-notification expectations — are the OSCE’s quietest success story: agreed by all 57 states, including Russia and Ukraine, and kept technically alive even through four years of war. The Zug programme tests how alive: working sessions cover operationalising the measures, ‘cybermediation’ between states in digital crisis, the governance of artificial intelligence in conflict, and a scenario exercise walking delegations through a simulated cross-border cyber incident.
The setting is pointed. Zug — a lakeside canton known for blockchain startups and commodity traders — represents the private infrastructure where most cyber conflict actually happens: the cables, clouds and companies that states attack and defend through proxies. Bringing the OSCE’s diplomats here, Swiss organisers said, is an admission that classical diplomacy cannot govern this domain alone.
Ukraine’s experience shadows every session. The war has produced the most intense state-on-state cyber campaign in history, much of it documented by the very national centres represented in Zug — yet the OSCE’s CBM network has never been activated to de-escalate it. Whether confidence-building measures can function between belligerents, or only between states at peace, is the question the scenario exercise will pose without, its designers concede, answering.
The conference closes tomorrow with Cassis’s address and a set of recommendations for the Lugano ministerial in December. For an organisation whose other instruments — observers, treaties, field missions — have been vetoed, invaded or dissolved in recent years, the cyber file offers something rare: a mandate nobody has blocked yet, and a room in which all 57 states still, at least digitally, talk.
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