For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

Unpredictable great-power behaviour and a straining international order seemingly at the outer limits of its capacity have prompted many to champion the idea of increased and more systematic collective middle-power action, both to advance the interests of middle powers and to add a potentially stabilizing influence on the global stage. S. Yash Kalash and I made that case in 2025, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney reinforced these ideas at the 2026 Davos summit, advocating for “variable geometry” to enable agile, flexible cooperation.

Variable geometry among middle powers is most likely to achieve its full potential when it operates within a permanent institutional framework dedicated to middle-power deliberation and collaboration. Such an institution would maximize middle-power leverage and provide continuity, identity and coordinating capacity to its efforts while operating alongside and interacting with existing institutions in the broader global governance architecture.

Virginia Woolf famously argued that women required “a room of one’s own”: an independent space in which creativity could flourish free from external constraints. Borrowing that metaphor here, it describes a dedicated institutional home where middle powers can develop ideas, build relationships and coordinate collective action on their own terms, without interference from others.

The Limits of Ad Hoc Cooperation

The growing influence of middle powers has been accompanied by an equally impressive growth in geo- and issue-specific arrangements among middle powers. Regional trade agreements, diplomatic groupings and security dialogues demonstrate that middle powers are increasingly willing and able to cooperate independently of the great powers.

But the proliferation of ad hoc middle-power collective arrangements must be juxtaposed against a new strategic reality of aggressive great-power pressure across trade, security and digital domains. In the absence of a central coordinating institution for middle powers that can work toward coherent global responses by its members, their fragmented, disconnected alliances dilute their collective leverage and leave their sovereignty particularly vulnerable to exploitation.

Four limitations of the current ad hoc approach are described here. First, middle-power cooperation, as currently practised, is for the most part institutionally disjointed, with multiple regional and functional arrangements evolving independently and without strategic coordination. Second, there is no permanent global forum through which middle powers can deliberate collectively as international events unfold. Third, most existing arrangements lack permanent and adequate analytical and operational support. Finally, because relationships, agendas and organizational structures must continually be recreated, serial cooperative approaches carry unnecessarily high transaction costs.

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The problem is therefore not a lack of willingness to cooperate; it is the absence of an institutional framework capable of leveraging cooperation to be more systematic, efficient and strategically coherent. Such a framework would provide an enabling environment in which variable geometry arrangements could be developed, tested and refined, increasing the likelihood that promising coalitions achieve critical mass and can subsequently be scaled, adapted or reconfigured as circumstances evolve.

Trade illustrates both the promise and limitations of the current model. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership demonstrated that middle powers could successfully preserve and expand an ambitious trade agreement following the withdrawal of the United States. Yet its subsequent evolution (including the functional anomaly of adding the United Kingdom into a trans-Pacific partnership), together with the proliferation of European and other regional trade arrangements, illustrates an increasingly fragmented landscape. The challenge is no longer creating regional agreements; it is coordinating those agreements for more effective collective middle-power leverage.

Comparable challenges arise in security and digital governance. When major geopolitical crises occur, no standing forum exists where middle powers can confer privately and determine whether coordinated global responses would better advance their interests and support the international rules-based order. Likewise, issues such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and digital platform governance increasingly place the sovereignty and autonomy of individual middle powers opposite to multinational technology companies possessing immense economic and political influence. Essentially, acting collectively would significantly strengthen middle powers’ capacity to respond.

Existing initiatives, such as MIKTA and the Alliance for Multilateralism, demonstrate both the possibilities and limitations of informal modes of cooperation. Both have facilitated dialogue, but, lacking permanent institutional structures, they have struggled to sustain broader strategic influence.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) offers a more instructive model. Much of its effectiveness derives not simply from its membership but also from its permanent secretariat, its significant analytical and operational capacity, and robust deliberative processes capable of developing both legal and soft-law instruments across a wide range of issues. These institutional characteristics have enabled the OECD to exert influence well beyond its formal authority. A middle-power institution should draw upon these strengths while avoiding governance arrangements that permit domination by any single major power.

The broader lesson is straightforward: permanent institutions reduce transaction costs by providing continuity, institutional memory, trusted deliberative processes and analytical support. Rather than requiring governments to recreate relationships and organizational mechanisms whenever new issues arise, they create the conditions under which cooperation becomes more timely, efficient and effective.

Variable geometry should therefore not be viewed as an alternative to institutions. Flexible coalitions work best when supported by a stable institutional framework that enables them to form, evolve and dissolve as circumstances require.

A Middle-Power Room of Their Own

The proposal advanced here is modest but potentially transformative. Middle powers should establish a permanent institutional home through which they can deliberate collectively while retaining complete autonomy in their external relationships.

Such an institution would neither replace the United Nations nor compete with existing regional organizations. Nor would it constitute a geopolitical bloc. Participation would not require common positions on every issue, nor would it restrict bilateral or multilateral relationships with great powers. Rather, it would provide a standing forum, permanent analytical capacity and organizational continuity through which middle powers could determine when (and with whom) it makes sense to cooperate.

As a practical first step, a representative founding secretariat should be established to draft proposals on membership, governance, funding and organizational structure. These proposals would then be finalized at an international conference. Establishing joint headquarters in both the Global North and the Global South would clearly signal a commitment to the realities of global governance in the twenty-first century.

To be sure, significant operational challenges lie ahead. These include addressing definitional hurdles regarding what constitutes a “middle power”; aligning on a shared value system, such as the rule of law, human rights, free markets and institutional accountability; and establishing flexible, fit-for-purpose, deliberative decision-making processes. While responding effectively to challenges such as these will undoubtedly require ingenuity, history demonstrates that diverse groupings of countries — when united by a common purpose — can overcome these obstacles while respecting individual differences.

Governance evolves because the world evolves. The institutional architecture established after the Second World War reflected the geopolitical realities of its time. Today’s multi-polar world is characterized by a broader distribution of influence in which middle powers have become indispensable contributors to trade, technology, security and the maintenance of the international rules-based order. Recognizing that reality through a permanent institutional home for middle powers would improve their collective leverage but would not diminish existing institutions. It would strengthen the global governance architecture by filling one of its most significant institutional gaps.

The twentieth century required institutions designed primarily around the great powers. The twenty-first century needs the development of an institution reflecting the increasingly consequential role played by middle powers that leverages their interests and ideas for maximum influence on the global stage. It is time that middle powers had a room of their own.

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

This opinion’s analysis was developed and approved by the named human authors under documented review controls; AI assistance was judicious, disclosed and verified. Learn more about CIGI’s Human Analysis Standard.

About the Author

Kernaghan Webb is an associate professor in Toronto Metropolitan University’s Department of Law and Business. He is also the Founding Director of the Toronto Metropolitan University Institute for the Study of Corporate Social Responsibility.

For more insights, visit CIGI Online.

What was the main message of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s now-famous speech in Davos earlier this year?

There are no fewer than three competing takeaways from Carney’s address — and a recent op-ed for The Economist co-authored with Finnish President Alexander Stubb has done little to reconcile them. Now, more than half a year after Carney’s speech and for all the focus on the current inflection point in the international order, there is little clarity on what the Carney government’s vision for a revised and more resilient order might look like. This is possibly because, despite considerable global turbulence, it is Canada’s relationship with its southern neighbour rather than the international order itself that has reached a breaking point.

The central theme in Carney’s address was his call to “take down the sign.” For years, Western countries claimed to act in defence of the “rules-based international order” when this was never verily a neutral description of the postwar world. In reality, appeals to the “rules-based order” were a discourse born out of anxiety over Western decline, aiming to write the rules of the future by shoring up the power structures of the past. Nor did it help that the most vocal defenders of this supposed order were prepared to tolerate a highly selective application of the rules.

But now that we have taken down the sign, what comes next?

The first possibility hinted at is more realism and less megaphone diplomacy. As we are constantly told, we must take the world as it is rather than as we wish it to be (as if a world in which non-Western actors have power and agency is somehow a lamentable fact).

Carney and Stubb rightly note that progress “can be signalled through monologue, but it will be achieved only through dialogue.” After Ottawa’s ties with Beijing and New Delhi rapidly declined under Justin Trudeau’s premiership, this is a message that Canadians need to hear. One wonders, of course, whether the Carney government will be committed to privileging dialogue over monologue when it comes to Russia, whose exclusion from the core of the post-Cold War European security order engendered a security dilemma that resulted in war. Still, employing the vocabulary of interests is a much welcome respite to erstwhile lectures about “who we are” that were of little interest to the rest of the world.

