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Centre For International Governance Innovation

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The Future Of Security Sector Reform

What is Blockchain?

This volume hopes to initiate a debate within the SSR community of policy and practice on the future of the concept, developing new ideas on the form and content of a second-generation model. If nothing else, it hopes to give shape to a new research agenda that can harness the many lessons learned from a decade of implementation to foster a more informed debate on the future of SSR.

The Freedom To Collaborate Online Is At Risk

The unprecedented digital collaboration we have seen through the internet has only been possible because the internet was built with freedom at its core. But this freedom cannot and must not be taken for granted. Global internet freedom has declined for the eleventh consecutive year, according to Freedom House. Largely, this trend reflects the growing use of authoritarian information controls however, growing industrial policy increasingly presents additional dimensions of risk.

New laws on the horizon have the internet landscape poised for a major shift. In Europe, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act will set global precedents, just as the earlier European privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, did. These laws, together with the UK Online Safety Bill and other proposals under consideration in countries all around the world, are intended by governments to make the internet safer and more competitive. But, as always, the devil is in the details fixing some things can break others, such as the freedom to collaborate online and, in particular, to collaborate on software development. In turn, deep and possibly existential questions arise regarding the future of innovation and the internet.

Cigi Ssr Monitor Haiti No 4

This edition of the Security Sector Reform Monitor: Haiti, written before the January 12, 2010 earthquake, examines issues surrounding the renewal of the UN mission, therecommendations on the security apparatus put forth by the two presidential commissions and existing security threats. While some priorities of the SSR process willchange dramatically in the wake of the earthquakewith a significant portion of the security infrastructure devastated and the police thrust into the role of relief facilitatorsmany of the existing challenges will remain the same, only amplified.

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A Vibrant Sanctuary Built To Last For At Least 100 Years

The CIGI Campus, a centre for excellence in teaching and research in international governance, is an innovative academic initiative shared by CIGI, the University of Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier University.

Located on the former Seagram Distillery lands, the project transforms an historically industrial site into an institutional use, and connects to and extends Uptown Waterloo. The site is also unique in Canada in that it is bounded by three Governor General Award-winning projects the Perimeter Institute, the Clay and Glass Museum, and the former Seagram Museum design excellence was mandated.

Recalling his own university experience, our Client requested a contemporary interpretation of academic courtyard building with a bell tower. As the new institution is located on a heavily trafficked intersection, it was designed as a sanctuary for academic life, with the understated brick façades referencing Waterloos industrial heritage.

Once inside, the building and courtyard are designed with a high degree of transparency, connectivity and animation to deliver a vibrant learning environment. Highly durable materials, including brick, local Ontario stone and wood, ensure the buildings longevity.

Sustainable design was another priority, and we designed Ontarios first installation of Bubbledeck long-span slabs, decreasing the amount of concrete used in the construction by 30%.

Deniable Influence: The Wagner Groups Evolving Usefulness

Centre for International Governance Innovation

The Wagner Groups recent emergence in West Africa is showing similarities to its continuing involvement in the Central African Republic . One difference is that deceptive campaigns on Facebook alongside broader pro-Russia influence operations have been used as a tool to garner public support ahead of time for newly established military junta regimes in the restive Sahel region to hire the mercenaries as replacements for Western counterterrorism forces.

According to analysis by experts at the Atlantic Councils Digital Forensics Research Lab, in February 2020 a handful of Facebook pages in Mali began promoting narratives that lobbied for Wagner mercenaries to be deployed to the country, well before they actually arrived in late 2021.

Content shared by the network is aimed at undermining French interests, promoting Russia as a viable alternative to the West, and mobilizing public support for the government of interim President Assimi Goïta and the Malian military, say the researchers.

As of February 2022, the network had amassed 140,000 total followers on pages trying to pass themselves off as non-profit organizations and community groups. This figure likely underestimates the networks reach as Nigerian development expert Idayat Hassan has pointed out, social media in Africa functions as an evolved form of pavement radio, with community members often congregating around a single device to consume content together.

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Cigi Ssr Monitor Haiti No 1

When the new constitution came into effect in 1987, the Haitian security and justice sector was weak and fractured. The army was intent on playing an internal policing role, the judicial system was corrupt and ineffective, and the local and national governance institutions were incapable of asserting democratic civilian control of the sector.

This edition a CIGI SSR Monitor dedicates particular attention to issues related to penal reform and the overarching issue of corruption in the security sector.

This issue of the CIGI Security Sector Reform Monitor: Haiti analyses the programming shift undertaken by MINUSTAH and some donors from a traditional DDR toa violence reduction approach, underlining the problems of coordination and knowledge sharing that emerged.

Centre For International Governance Innovation

Centre for International Governance Innovation

The CIGI campus
International think tank on global governance
Purpose Generating ideas for multilateral governance improvements
Headquarters
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The Centre for International Governance Innovation is an independent, non-partisan think tank on global governance. CIGI supports research, forms networks, advances policy debate and generates ideas for multilateral governance improvements. CIGI’s interdisciplinary work includes collaboration with policy, business and academic communities around the world.

