Otago Foreign Policy School 2026

Every winter for six decades, a small corner of Dunedin has become an unlikely centre of gravity for New Zealand's foreign policy establishment. Diplomats, academics and journalists fly south from Wellington and Auckland, joining experts from across the globe, students and interested members of the public to squeeze into St Margaret's College (above) to argue about the state of the world. This year, from 26 to 28 June, the University of Otago Foreign Policy School marked its 60th anniversary - a milestone that arrived at a moment organisers say is as consequential as any in the school’s history.

An adult-education idea that outgrew itself

The school began in 1966, the creation of international relations lecturer Arnold Entwisle, who directed it for its first ten years with support from Angus Ross, then head of Otago's History Department. It grew out of adult-education courses on world affairs that Otago's University Extension programme had run since the mid-1950s, and it kept the word "School" in its name deliberately, as a nod to its origins as a course meant to teach ordinary New Zealanders "the practical realities of foreign-policy making," rather than a conventional academic conference.

Entwisle's founding rationale, delivered in his opening address that first year, was that New Zealand urgently needed "a do-it-yourself kit" for making its own foreign policy — a striking admission at a time when Britain's drift toward Europe was forcing Wellington to think for itself on the world stage for the first time. That anxiety about a small, exposed trading nation navigating great-power competition amid a crumbling rules framework looks just as relevant in 2026 as it did in 1966.

Historians have documented how the OFPS has shaped the "agendas and institutional" levels of foreign policy debate in New Zealand, debating issues often well before they became mainstream political concerns. Arguably its most famous notable moment came in 1985, when Labour Prime Minister David Lange used the Otago platform to signal to Ronald Reagan's Washington and Margaret Thatcher's London that New Zealand would not budge on going nuclear-free, a policy that took effect in 1987.

A fixture of the foreign policy ecosystem

What began as a rural extension course is now, in the University's own description, "one of the premier events in New Zealand's international calendar." MFAT treats it as a working retreat for policy officials (although this year many were prevented travelling south due to appalling weather) and speaker lists have often included sitting Foreign Ministers.

It also attracts interest from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Ministry of Defence, NGOs and the private sector, alongside emerging scholars supported by travel grants from the Asia New Zealand Foundation's NextGen programme, which also runs an adjacent Friday workshop and roundtable.

Professor Robert Patman (centre) speaks to the Asia New Zealand Foundation "NextGen" Roundtable at this year's OFPS

The 60th School: a "fork in the road"

This year's theme was "The Faltering International Rules-Based Order and New Zealand", looking at a rules-based order under strain on three fronts: direct challenges such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the 2026 US-Israeli military action against Iran; the rise of right-wing populism in the United States, Britain, Brazil and Hungary eroding domestic support for multilateralism; and the exploitation of social media to influence the politics of states that have traditionally upheld the rules-based system.

Five linked themes structured the programme: liberal institutions and multilateralism; free trade, sovereignty, Big Tech and democratic governance; upholding rules in an insecure and unjust world; alternative approaches to the rules-based order; and New Zealand's own position under strain.

Speakers included MFAT deputy chief executive Tahamoana Macpherson, Ukrainian Prism's Dr Hanna Shelest, Peking University's Professor Zhang Qingmin, the Max Planck Institute's Dr Malcolm Jorgensen, Exeter's Professor Ilan Pappé and Professor Richard Byrne of the University of Maryland, among a cast spanning academia, government and media, and also including Otago Daily Times political editor Mike Houlahan.

Among the speakers this year, few delivered a message as bluntly transactional as David Stilwell, the former US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. In a pointed session, Stilwell was careful to frame his remarks as analysis rather than instruction, insisting he was not there to dictate policy changes to New Zealand. What he offered instead was a hard-edged lesson in realpolitik. His central argument was that the era of one-way security guarantees is ending, if it ever really existed. Geopolitical relationships, he told the audience, are built on transactional value, not sentiment or shared history. Distilling the point into a single blunt phrase: "What have you done for me lately?".

He argued that small nations like New Zealand wanting continued defence cooperation with major powers need to actively contribute to the relationship rather than simply receiving protection. It was less a threat than a description of how he believes the system already works, whether or not New Zealand has fully absorbed that reality.

Stilwell also addressed NZ’s decades-old anti-nuclear legislation and argued against the assumption that major powers will unconditionally extend a security umbrella to partners who remain indifferent to their own defence underfunding. In a view echoing comments by US Defence Secretary Hegseth at the Shangri-La Dialogue last month, Stilwell said nations need to explicitly decide what level of military and strategic capability they actually want, and build it.

The comments, some openly mocked by the audience, were a reminder from a former insider of the US foreign policy machine that the rules of the alliance game may be shifting under New Zealand's feet, whether Wellington chooses to notice or not.

Speaking to the Otago Daily Times ahead of the opening session, Professor Robert Patman called the gathering "a fork-in-the-road moment for New Zealand foreign policy," expressing hope it would push the Government to rethink its approach. He argued New Zealand's current posture toward the Trump administration - what he called a "softly, softly approach", is not working, and that most of the era's defining problems from climate change to pandemics to economic disfunction could only be solved through broad, multilateral co-operation.

Professor Richard Byrne offered a complementary prescription: that New Zealand and similarly placed countries could exert leverage by building trade partnerships deliberately excluding both the United States and China, and by publicly calling out major-power rule-breaking, applying subtle pressure that might nudge Washington and Beijing back toward more rules-faithful behaviour.

Sixty years after Entwisle's "do-it-yourself kit," the school’s underlying premise endures: that a small, trade-dependent democracy at the bottom of the Pacific cannot afford to let its foreign policy be made by others. Whether this year's warnings translate into any shift in Wellington's settings remains, as always, a question for the year ahead.

Asia Media Centre