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The second — and more idealistic — option that Carney called for in Davos involves “acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals.” This is a test that Carney appeared to fail after the United States launched a war of choice against Iran in violation of the United Nations Charter. It was one that he continued to shirk at the very outset of his op-ed with Stubb, where Russia is accused of “waging a war of aggression against Ukraine and actively interfering in other societies” while the United States is merely characterized as “reassessing its priorities and transforming all its commercial relationships” despite Donald Trump’s repeated threats to annex Canada and Greenland.

Between cynical realpolitik and a consistent commitment to international norms lies a third path — building a coalition of middle powers based on “values-based realism” and principled pragmatism. This approach views ad hoc minilateral partnerships — or “variable geometry” — as an alternative to what Carney in Davos called “naïve” multilateralism on the one hand and multipolarity, which Carney and Stubb associate with “chaos,” on the other.

Such calls for a via media are not particularly novel. Already a decade ago, then Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion was advocating for a foreign policy based on “responsible conviction,” which sounds an awful lot like Carney’s call to be both “principled and pragmatic.”

Leading Global South actors such as India and Brazil have long been pursuing multi-vectored foreign policies. It is rather the West that is beginning to emulate a trend already set by others — yet Carney and Stubb conclude their op-ed by inviting others to join them. It was not all that long ago, during Chrystia Freeland’s tenure at the top echelons of government, that cooperation with “likeminded” countries was the talk of the town. Carney and Stubb concede that “not every partner will share all of our values” but their proposed remedies centre mostly on working with the same group of friends: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union and the Group of Seven.

Whether a global coalition of middle powers is even possible at a time when great powers have demonstrated their willingness to wield considerable leverage to keep wayward states in line remains an open question. A more “variable” configuration may prove more feasible than a cohesive coalition. But the more germane question is what problem do such partnerships purport to solve? If the purpose is greater capacity for self-help and strategic autonomy in a Machiavellian world, then this may be desirable. But this is far from a panacea for the supposed “rupture” in the international order that we are told we are living through.

Carney and Stubb do not mince words: they claim that the “world order built after 1945 is unravelling.” But a crisis of authority within an international order is not the same as a crisis of the order itself. The so-called rupture at which we have arrived is the product of decades of contestation over the rules and who gets to write them. Unless we address the sources of these disagreements, we will remain on a pathway toward the law of the jungle that ad hoc coalitions alone may not be able to prevent.

The post-1945 order has gone through several phases, from hot rivalry to détente and from neoliberal globalization to renewed great power competition. Throughout this time, the legal and institutional architecture of the order has survived and even grown denser. Rules may be bent or broken but no one fundamentally challenges the legitimacy of international law and multilateralism as core organizing principles for interstate relations.

Canada’s relationship with the United States may be undergoing a rupture but this is not necessarily so for the international order. This is because American hegemony was never synonymous with the postwar order writ large — a revisionist belief that the unipolar moment of the 1990s helped to foster. Rather, it was a feature of the post-1991 order based on a revived standard of civilization that liberal states sought to substitute for the post-1945 order.

While it may be a useful message for domestic audiences that have grown unaccustomed to the necessity of strategic choices and trade-offs, being both principled and pragmatic is a formula for justifying almost any policy. We have not yet reached a complete rupture in the international order but we may yet unless we seize what Carney’s co-author calls our “last chance” to treat rival powers and the global majority as sovereign and equal rule-makers.

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

This opinion’s analysis was developed and approved by the named human authors under documented review controls; AI assistance was judicious, disclosed and verified. Learn more about CIGI’s Human Analysis Standard.

About the Author

Dr. Zachary Paikin is deputy director of the Better Order Project and research fellow in the Grand Strategy Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy.

For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

For years, debates about autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted targeting remained largely theoretical. Critics warned of future harms, while some powerful countries insisted existing legal frameworks and human oversight would ensure responsible use. The absence of identifiable victims allowed many to treat these concerns as speculative.

That changed this year. Following a US strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran that killed at least 157 people, most of them students, public attention quickly turned to whether AI-assisted targeting had played a role. There was a strong indication that AI targeting was being used in the war, with some 1,000 targets struck in the first 24 hours. Although subsequent reporting suggests outdated intelligence — rather than AI itself — was likely responsible, the debate exposed deeper concerns about the quality of intelligence feeding military decisions, the pressure to generate targets rapidly and the growing reliance on AI-enabled systems operating on imperfect data. These questions became even more urgent following a joint investigation by The Independent and Airwars, which identified Abdul-Rahman al-Rawi, a 20-year-old student killed in a US strike in Iraq in 2024, as the first publicly known victim of an airstrike in which AI-assisted targeting was officially acknowledged.

For most people far from conflict zones, autonomous weapons and AI-enabled targeting may still seem abstract. However, the issue matters because the rules governing war shape how violence is used — and misused — against real people. Those rules exist precisely to constrain violence and protect civilians, and they are under pressure.

The question governments should now be asking is how AI is changing human judgment in war. As these systems become embedded across military planning and targeting, understanding how they shape what commanders see, how quickly they act, and how they exercise legal and ethical judgment are just as important as understanding the technology itself.

Military organizations are expected to seek decision advantage. AI systems promise to process vast quantities of information, identify patterns that humans might miss, generate target recommendations and accelerate what militaries call the “targeting cycle.” In increasingly complex operational environments, these capabilities appear to offer clear military benefits. Proponents often argue that AI tools may improve situational awareness, reduce cognitive burden and enable faster responses to evolving threats. But military advantage, or the promises of the technology, should not be confused with better decision making or the practical realities.

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Judgment in war has never been simply about making decisions quickly. It requires weighing uncertainty, interpreting context, questioning assumptions, and balancing military necessity against legal and humanitarian obligations. AI can support those processes, but it also changes the conditions under which they occur. When AI systems produce recommendations at a pace that humans struggle to interrogate, or when operational success becomes associated with the speed and scale of targeting, the opportunity for meaningful deliberation begins to shrink. As a result, human judgment risks becoming increasingly procedural rather than genuinely reflective. This matters because the consequences extend far beyond individual strikes.

When targeting decisions are made faster, mistakes can also spread faster. Civilians are often the first to bear those consequences, particularly in densely populated urban environments where distinguishing combatants from civilians is already difficult.

For more than a decade, governments have debated these challenges through discussions on lethal autonomous weapons systems at the United Nations. A broad consensus has emerged that existing international humanitarian law applies to AI-enabled weapons and that humans must retain responsibility for decisions to use force. Yet recent conflicts suggest that affirming these principles is becoming easier than implementing them. “Meaningful human control” has become one of the defining concepts in these debates, more recently expanded to include context-appropriate human judgment and control. But invoking these concepts is not enough. The more difficult question is whether meaningful human judgment is actually possible under the operational conditions that AI is helping to create. Do commanders understand how AI-generated recommendations are produced? Can operators realistically question the outputs of increasingly complex systems while working under intense time pressure? Does the technology gradually narrow the range of options considered acceptable, or nudge certain decisions over others through system design?

These questions deserve far greater attention because AI does more than generate recommendations. As scholars and analysts highlight, it increasingly shapes the decision environment itself, what information is prioritized, which options appear most credible and how much time decision makers have to exercise independent judgment. Even when a human formally authorizes a strike, the quality of that judgment may already have been influenced by the design of the system, the data it relies upon and the pace at which decisions are expected to be made.

This is why governance must extend beyond the moment a weapon is employed. Accountability begins long before a commander authorizes the use of force. It begins with the data selected to train AI systems, the assumptions built into algorithms, the testing and validation processes used before deployment, and the institutional incentives that reward speed and efficiency. It continues through operational use and must include rigorous post-strike review and mechanisms for learning when systems fail.

States therefore have opportunities to strengthen governance now, even if negotiating new international agreements remains politically difficult. Key is to move beyond treating human judgment as a procedural requirement and instead ensure it remains a meaningful operational capability. That means providing commanders and operators with sufficient training, time, authority and institutional support to critically evaluate AI-generated recommendations rather than simply approve them.

Additionally, governments should significantly improve transparency around AI-enabled military systems. While sensitive operational information will always require protection, states should be clearer about how these systems are tested, validated, monitored and evaluated against their legal obligations. Without greater transparency, meaningful accountability becomes exceedingly difficult.

Finally, states should strengthen oversight and accountability mechanisms across the entire life cycle of AI-enabled military systems. This should include documentation of decisions made throughout the life cycle by the operators, commanders and legal advisers involved, in a form that enables genuine traceability of accountability and supports independent review, not just internal record keeping. Such documentation would also encourage a greater understanding of the role of human judgment and how it was, or was not, enabled in practice.