Until September 2014, CIGI was headquartered in the former Seagram Museum in the uptown district of Waterloo, Ontario. It is now situated in the CIGI Campus, which also houses the CIGI Auditorium and the Balsillie School of International Affairs .

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Since The Wagner Group First Appeared In Support Of Russias 2014 Annexation Of Crimea The Kremlin Has Denied It Exists

Not much is known for certain about the Wagner Group. Since the decentralized private network of Russian mercenaries first appeared in aid of Russias 2014 annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin has always denied it exists. Meanwhile, the US government and its allies view the paramilitary outfit as a proxy force for Russias Ministry of Defence, allegedly funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch and one of President Vladimir Putins most trusted loyalists. However, some analysts argue that conceptualizing the Wagner Group as a coherent entity is misguided giving an unwarranted level of autonomy to something that doesnt appear on paper and has no established structure or leadership.

Nevertheless, the group has been playing its most visible role yet during the ongoing war in Ukraine. Its fighters are participating in front-line battles and engaging in a public relations blitz and recruitment drive in Russia. In mid-August, Ukrainian forces claimed to have bombed a Wagner Group headquarters in the Luhansk region after a by a pro-Russia journalist accidentally revealed its location.

In this way the Wagner Groups evolution is unique. However, its rising public profile also shines light on the growing demand for private military companies in modern conflicts increasingly messy, drawn-out and ill-defined affairs.

Preserving Collaboration Requires More Than Preserving Expression

How UNDRIP Changes Canadas Relationship with Indigenous Peoples

The above proposals affect both expression and collaboration, yet the two freedoms are distinct, and it is possible to protect expression and assembly while nevertheless undermining collaboration. Understanding those distinctions requires a deeper dive into proposals that would specifically undermine either the permanence or the accessibility of the combined inputs in a collaboration.

Consider a hypothetical law that forced all online content to be made unavailable within 15 minutes of its posting. Any individual could speak and be heard, for their full 15 minutes of fame, and no additional limits would be placed by the law on the ability of individuals to join together and communicate. Yet, something fundamental would be lost. In this case, the assumption of permanence would no longer hold true, and practical limits would be imposed on the ability of one individual to react to, and contribute downstream from, anothers individual contributions. While we could all speak, and some limited amount of interaction would be feasible, the combined value of the interactions would be no more, or little more, than the sum of the value of the individual parts, losing that magic of true collaboration.

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Latest Documents From Centre For International Governance Innovation

  • DocumentA. Ezenagu / Centre for International Governance Innovation, 2019
  • DocumentE.A. Parson / Centre for International Governance Innovation, 2015
  • DocumentP. Chasek, L. Wagner, I.W. Zartman / Centre for International Governance Innovation, 2015
  • DocumentH. Besada, N. Moyo / Centre for International Governance Innovation, 2008

Reliability Lost In The Shuffle

A resilience agenda for Canadian telecom is easy to call for but hard to execute, especially when much else is afoot. Over the three decades since the Telecommunications Act came into force, the regulator has also presided over the progressive introduction of competition the implementation, then general dismantling, of foreign ownership restrictions and the complete, and ongoing, reworking of how communications services are delivered in light of digital technologies. It has worked to update its frameworks to both respect and respond to the once-central public switched telephone networks long wind-down in favour of broadband and internet.

Somewhere along the way, however, the reliability expectations exemplified by responsibilities such as retail quality-of-service reporting, once required of rate-regulated monopolies by the CRTC, were replaced by the lesser outcome of informal resilience. Thats something that emanates from markets in which overlapping service providers compete on multiple platforms for the trust of consumers and businesses. For critical infrastructures, informal resilience is not enough.

The consequences of insufficiently embedding a reliability agenda within shifting telecom policy mandates have long been visible in places such as Canadas North, where 9-1-1 services have lagged modern standards, telephone and broadband services are frequently spotty, and community-wide outages are not uncommon.

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What Distinguishes The Internet From Its Various Predecessor Technologies Is That We Dont Surf Alone

The internet is unique because we surf it together. The internationally recognized freedoms of expression and assembly reflect part, but not all, of how we engage with others online we express ourselves as individuals, and we come together in virtual fora. The missing third leg of the internet freedom stool is the freedom to collaborate, an articulation of our freedom to contribute and to react to others contributions, resulting in a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Distinct from existing freedoms, the concept of internet freedom the preservation of the internet as a free, open and accessible space for the realization of fundamental human rights online typically encompasses the freedom of expression, articulated in article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the freedom of assembly and association, affirmed in article 20, and grows from these and other fundamental rights. Reflecting on the challenges facing the modern internet, advocates for internet freedom should also explicitly recognize, and work to preserve globally, the freedom to collaborate on the internet. While the right to collaborate is not grounded in existing human rights treaties, recognizing it as a new distinct right complements the freedoms of expression and assembly in practice and will help to shape the future development of legislative and regulatory exercises, with the objective of preserving the unique togetherness characteristic of the internet.

