CIGI Welcomes New President

On Tuesday, September 6, Paul Samson joins CIGI as president.

Bringing deep experience in international relations, economics and governance, Samson arrives at a pivotal point for CIGI and the nexus of global issues that form its core areas of study.

In this profile, Samson talks about the accelerating international changes under way, their implications for the world’s major institutions of multilateral governance, and the think tank’s critical role in providing deeply grounded research, analysis and ideas that can help policy makers navigate this uncertainty and find a constructive path forward. Meet CIGI’s new president.

As CIGI welcomes Paul, we invite you to connect with him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

Not much is known for certain about the Wagner Group, whose existence the Kremlin has always denied. The mysterious decentralized network of Russian mercenaries has been playing its most visible role during the war in Ukraine, although soldiers of fortune operating under its amorphous brand and acting in line with Russian state interests have popped up in Syria, Venezuela and at least a dozen African countries.

Kyle Hiebert writes that aside from the material impact it exerts, the group functions as a propaganda tool. Disinformation campaigns based on myth-making about its deployments have been appearing online, months before Wagner boots hit the ground, allowing Russia to gain a strategic foothold in fragile, resource-rich nations at the periphery of Western attention.

Rogers Communications’ network outage on July 8 threw into sharp relief Canadians’ dependence on their telecom services, and the firms that provide them. Although every complex system, given enough lifespan, must experience failures, that inevitability should be viewed as a conversation-starter, not an excuse for inaction.

Resiliency is bigger than any one individual or company. Bram Abramson and Keldon Bester ask: How do we retrofit into our fraught telecom environment a reliability agenda that is more than a telecom equivalent of poorly privatized health care, in which service is most accessible to the most fortunate? What does a reliability agenda for telecom even look like — one that recognizes we are all better off when we are all served by a critical communications infrastructure that we rarely need to notice?