Abdul-Rahman al-Rawi was not a theoretical example. He was a student whose death has given a human face to debates that governments have conducted largely in the abstract for more than a decade. In the coming months, states will decide on the future of the discussions on autonomous weapons as well as ways to move forward on broader military AI dialogue. The question before them is how to ensure that human decision makers retain the capacity to exercise careful, informed and independent judgment in environments increasingly shaped by AI. Protecting civilians in the age of AI will ultimately depend on the answer.

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

This opinion’s analysis was developed and approved by the named human authors under documented review controls; AI assistance was judicious, disclosed and verified. Learn more about CIGI’s Human Analysis Standard.

About the Author

Branka Marijan is a CIGI senior fellow and a senior researcher at Project Ploughshares.

This article was first published by Canada’s National Observer. For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

Recent global events, from war-driven oil shocks to attacks on critical infrastructure, have shown the fragility of current centralized fossil fuel chains. The effects have been felt most prominently at the pump, resulting in an average fuel price increase of 27.1 per cent since the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. As Canada seeks more resilience from these shocks, shown by the recently published national electricity strategy and broader electrification agenda, no product highlights this more than electric vehicles (EVs). Right now, the more important policy question is no longer whether EVs are cleaner or more efficient, but which transportation and energy systems are likely to prove more resilient in an era defined by geopolitical fragmentation, cyber risk, climate disruption and information disorder.

With that in mind, the more important distinction may be between centralized fossil fuel systems and increasingly distributed electric systems. Gasoline and diesel supply chains depend on highly centralized infrastructures of extraction, refining, transport and retail distribution. These systems are vulnerable to geopolitical conflict, cyberattacks, natural disasters, shipping disruptions and price volatility. Recent global conflicts and energy crises have repeatedly demonstrated how quickly fuel prices and supply chains can destabilize when concentrated infrastructure is disrupted. Even countries like Canada and the US — two of the top oil producing countries in the world — are not immune from such commodity shocks and subject to international oil prices.

For years, EV critics have framed them as fragile, overly digital machines: vulnerable to cyberattacks, dependent on unreliable infrastructure, and incapable of functioning during serious crises. In public discourse, gasoline-powered internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles are often portrayed as the more rugged and resilient option — particularly during geopolitical instability, infrastructure disruption or emergencies. But many critiques directed specifically at EVs misunderstand a broader reality: modern vehicles of all kinds are now deeply digital systems.

Regardless of perceptions, today’s ICE vehicles are also “computers on wheels.” Modern automobiles — regardless of powertrain — rely heavily on software controlling braking, steering, navigation, safety systems, engine management, connectivity and remote updates. Many contain more software code than advanced military aircraft. As vehicles become increasingly connected and autonomous, cybersecurity risks are becoming systemic across the automotive sector and not unique to EVs. The relevant comparison is therefore not between “digital EVs” and “mechanical gas cars.” That world no longer exists.

While it is true that electricity systems are not immune to disruption, they can also draw from a far wider range of generation sources and distribution models. Power can increasingly be produced domestically through hydroelectricity (approximately 55 per cent of Canada’s electricity generation), nuclear energy (13 per cent), wind (7 to 8 per cent), solar (1 per cent), geothermal and distributed microgrids, reducing reliance on vulnerable centralized energy systems. In countries such as Canada, where electricity generation is already relatively diversified and low-carbon, this creates important long-term resilience advantages by reducing exposure to global fuel price volatility, strengthening energy security, increasing system redundancy, improving adaptive capacity in the face of climate-related disruptions and enabling more decentralized and flexible energy systems capable of sustaining critical infrastructure during emergencies.

That said, EVs are vulnerable to a different set of problems, such as challenges in battery supply chain dependencies, charging infrastructure gaps, fragmented provincial policy frameworks and cybersecurity concerns. Canada and its allies also remain heavily dependent on critical minerals and battery manufacturing capacity, of which China controls between 70 and 96 per cent, along with other geopolitically sensitive supply chains.

EV charging infrastructure is also becoming more distributed and adaptable over time. While charging networks still require substantial expansion, EVs can already be charged from homes, workplaces, public chargers, solar installations, backup battery systems and localized grids. During emergencies, access to electricity may ultimately prove easier to restore than liquid fuel logistics, dependent on tanker deliveries, refinery operations and functioning gas stations. Even gasoline infrastructure itself relies heavily on electricity for fuel pumps, payment systems, refining operations and transportation networks. Concerns about EV battery fires are often poorly contextualized, as while lithium-ion fires can be difficult to extinguish, gasoline vehicles catch fire at significantly higher rates, with EV incidents receiving disproportionate attention due to their novelty and media visibility.

At the same time, public debate surrounding EVs has become increasingly shaped by misinformation and disinformation circulating across digital platforms. Viral claims about inevitable grid collapse, exaggerated battery fire risks or the impossibility of EV adoption in cold climates frequently spread without context, often amplified through polarized online ecosystems. Legitimate debates certainly exist around infrastructure readiness, industrial policy, mineral supply chains and affordability. These include questions about the expansion of EV charging networks and electricity grids, the development of domestic clean technology and manufacturing capacity, reliance on critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel, and the costs associated with electric vehicles and other low-carbon technologies. But distorted or misleading narratives can undermine evidence-based policymaking and complicate long-term infrastructure planning precisely when governments are attempting to strengthen energy resilience.

This creates an important policy challenge. Governments should not simply promote EV adoption; they should also strengthen public understanding of the broader resilience benefits associated with electrification. Public-interest communication strategies, greater transparency around energy infrastructure planning, and support for independent research on online energy misinformation could all help improve the quality of democratic debate surrounding transportation transition policies.

Policymakers should also work with provinces, utilities and industry to accelerate investment in distributed grids, vehicle-to-grid technologies, interoperable charging networks and domestic battery recycling and manufacturing capacity. Strengthening cybersecurity standards for all connected vehicles and charging systems will likewise become increasingly important as transportation and energy systems converge.

None of this suggests an immediate or universal transition away from ICE vehicles. In remote regions and sectors requiring specialized heavy-duty transportation, conventional and hybrid vehicles may remain necessary for years to come. Nor should policymakers underestimate the importance of securing critical mineral supply chains and addressing vulnerabilities within electricity infrastructure itself.

When centralized fuel chains fracture, the costs land on ordinary Canadians first and fastest. EVs won’t eliminate that vulnerability overnight, but they point toward a system that is distributed, domestically grounded and harder to shock. In an era defined by energy insecurity, digital dependence, geopolitical volatility and increasingly contested information environments, resilience increasingly depends on diversification, decentralization and adaptability. Electrified transportation systems, despite their limitations, may ultimately align more closely with those resilience imperatives. Canada’s national electricity strategy is a start — the harder work is building the governance institutions to match the ambition.

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

This opinion’s analysis was developed and approved by the named human authors under documented review controls; AI assistance was judicious, disclosed and verified. Learn more about CIGI’s Human Analysis Standard.

About the Author

Andrew Heffernan is a CIGI fellow. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Ottawa, where he is an adjunct professor teaching on global governance, environmental politics and information integrity.

For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

Two developments at the recent World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai sent the same signal. China launched the World Artificial Intelligence Conference Organization (WAICO) to institutionalize its vision of more open and inclusive global AI governance, while Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3, China’s most powerful open-weight model to date. Together, they suggest that China is likely to remain committed to open-source and open-weight AI — for now.

WAICO institutionalizes China’s preferred AI governance message: AI should be accessible to all countries, development should be prioritized alongside safety, and global coordination should remain closely linked to the United Nations. While President Xi Jinping’s WAIC address, the 2026 WAIC chair’s statement and the announcement establishing WAICO did not explicitly commit China to open-source AI models, they emphasized openness, inclusion and broader access to AI, especially for developing countries.

This approach reflects China’s broader AI development strategy. Open models allow Chinese companies to attract developers, accelerate industrial applications and expand overseas adoption, especially in countries that lack advanced AI capabilities. More importantly, they enable Beijing to internationalize its domestic AI strategy by extending China’s open-source ecosystem beyond its borders. Through application-driven innovation, “AI Plus” initiatives and AI-enabled industrial upgrading, China is seeking to build an ecosystem around its own technologies while promoting AI as an international public good rather than an exclusive technology controlled by a handful of countries. In doing so, Beijing advances its longer-term objective of expanding global AI infrastructure and increasing the international reach of Chinese AI.

Rather than serving simply as another international AI forum, WAICO institutionalizes China’s strategy by providing China with a permanent platform to shape global AI governance. Drawing on China’s previous experience creating international organizations, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank, WAICO appears designed to combine institution building with practical cooperation. China is likely to provide much of the financial support for capacity building, technical assistance and AI infrastructure projects in participating countries, particularly across the Global South.