Competition As Complement To Resiliency

Top Employer: Centre for International Governance Innovation

How competition is structured affects how telecom markets tackle resilience. Single points of failure, both within a network and through over-reliance on any one firm, are red flags. Canadas rural and remote communities, already confronted with being underserved, face particular challenges in this regard. Yet it would be a mistake to assume no room for improvement in Canadas urban centres, as images of city-dwellers descending on coffee shop hotspots drove home on July 8. Even in our largest cities, many residents and commercial users, particularly those in newer apartment and condo buildings and single-developer plazas, increasingly have what amounts to a single choice for a facilities-based internet service provider. Where additional network facilities would provide a hedge against the scope and scale of potential outages, the CRTC, municipalities and provinces can all take steps to promote resilience-first competition.

The opinions expressed in this article/multimedia are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of CIGI or its Board of Directors.

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Focusing On Freedom To Collaborate Can Address Deeper Systemic Challenges

Collaboration on the internet can feel like an issue quite removed from core free-expression matters, and, given the salience of expression in well-established narratives of individual human rights, the blunt question Why bother? is worth asking. Its hard enough to balance speech and harm in the highly visible context of social media. Where the speech at issue isnt human language but rather code, or an amorphous community, that balance is harder to perceive. And its harder still when the balance focuses not on one individuals ability to create speech or code, but instead on the ability of a community to collaborate together.

Preserving collaboration is in some sense orthogonal, and thus complementary, to supporting the freedoms of expression and association. In addition to its inherent value and distinctness, the freedom to collaborate may offer a more tractable lens for engaging with intermediary public policy conversations because the discussion becomes not about the balancing of rights in individual instances through judicial processes, but about the use of legislative and administrative processes. The world stands on the cusp of a major change in how we protect rights particularly, but not only, in the context of the internet and having as many tools and theories as possible to test in the wake of that change will be advantageous, even if some of them do not end up being strategic or viable.

Rising Demand For Mercenaries Reflects Changing Nature Of Conflict

From a legal perspective, a PMC is a corporate entity a mercenary group is not. On the ground, though, the difference between the two can be almost impossible to discern. And the use of both is undoubtedly on the rise.

The demand for PMCs has skyrocketed since Russias invasion of Ukraine, with their services reportedly sought in Ukraine to assist with evacuations, logistics and protection of humanitarian organizations. In April, just two months into the war, European officials claimed Russia had already deployed up to 20,000 Syrian and Libyan mercenaries in the Donbas region, offering Syrian government soldiers up to 50 times their monthly salary to enlist.

Outsourcing the use of violence to PMCs in chaotic locations presents a serious challenge to core tenets of state security and established international law. And indeed, the risks of human rights abuses and war crimes stemming from PMC involvements is all too apparent.

In a recent interview, Marat Gabidullin, the first former member of the Wagner Group to go on record about his experience, argued that mercenary groups are nothing to be ashamed of, they exist everywhere, but we lie about them.

Going forward, Gabidullins Wagner Group colleagues still in the game appear poised to profit as does the Kremlin, politically from those services being lied about, and promoted, in online campaigns targeting citizens desperate for security, in some of the worlds most dangerous and forgotten places.

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Catch Up On Minimum Standards

High on the list of essential elements for any telecom reliability agenda must be baseline reliability governance across the sector, in the form of proper, robust, independently-audited internal controls.

Most large telcos are, it is true, already subject to some patchwork of security standards as payment card processors, outsourcing partners or procurement respondents. So are most banks, railways and electric utilities. But the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions holds Canadas banks to guidelines, and reporting, on operational and technology risk management. The Ontario Energy Board requires electricity distributors to self-assess annually against an Ontario Cyber Security Framework, and is one of eight provincial regulators to mandate North American Electric Reliability Corporation cyber standards. The looser work coordinated for some telcos by ISED, not the CRTC, is an uneven equivalent.

Work toward mandatory internal controls will not come as a surprise. The Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel for the CRTC to update security best practices for Canadian telcos and to determine to which classes of service provider they should apply. Now the proposed Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act would more formally duplicate within ISED, by designating it the telecom sector regulator, some of the very responsibilities the CRTC ought already to have taken up.

A Fine Balance: The Eu And The Process Of Normalizing Kosovo

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The recent agreement between Kosovo and Serbia is a significant accomplishment for the European Union. Still, the agreement marks the beginning, rather than the end, of a long-term process of normalizing relations between Serbia and Kosovo. The maintenance of the EUs constructive ambiguity approach to the question of Serbias recognition of Kosovo as an independent state is important for continued normalizing relations between the countries. The EUs continuous and active involvement and interest in the region is of paramount importance for the full implementation of the agreement.

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