This open-source diplomacy, however, is unlikely to persuade established Western powers, which remain committed to smaller, values-based AI governance frameworks. The geopolitical alignment is difficult to miss. In this respect, China’s message of openness and public goods resembles Xi’s earlier defence of free trade at Davos days before Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017: rhetorically attractive, but received in the West with muted responses and considerable skepticism.

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Compared with initiatives such as the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) and the Council of Europe Convention on AI, WAICO stands out in three respects: its emphasis on AI capacity building for developing countries, its promotion of openness and open-source ecosystems, and its close alignment with the United Nations. Together, these features reveal China’s broader geopolitical ambitions. By advocating openness, opposing what it describes as the over-securitization of AI, and promoting a UN-centred governance framework, Beijing seeks to position itself as a champion of equitable access to AI while implicitly criticizing US-led export controls and technology restrictions. Rather than simply participating in existing AI governance frameworks, WAICO advances a competing vision — one that prioritizes technology diffusion, development and the interests of the Global South.

WAICO’s membership reinforces this geopolitical reading. Unsurprisingly, its 29 initial signatories are exclusively non-Western states, spanning Russia, Brazil, Indonesia and Pakistan alongside other members of BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as well as 10 African countries. The absence of Western members suggests that WAICO may become not so much a universal AI governance platform as a China-centred coalition focused on development, infrastructure and resistance to Western technology controls.

WAICO’s near-term priorities translate this broad rhetoric into a more concrete institutional strategy. The organization will focus on capacity building — including Xi’s pledge to provide 5,000 training opportunities for developing countries and to establish AI cooperation centres with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union, BRICS and other regional bodies — while supporting an open-source ecosystem designed to extend China-centred AI infrastructure abroad and anchoring its governance agenda in UN-centred multilateralism. Together, these priorities reflect China’s view that development deserves as much attention as safety, a position it also advanced through the AI + International Cooperation Initiative proposed at the UN Global Development Initiative high-level meeting in September 2025.

This UN alignment is already visible. With the UN Secretary-General António Guterres attending and endorsing the event, WAICO is likely to promote goals that overlap with the UN agenda, including AI for good, human-centred AI. The alignment was also reflected in the China-backed UN resolution on strengthening international cooperation in AI capacity building at the 78th UN General Assembly in 2024, as well as in China’s proposed “AI Capacity-Building Action Plan for Good and for All” released in September 2024. Both prioritize global AI connectivity and digital infrastructure, especially in the Global South, and the application of AI to empower various industries.

Open Weights as Business Strategy

Yet institutional initiatives alone do not explain why China continues to embrace openness. Equally revealing are the decisions made by China’s leading AI companies. The release of Kimi K3 and DeepSeek’s continued commitment to open-source development provide perhaps the clearest evidence that openness remains a strategic choice for China’s AI industry — not merely a political slogan. For now, China appears likely to maintain both the concept and practice of open source, but the durability of this commitment depends on whether Chinese firms continue to see openness as strategically useful once the technology gap narrows.

Kimi K3, released during WAIC, is one of China’s most powerful AI models and further narrows the gap with leading US models such as Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol. Despite the exaggerated claims that Chinese AI models are overtaking their US counterparts, Kimi has acknowledged that K3 still lags behind leading American models. More importantly, Kimi announced that K3 would remain open weight.

DeepSeek appears to be following the same path. According to the recent comments by founder Liang Wenfeng, the company intends to continue pursuing open-source development, potentially including its most advanced models. Liang argues that openness does not weaken DeepSeek’s competitive position because releasing model weights does not eliminate the formidable technical and financial barriers to deploying frontier AI systems. The barrier to entry remains extremely high even when a model is open source: deploying it effectively is difficult and running it at very low cost is even harder. After all, deploying frontier AI systems effectively and at low cost requires infrastructure, engineering and computing resources that cannot simply be copied by downloading an open model.

Liang’s view provides an important corporate-level counterpart to China’s official rhetoric. Open source helps Chinese firms expand adoption, strengthen ecosystems and compete with leading US companies without necessarily sacrificing commercial returns. Liang argues that open source and commercialization are not mutually exclusive: DeepSeek can support competitors and community deployment while still preserving advantages in cost control, engineering and operational efficiency. The AI market is sufficiently large that no single company can dominate it, making ecosystem expansion more valuable than maximizing short-term licensing revenue.

For now, open source serves China’s strategic interest on every front. While China is still catching up, openness helps diffuse Chinese models, build ecosystems, reduce dependence on Western platforms and gain support from developing countries. But if Chinese firms further close the gap or achieve leadership, they may have stronger incentives to protect model weights, talent and intellectual property.

Yet China’s openness has limits. Beijing is also working to protect AI-related intellectual property, talent and technologies. Reports of efforts to prevent talent from leaving the country, the forced cancellation of Meta’s proposed $2 billion acquisition of Manus, and Financial Times’ reporting on export controls restricting foreign access to China’s most advanced AI model weights all point in the same direction. If China achieves, or comes close to achieving, AI technological leadership, the incentives may shift from diffusion to protection.

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

This opinion’s analysis was developed and approved by the named human authors under documented review controls; AI assistance was judicious, disclosed and verified. Learn more about CIGI’s Human Analysis Standard.

About the Author

Alex He is a CIGI senior fellow. Alex is an expert on digital governance in China, the Group of Twenty (G20), China and global economic governance, domestic politics in China and their role in China’s foreign economic policy making, and Canada-China economic relations.

For more insights, visit CIGI Online.

In 2021, global supply chains buckled under the combined pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread logistical disruptions. A year later, in 2022, the European Union woke up to its dangerous dependence on Russian energy. In 2026, the next strategic vulnerability staring us in the face is workforce dependence. Most nations maintain sophisticated systems to detect military threats, economic shocks and logistical breakdowns. By contrast, although several countries now conduct sophisticated workforce and skills anticipation, few integrate those efforts across government into a strategic warning capability that informs national priorities.

While governments and corporations devote enormous resources to understanding risks to capital, trade, energy and security, human capital — widely recognized by institutions such as the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as a fundamental driver of long-term productivity, resilience and national prosperity — remains managed largely through backward-looking statistics. Labour-force participation, vacancies, unemployment and retirement projections serve an important administrative purpose, but they simply describe conditions that already exist rather than emerging vulnerabilities.

As countries compete for technological leadership, industrial resilience, health-care capacity, Arctic development and strategic autonomy, the ability to anticipate workforce constraints may prove just as important as anticipating geopolitical ones. The next great competition among advanced economies may not be over resources, markets or even technology. It may be over the human capabilities required to transform ambition into real capability.

Building on the literature on labour-market intelligence, strategic foresight and state capacity, “workforce intelligence” can be understood as the systematic identification of emerging human-capital risks before they evolve into economic, industrial or strategic constraints.

The purpose of workforce intelligence is to provide early warning about future capability gaps. Unlike workforce planning, which aligns staffing requirements, or labour-market forecasting, which estimates supply and demand, workforce intelligence synthesizes demographic, industrial, educational, immigration and geopolitical signals to assess whether future workforce conditions could constrain national objectives. Essentially, while labour-market analysis asks What is happening?, workforce intelligence would ask, What will happen and what does it mean for national power?

Human capital occupies a unique position within national power. Military capability, economic productivity, technological innovation and diplomatic influence ultimately depend on people with the skills to sustain them. Canada can sit on vast critical mineral deposits, but without enough mining engineers, geologists and skilled tradespeople, those resources will stay in the ground. It can increase defence spending, but without shipbuilders, technicians and systems engineers, the platforms never materialize at scale. It can launch ambitious artificial intelligence strategies and innovation funds, but without sustained access to elite technical talent, investment risks generating visibility rather than capability.

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Political scientists have long argued that states succeed not merely because they possess resources or policy vision, but because they possess state capacity — the ability to translate objectives into outcomes. Workforce intelligence should be understood as a neglected component of state capacity.

A practical workforce intelligence framework would rest on five domains: demographic intelligence, to anticipate retirements; talent intelligence, to track globally scarce skills and migration; educational intelligence, to align graduate supply with strategic priorities; industrial intelligence, to forecast workforce needs for major national projects; and geopolitical workforce intelligence, to assess how strategic competition shapes the global movement of talent.

Canada’s Fragmented Picture

Canada’s strategic agenda increasingly centres on economic resilience and strategic autonomy through critical minerals, Arctic development, defence modernization, infrastructure renewal and advanced technology. Less glamorous is the fact that each of those depends on workforce capacity that current systems cannot guarantee. Planning remains fragmented across provinces, federal departments, educational institutions and private employers, with no single entity holding the full picture. Yet strategic autonomy ultimately depends on capability, and capability depends on people.

Canada maintains a national security apparatus and sophisticated economic policy institutions. What remains absent is an integrated workforce intelligence capability that translates workforce information into strategic warning and national capability assessments. Canada already has important labour-market institutions. Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) and Job Bank provide data, occupational outlooks, wages and employment trends, while the Future Skills Centre supports research and innovation in skills development. Canada also created the Labour Market Information Council in 2017 to improve the sharing of labour market information across jurisdictions. Its mandate, however, is the quality and accessibility of the information itself, not assessment of what workforce conditions mean for national objectives. These functions are valuable, but they are not the same as workforce intelligence. Their primary focus is information, skills development and workforce adaptation, rather than how those signals combine into forward-looking assessments of national capability.

Intelligence organizations exist to identify emerging vulnerabilities before they become operational failures. They ask: What is changing and what are the implications? Workforce policy, by contrast, usually reacts after the fact — often too late and at higher cost.

The distinction matters. A vacancy rate may show that a shortage exists, while workforce intelligence would ask whether that shortage threatens a defence procurement timeline, a critical minerals project, an Arctic infrastructure plan or Canada’s ability to retain strategic technology talent. In other words, its value lies not in producing more labour-market data, but in interpreting workforce signals through the lens of national objectives.

The next step for Canada would be to establish a national workforce intelligence function, whether housed within an existing central agency or organized as a dedicated analytical centre. Its role would not be to duplicate ESDC, Statistics Canada, Job Bank or the Future Skills Centre; instead, it would synthesize their outputs with industrial policy, immigration trends, education pipelines and strategic priorities. The result would be a forward-looking capability assessment to identify where Canada’s ambitions are likely to collide with human-capital constraints.

Other countries are moving in this direction, though none offers a perfect model. Jobs and Skills Australia produces employment projections and workforce analysis to inform policy and planning. Singapore’s SkillsFuture publishes its annual Skills Demand for the Future Economy reports to identify emerging skills needs in areas such as the digital, green and care economies. The OECD has similarly emphasized whole-of-government skills governance, integrated information systems and stronger coordination across departments. These examples show that advanced economies are beginning to treat skills and workforce capacity as strategic infrastructure. Canada should adapt that lesson but extend it further: from labour-market planning to national capability assessment.

Major federal initiatives should undergo workforce risk assessments alongside financial and environmental reviews. A critical minerals strategy, defence procurement plan or Arctic infrastructure project should identify not only its budget and environmental risks, but also the occupations, regions, education pipelines and immigration pathways on which delivery depends. Canada should also publish an annual workforce intelligence review focused on capability gaps that could constrain national objectives.

Ultimately, the defining strategic failures of the twenty-first century may not arise from a lack of capital, resources or political ambition. They may arise from an inability to anticipate workforce vulnerabilities before they become capability failures. Governments have spent decades developing institutions to monitor military threats, financial instability and geopolitical risk. The next challenge is building equivalent capacity to understand human-capital risk with the same seriousness.

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

This opinion’s analysis was developed and approved by the named human authors under documented review controls; AI assistance was judicious, disclosed and verified. Learn more about CIGI’s Human Analysis Standard.

About the Author

Abbas Qaidari is a researcher specializing in international security and Arctic defence strategy.

For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

The people building the most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) seem to think the race is about intelligence: creating the smartest, most capable AI systems. The leaders of Anthropic, DeepMind and OpenAI regularly posture about the imminent arrival of artificial general intelligence. When their companies promote new models, the first few paragraphs always highlight capabilities: the reasoning score, coding result or gap in performance over the last release. Other factors, such as cost or privacy, are buried after long descriptions of the breakthrough intelligence of new systems. The assumption that underlies this signalling is that the winner will be whoever builds the smartest model.

This is a mistaken premise. The developer who wins the AI race will not be the one with the most capable model, but rather the one who can deliver good-enough intelligence at the lowest sustainable price. There are naturally different definitions of what winning means, such as achieving the greatest market share or producing the highest-quality technology. I understand winning in economic terms, as Anthropic and OpenAI are, after all, for-profit businesses. Essentially, victory means achieving the greatest degree of durable diffusion: producing AI systems that are embedded in global economic processes and infrastructure.

History tells us that being first or being the best does not guarantee winning. Andrew Carnegie, for example, did not become the steel giant of the nineteenth century by first discovering or refining the purest steel. He won because, through vertical integration, ruthless cost accounting and the embrace of new technological processes, he produced high-quality steel more cheaply than any of his competitors. The mid-twentieth-century semiconductor boom teaches similar lessons. In the late 1960s, DRAM (dynamic random-access memory), an important semiconductor memory architecture, was first created in the United States. By the 1980s, the Japanese led in market share due to their high-quality and low-cost production methods.

The lesson here echoes today: The country that creates the most capable AI systems — also known as frontier — is not guaranteed to own what the frontier becomes once it is cheap. This is arguably already occurring with AI. The transformer — the architecture that underpins virtually every major modern large language model — was discovered by Google, an American company, in 2017. Today, Chinese labs such as DeepSeek and Alibaba have shown that they can consistently develop transformer-based models at a fraction of the cost of their Western competitors. By my own calculations, as of May 2026, DeepSeek’s best model was only three percent worse in quality than the best American model but 96% cheaper.

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The Rising Cost of AI

Cost leadership in AI is unlikely to come from race-to-the-bottom price wars in which companies routinely undercut one another with unsustainably low prices in order to capture greater market share. Durable cost leadership will come from structural business advantages, such as owning the supply chain, the hardware or energy. As such, pure-play laboratories that are burning massive amounts of cash to stay a few points ahead on a benchmark are the most exposed.

In fact, the cost problem has already arrived. This past spring, an Nvidia executive noted that the cost of tokens for his team already exceeded the cost of the employees they were meant to augment. Uber’s COO likewise admitted that the company’s entire 2026 budget for AI-coding tools had been exhausted by April. Another enterprise, according to Axios, spent half-a-billion dollars on Claude in a single month after failing to cap employee usage. In other words, cost is becoming the main AI business story of 2026. Moving forward, the question about AI will be less about what a model can do, and more about its costs and if any developer can actually build it sustainably.

Chinese developers, such as DeepSeek and Alibaba, have come to terms with this intuition first. They now offer models nearly as capable as their Western rivals at a fraction (more than a tenth) of the price. These pricing discounts are likely authentic and genuinely structural. Many of the best Chinese models are open weight, backed by the state, powered by cheap energy and made by companies that tolerate thin margins. These structural realities have important governance implications. Western export controls, which have been a pillar of US-led AI policy against China, are designed to prevent China from creating frontier AI models. However, if the AI race is decided by diffusion, which, in turn, hinges on price, controls aimed at stalling advances in raw capabilities will do little to prevent Chinese dominance in the cost layer.

There is already evidence that DeepSeek is becoming one of the world’s most widely used AI models: For example, DeepSeek has captured 89 percent of China’s AI market share. Western businesses have resisted integrating with DeepSeek, citing concerns about data privacy, security and content restrictions that come with models shaped by the Chinese state. However, there is growing evidence that Western businesses are switching over, for the cost reasons one might expect. Debates about the salience of cost versus capability also raise the question of what winning even means. If intelligence becomes a commodity, the winning firms may not actually be those that develop AI. Coming back to Carnegie, the steel he made was an input. Much of the wealth it facilitated went to the railroads and skyscrapers built with it.

Currently, in the West, the best-positioned cost leader among the labs is likely Google. Google owns some of its own silicon, data centres and its distribution. Amazon is targeting a somewhat similar vertically integrated system but currently lacks a frontier AI model. OpenAI has realized that vertical integration also matters, announcing in late June that it has pioneered its custom AI chip.

Presently, no major AI player has settled into stable cost leadership. AI pricing has been chaotic in the last few years: Cursor’s botched 2025 shift to usage-based billing and the refunds that followed; Anthropic quietly pulling its coding tool from the $20-per-month plan, and then reversing its decision within a day after user complaints; and grumblings that Google’s recently released 3.5 Flash model came with unexpectedly inflated pricing. There are now also reports that OpenAI is considering steep price cuts to lure customers away from Anthropic, even as OpenAI is supposedly deep in the red, with profitability nowhere near in sight and filing to go public. This volatility is the signature of an immature market that has not yet found its cost leader. The coming wave of initial public offerings will likely answer some questions, as companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are forced to go public with their financials. Investors will also reward companies that demonstrate sustainable unit economics in the long run. Ultimately, whoever might end the current pricing yo-yo will likely win out.

That said, the importance of pricing does not mean intelligence is fungible. After all, “good enough” is highly task dependent. For example, legal teams that cannot afford hallucinations will pay more for a marginally smarter model, and capability competition will certainly matter in that tier. However, most business workloads do not need a National Security Agency-hacking model; they need something competent, fast and cheap. In the end, Carnegie didn’t win by producing the purest steel — he simply produced the steel people could afford.

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

This opinion’s analysis was developed and approved by the named human authors under documented review controls; AI assistance was judicious, disclosed and verified. Read more about CIGI’s Human Analysis Standard.

About the Author

Nestor Maslej is a CIGI senior fellow and a globally recognized artificial intelligence (AI) strategist and researcher working at the intersection of technology, business and public policy. He is the founder and CEO of Nestor Maslej Consulting Inc., and has advised leading organizations on how to deploy AI for measurable productivity gains while prioritizing safety and responsible use.

For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

The leads of Five Eyes cybersecurity agencies have recently and emphatically warned that artificial intelligence (AI) is driving rapid changes in cyber risk. Their key message is that frontier AI models will transform defensive and offensive cyber capabilities in mere months, not years.

What should we take away from this latest clarion call?

Much has already been written about the projected, evolving cyberthreat landscape fuelled by AI-enabled vulnerability discovery, exploit chain development and agentic delivery, occurring at scale and with little human intervention or oversight. While there still may be some debate about the ease and effectiveness of these capabilities — still under review by global experts — there is no doubt that this AI trend will compound and intensify the baseline business risks that most organizations currently carry.

For the past decade or so, these cybersecurity agencies have been relentlessly promoting their best advice, guidance, threat intelligence and alerts to network defenders. They have gone from boardroom to boardroom, imploring C-suite executives to see cybersecurity as an integral part of their business risk, to embrace their technical security advisers, to invest in measures most likely to protect their digital crown jewels, and to be ready with a clear plan to respond when a serious cyber incident occurs. They have promoted the implementation of “security-by-design/default” models and called for software bills of materials in the name of information technology transparency and supply chain risk management. In recent years, they have even extended their reach to small and medium enterprises to share curated lists of recommended cybersecurity measures and to conduct public awareness campaigns to arm citizens with basic or better cybersecurity hygiene.

Their message has been constant and loud, but now the Five Eyes cybersecurity leads are sounding the alarm about a fast-approaching “new normal,” soon to arrive on our doorstep even as we wrestle with the already complicated “current normal.” This latest warning signals a step change in the threat environment that requires us to accelerate efforts and rethink our path at the same time.

Much of the rethink must be rooted in the less-discussed part of their call to action: defensive capabilities will also be transformed. If a threat actor can access state-like capabilities through a simple software subscription and deploy them at machine speeds, Canadian system owners and operators must be prepared to also look to AI to help meet the challenges on this encroaching defence horizon. It may take a while to catch up defensively, but it will only be possible to reduce the gap between offence and defence if we use the power of AI to cut through complexity and improve decision making among cyber defenders.

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All the standing advice and guidance of our national cybersecurity agencies — the standards, checklists and security measures — are still valid. But the environment we seek to protect now demands continuous, adaptive, real-time customization. First, our interconnected and interdependent networks, as well as the tools that run on them, introduce unprecedented complexity. Second, systems are incrementally altered as a result of technology updates and security patches, daily internal business decisions and process changes. And, lastly, the threat actor is now agentic, automated, sophisticated and swift. Combined, these factors demand a defensive posture that incentivizes the use of AI-enabled cybersecurity tools and services. That said, these tools must themselves be held to account: evaluated before they are trusted, governed so they do not widen the attack surface, and kept under meaningful human oversight for consequential decisions.

Cybersecurity investment has always been a tough sell. We know from too much experience that there is fierce competition for scarce dollars in corporate budgets and that market forces too often win out over “security-by-design/default” guidance. However, there is great opportunity now to leverage AI in the secure development and life cycle of software systems (secure design, vulnerability detection and remediation at build or deployment time) to introduce less vulnerable software into society. In maintaining more secure systems, AI can be a transformative force for more effective, more timely and more comprehensive patching that helps defenders keep pace with emerging threat vectors. Used well, AI amplifies the fundamentals long promoted by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security — such as asset inventory, configuration and patching — rather than replacing them.

Today, more Canadian organizations can have access to emerging commercial products and services that use AI to generate up-to-date network inventories, assess for vulnerabilities against any number of cybersecurity standards, and propose useful protections and mitigations. Their offerings can significantly enhance resilience and may even help find ways to draw down long-standing risk in legacy systems thought to be prohibitively expensive to address.

The shift may be more obvious and achievable for medium or larger Canadian enterprises that have already invested in cybersecurity best practices, such as national-level critical infrastructure operators. But smaller organizations can also take advantage as new AI-enabled tools and services enter the cybersecurity market. Even Canada’s least mature and most vulnerable organizations — ones that struggle to implement basic cybersecurity practices — can use open-source AI-enabled cyber assistants for advice, customized to their specific needs in a genuinely helpful, “no shame” environment.

We cannot just shudder in the face of the threat. AI must be employed urgently on the defence side of the cybersecurity ledger if we are to seriously contest agentic AI cyber offence. The Five Eyes are throwing down the gauntlet here. We must rethink our approach, shifting it from how we see risk to how we embrace the power of AI to keep pace with tomorrow’s cyberthreats. Our national cyber resilience depends on it.

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

This opinion’s analysis was developed and approved by the named human authors under documented review controls; AI assistance was judicious, disclosed and verified.

About the Author

Shelly Bruce is a CIGI distinguished fellow and the former chief (deputy minister) of the Communications Security Establishment.

This piece was first published by the Toronto Star. For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

A little over two years ago, the federal government announced it would be “exploring options” for the purchase of a new submarine fleet. Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the winning bid, for up to 12 diesel-electric submarines. He did so in advance of a visit to Ankara for the NATO leaders’ summit, where the deal between Canada and the German-Norwegian consortium TKMS was exhibit A in demonstrating our commitment to increased defence spending, a contentious issue for the Trump administration.

Timely as the announcement was, it caused some awkwardness in Ankara. A planned bilateral discussion between Carney and the president of South Korea, representing the losing bidder, was abruptly cancelled. Some fence-mending will be required. Canada wants strong security and defence ties with South Korea and for the country to join the Defence, Security and Resilience bank, to be headquartered in Canada. That will mean asking Seoul to pony up a lot of investment capital.

Canada has never built submarines before and has operated few in the modern history of our Navy. “Buy Canadian” was off the table this time. When we decided against nuclear-powered submarines, we ruled out any manufacturer in the United States and were thrust into the global marketplace. The competition between TKMS and South Korea’s defence giant Hanwha Ocean, proved surprisingly tight, as both shipbuilders offered boats that met our requirements and promised massive, direct economic benefits to Canada. The German-Norwegian bid was favoured for geostrategic reasons, as it emphasizes Canada’s defence ties to key NATO allies in Europe and our shared long-term commitment to Arctic and transatlantic security.

The first new Canadian sub will be delivered by the mid-2030s, and it will be years after that before a full fleet is operational. So now that the bidding is over, it’s time we turned to some unanswered questions — about the strategic purpose of a submarine fleet and how that fleet will be networked with other defence assets to provide surveillance and deterrence.

A submarine fleet has been described as key to Canada’s coastal defence, but this is narrow and misleading. Julie Kim, a defence expert writing for the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, articulates a broader purpose: “Submarines enable Canada to detect and deter maritime threats, control its approaches, and project power and striking capability further from its shores.”

Submarines are stealth assets, built to roam the high seas, including the Arctic Ocean. They won’t be stay-at-home vessels but will combine defence and offence — although the full offensive capabilities of the TKMS sub remain shrouded in secrecy. The consortium’s fact sheet says only that it will have “heavyweight torpedoes” and torpedo counter-measures, and will be “fitted” for missiles and underwater drones.

How effective these boats will be in patrolling the Canadian Arctic is another open question. The TKMS submarine has the tonnage required to break through Arctic ice, but just barely. It seemed potentially less capable than its South Korean counterpart in turns of underwater cruising range. The Hanwha vessel is also significantly heavier than the TKMS.

What we can be sure of is that these submarines will never operate on their own. They will have to be networked into a complex web of sensors and intelligence-gathering systems that includes underwater sensors, shipboard platforms, helicopters, long-range patrol aircraft and satellite monitoring. Assembling this network will present huge opportunities for Canadian innovation — and Canadian export.

Canada’s new subs will need to be capable of operating alongside surface warships, including our Arctic offshore patrol vessels and as-yet-unbuilt fleet of River-class destroyers. Above all, our submarine fleet will need to be twinned with underwater drones, a capability the Royal Canadian Navy does not yet possess in strength. Our networked “balance of forces” should also include icebreakers: eventually, the Navy will have six patrol vessels, 15 destroyers, a small fleet of replacement coastal defence ships (also yet to be built), an undetermined number of underwater drones but only two icebreakers.

All this brings us back to the strategic purpose of submarines for Canada, which is the foundational issue here. The federal government has a decade or so to work out what that is and explain it to the public in full.

Submarines may run silent and run deep, but we need to bring the debate over their purpose for Canada to the surface.

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

About the Author

Wesley Wark is a CIGI senior fellow.

This piece was first published by The Hill Times. For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

As Canada co-hosts the 2026 FIFA World Cup alongside the United States and Mexico, the tournament presents an opportunity to showcase more than athletic excellence. At a moment of growing geopolitical tension and international fragmentation, it offers a rare platform to demonstrate the enduring value of openness, cooperation, and people-to-people exchange. For Canada in particular, the World Cup represents a chance to exercise a form of soft power that has long been central to its international identity: convening diverse actors, building bridges across differences, and supporting the conditions for constructive global engagement.

The FIFA World Cup has long been presented as one of the few genuinely global events capable of transcending politics. For a brief moment every four years, the tournament is supposed to remind us that competition need not preclude cooperation, that national pride can coexist with international community, and that shared human experiences still matter in an increasingly divided world.

Yet, with 2026 FIFA World Cup well underway, it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain this romantic vision. Recent reports that Iran’s national team was forced to land in Mexico rather than the United States amid visa disputes are only the latest example of a broader reality: geopolitics is no longer operating in the background of international sport. It has moved centre stage.

This is not merely a story about one team or one diplomatic disagreement. Rather, it reflects a deeper transformation in international affairs. As the liberal international order continues to come under strain —if indeed it can still be said to function in any meaningful sense—geopolitical rivalries are increasingly permeating every aspect of social, economic and cultural life. Sport is no exception.

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The lead-up to the 2026 tournament has already been marked by disputes over visas, border controls, security concerns, diplomatic tensions, and questions about freedom of movement. The fact that the tournament is jointly hosted by Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. only highlights the challenge. At a time when governments are increasingly viewing migration, trade, technology, and information flows through the lens of national security, even the logistics of international sport become politicized. This also comes at a time when looming trade talks for North America cast an ominous shadow over relations between the three countries.

The result is that the World Cup increasingly resembles a microcosm of a fragmented international system.

The implications extend beyond state-to-state relations. Geopolitical competition today is not confined to governments. It is increasingly mediated through digital platforms, technology companies and artificial intelligence systems that shape how billions of people experience global events.

The rise of powerful technology firms has transformed the information environment surrounding international sport. Platforms originally designed to connect people across borders now frequently amplify polarization, outrage, and nationalist narratives. Algorithms optimized for engagement often reward conflict over understanding, controversy over context, and emotion over evidence.

As the World Cup unfolds, social media platforms powered by generative AI tools will ease spread of political narratives and misinformation. While concerns about election interference have attracted significant attention, major sporting events may become equally attractive targets. False reports about fan violence, fabricated statements by players, or manipulated footage could spread globally within minutes.

Such risks emerge at a particularly sensitive moment. Trust in institutions is declining across many democracies. International cooperation is under pressure. Public discourse is increasingly fragmented. In this environment, the World Cup is not merely vulnerable to geopolitical tensions; it risks becoming another vehicle through which those tensions are amplified.

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This reality presents an uncomfortable challenge for organizations such as FIFA. For decades, governing bodies have sought to maintain the fiction that sport exists apart from politics. That position was always difficult to sustain. It is now virtually impossible.

The question is no longer whether geopolitics belongs in sport. Geopolitics is already there. The more important question is whether international sporting institutions can help mitigate geopolitical tensions rather than simply reflecting them.

There remains reason for cautious optimism. The World Cup still creates opportunities for people from different societies to engage with one another in ways that politics often cannot. Fans travel, cultures mix, and moments of collective celebration transcend national borders. These experiences matter precisely because they are becoming rarer.

Yet, the World Cup’s significance lies precisely in its ability to create encounters that politics alone often cannot. Fans travel across borders, cultures interact, and millions of people participate in a shared global experience. At a time when international cooperation is increasingly strained, these moments carry greater importance, not less.

For Canada, this creates an opportunity as well as a responsibility. While no host country can insulate the tournament from broader geopolitical tensions, Canada can help ensure that the World Cup remains a space where openness, dialogue, and international engagement are actively fostered. Through effective coordination with partners, welcoming policies toward visitors, and leadership on issues ranging from digital trust to public diplomacy, Canada can help reinforce the idea that international exchange remains both possible and worthwhile.

The 2026 World Cup may ultimately be remembered for extraordinary goals, dramatic upsets, and memorable performances. But it may also be remembered as a revealing snapshot of a changing world order. If the tournament demonstrates anything, it is that geopolitics is no longer confined to diplomatic summits, military conflicts or trade negotiations. It now shapes the movement of athletes, the experiences of fans, the flow of information and even the narratives surrounding the world’s most beloved sporting event.

Whether the World Cup becomes primarily a symbol of fragmentation or a reminder of our continued capacity for cooperation remains an open question. As one of the tournament’s hosts, Canada has an opportunity to help tip the balance toward the latter.

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

About the Author

Andrew Heffernan is a CIGI fellow. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Ottawa, where he is an adjunct professor teaching on global governance, environmental politics and information integrity.

For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

Access and privacy are two sides of the same coin, regulating how data and information are collected, used and disclosed. Mediating the clash between them is an ever-critical and challenging policy imperative. In an era of digital governance, both play a critical role in how our rights and freedoms are restricted and realized.

Back in the analogue era, in 1983, Parliament enacted two statutes, the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act, in an attempt to strike the right balance regarding information in government hands. One act provided access to records under the control of the government; the other governed how the federal government handled individuals’ personal information.

As the Supreme Court later noted, together these acts formed a “seamless code.” This is plain from the text of the statutes as well: the two laws reference one another in detail, establish comparable regulators and even specify that the information commissioner can become the privacy commissioner, so the same person can hold both watchdog roles.

They also share another important element: both acts are terribly out of date.

Neither law has been meaningfully updated since its passage over four decades ago. Countless ministerial, parliamentary, watchdog, academic and civil society reviews have identified many of the same shortcomings and proposed many of the same reforms.

Now, two sorely needed reviews are trying to address some of these problems, both being framed as efforts at “modernization.”

The review of the Access to Information Act launched last June, though initial results have been worrying. The information commissioner has openly characterized the review as showing a “lack of ambition,” reflecting “an insufficient appreciation of the seriousness of the challenges facing Canada’s access to information system.”

The review of the Privacy Act also has its problems but has generally received a warmer welcome. However, it is the dissonance between the two reviews that may raise the biggest concerns about how access and privacy rights will operate in practice.

One proposal in particular stands out: the federal government’s intention to take requests for personal information — currently handled through the Privacy Act, with complaints adjudicated by the privacy commissioner — and to shoehorn them into the system governed by the Access to Information Act, where complaints go to the information commissioner.

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This would be no small change, since approximately 75,000 Canadians make such requests for their personal information each year.

Unfortunately, the Office of the Information Commissioner is already overloaded with complaints in requests for access to general records. Last year, it received half of the privacy commissioner’s budget ($18 million compared to $36 million) despite processing almost twice as many complaints (3,626 compared to 1,725).

Moreover, the majority of complaints that the privacy commissioner handled (1,279) entailed requests for personal data. So under a regime where those privacy complaints are then directed through the Access to Information Act, these would presumably become the responsibility of an already overburdened information commissioner.

The information commissioner’s current investigations are already egregiously long. More than 10 percent of her investigations pre-date 2024, and some recently stretched over a decade long. Most complaints the commissioner receives also concern time delays in the processing of access requests by government institutions. And the commissioner highlighted that the government’s policy approaches in the ongoing review do little to address this problem.

Under a new regime, Canadians will have to do what they do best: wait.

Indeed, individuals seeking access to their personal information may end up waiting a long time under the new reform, since the information commissioner’s decisions are a prerequisite for going to court to secure a final adjudication of one’s access rights. That would also likely slow down disclosure of media requests for government information, further undermining journalists’ use of the access system.

The newly proposed requirements would also likely slow the information commissioner’s ability to issue orders. She would also be required to take into consideration “any evidence” that a government institution “did its best to respond to the request” as a new criteria for issuing orders. That would further dilute her ability to issue orders in privacy-related complaints.

In short, watered-down access would have negative knock-on effects for privacy. This is why the access review, in particular, needs a reset, with an objective review rather than a government-led effort that omits many of the areas flagged by the commissioner as needing urgent reform.

In fact, an objective review is exactly what Prime Minister Carney promised on the campaign trail. That objective review should be led by a well-respected Canadian with real independence, such as a former federal judge or Information or Privacy Commissioner. A review of this kind found great success in Newfoundland and Labrador; it is an example worth following. That review revolutionized their provincial system into “one of the most robust access to information regimes in the country.” It directly tackled many of the areas of concern at the federal level now, such as time delays.

As data and information become core aspects of digital governance, effective governance of both access and privacy has become more essential than ever before. Neglecting their interconnected nature is not an option if we are going to have either.

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

About the Author

Matt Malone is a Balsillie fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the founder of Open by Default.

For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

Whether they know it or not, Canadians rely on space for as much as 20 percent of daily economic activity in industries such as navigation, communications, banking and more. Despite that, Canada remains the only Group of Seven nation without the domestic capability to place payloads — such as the satellites that provide these services — into orbit. With space infrastructure so deeply embedded in its economy and security apparatus, yet without control of a critical piece of the delivery stack, Canada has made itself quietly dependent on the goodwill and capacity of allies. Closing that gap through sovereign launch is not simply a question about space ambitions: it is a prerequisite for a resilient space posture.

On June 10, 2026, Maritime Launch conducted a successful hypersonic suborbital test from Canso, Nova Scotia. This milestone brings Canada closer to operational sovereign launch than it has ever been. Currently, Canada relies on the Europeans and the Americans when it needs to launch equipment into space for commercial or government operations, with a waiting list that can be as much as two years delayed, even when conditions are perfect. In the words of the commander of 3 Canadian Space Division, Brigadier General Chris Horner, during an episode of the Defence Deconstructed podcast: “And so, does that mean that we should spend more hard-earned Canadian dollars to give that money to some foreign entity to launch our capability, or worse, take a bespoke military capability that has incredible military value — secret, top secret, whatever you want to call it — and give it to another country to launch for us?”

Ottawa has begun putting money behind ambition, and industry is starting to follow. A May 2026 agreement between two German companies — ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) and Isar Aerospace — to build Canadian launch infrastructure at Maritime Launch Services’ Spaceport Nova Scotia, linked to TKMS’s winning bid for the Canadian Patrol Submarine Project, signals that sovereign launch is moving from aspiration to investment. Having our own space launch capability would be a good thing, and the Government of Canada should continue to support the goal of Canadian launch and re-entry capabilities for the stated goals of security, sovereignty and economic prosperity. These three objectives are the main talking points of both the Prime Minister’s Office and Commander Brigadier General Horner.

Over the past two years, Canada has seen a significant resurgence in interest in the space domain. Space is important for the daily lives of Canadians, and the nation already has a significant and growing space industry, including by coordinating with the United States on space domain awareness. Allies such as France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom all combine their launches through the European Space Agency at the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana.

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Two important variables for Canadian launch capabilities are defence and security. Launch from Canada would provide specific orbital insertion that will give access to polar orbits for High North coverage that are harder to get to from launch facilities in Florida, California or French Guiana. At the same time, the sovereignty question will be answered because Canada will be able to launch government and commercial systems on time schedules not dependent on others. But most importantly, the opinion and argument for Canadian launch is also driven by economics.

Canadian launch from Canadian spaceports will benefit the Canadian economy in several ways. For examples, the money for manufacturing, launch and operations will remain in Canada rather than going abroad. To be sure, the upfront costs may be high, and additional financial input will be required beyond the recently allocated CDN$183 million that Ottawa has approved. However, the Canadian government’s interest and funding will demonstrate that it recognizes the importance of sovereign launch, and spur commercial confidence and investment.

Two companies are currently receiving the bulk of government funding for their efforts in establishing sovereign launch. Maritime Launch — headquartered in Halifax with a spaceport in Canso — and NordSpace — headquartered in Markham, Ontario, with its Atlantic Spaceport Complex in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland and Labrador. Following Maritime Launch’s successful hypersonic suborbital test in early June, it expects to have a fully operational, regular orbital launch within a year, while NordSpace says its is on a similar timeline for orbital insertion. Both these companies have received domestic and international commercial interest in using their launch facilities to lift satellites into low-Earth orbit. Maritime Launch will have to prove the concept, but it expects to transition immediately to commercial launch, with a growing customer list that includes prepurchased launch slots from the Canadian government and the Department of National Defence (DND).

Canadian orbital launch means that the money spent on it will remain in Canada, with the benefit of attracting domestic and foreign commercial launch money to bolster the Canadian economy. No longer will Canadian (and foreign) money flow to the United States, Russia or other launch providers for lift — that money could come to Canada instead. Additionally, rocket and satellite manufacturing and talent will stay in Canada, creating a positive feedback loop for the Canadian economy and talent retention. The Canadian space ecosystem could potentially expand from the $3.8 billion contribution to the Canadian economy (with $5 billion in revenue) in 2024, to more money for the economic prosperity cited by the prime minister and DND. Based on projections from the State of the Canadian Space Sector Report (2025), “the space sector contributed $3.8B to Canada’s GDP, which is a 6% growth since last year when adjusting for inflation, and 15% growth since 2019. This means that the sector is making an increasingly important impact on the economy at large.” These growth markers indicate the positive trajectory of the industry to the Canadian economy now and into the future. Projections are that sovereign launch from Canadian spaceports will continue to increase revenue, provide jobs, and strengthen the Canadian space ecosystem with both domestic growth and international interest and support.

With domestic launch, Canada will be able to dictate the schedules and the expansion of Canadian space networks for the benefit of Canada specifically. From new satellites — built in Canada — to an increased space presence, Canadian sovereign launch will facilitate the growth of the Canadian space ecosystem for the expansion of space capabilities. These include, but are not limited to, providing communications for the High North and connecting communities with high-speed internet, voice, data and access, as well as positive effects in education, health care and logistics. Canadian space will continue to improve customer, government and DND access to the Far North to better integrate society with services, capabilities and connectedness. All Canadians will benefit from internet access for education and health care, communications and everyday life. Launch capabilities will also bolster environmental monitoring for applications such as weather prediction and mitigation, climate science, wildfire spotting and prevention, keeping track of sea ice and shipping in the Far North, remote sensing of resources and mining, and a host of other space-based sensors for discovery and monitoring. For the DND, specifically, Canadian space access will improve Far North communications and border security, especially Arctic security, as well as oversight for Far North operations, rescue and monitoring. These improvements could include space-based bandwidth for uncrewed aerial and nautical vehicles, crewed airborne reconnaissance, and general Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities as the Northwest Passage becomes a major shipping thoroughfare.

Most importantly, a vertically integrated Canadian space ecosystem that includes launch capabilities will ultimately boost the Canadian economy. From education to manufacturing to orbital insertion to monitoring, all the money for all the components will add to our space resilience, rather than enriching other countries. Canada has the talent and the geography, and now the political will, to close the last gap in its space posture. Sovereign launch gives Canada the final piece of the puzzle: space access that doesn’t depend on anyone else’s goodwill, schedule or politics.

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

About the Author

S. Mike Pavelec currently teaches sessional classes at McGill University and is an advisor for the 3 Canadian Space Division for strategy and policy.

For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

Artificial intelligence (AI) governance has become a common concern among administrators. For example, a ministry deciding whether to automate benefit cheques, a city buying a hiring tool, a health agency testing a triage model and a regulator reviewing a facial-recognition system now face the same practical question: Is this AI system fit for public use? In McKinsey’s 2025 survey on the state of AI, 88 percent of respondents reported regular AI use in at least one business function, with roughly one-third reporting scaled enterprise use. In other words, adoption has outrun many accountability routines. Accuracy, speed, uptime and cost belong in the dashboard, but public legitimacy requires a broader base of evidence that considers affected people, legal authority, contestability, vendor responsibility, fiscal exposure and the environmental burden.

The existing policy baseline is complex, and incomplete. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) AI Principles promote trustworthy AI that respects human rights and democratic values, while the United Nations Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organization Recommendation on the Ethics of AI links AI governance to human rights, fairness and environmental sustainability across 194 member states. The National Institute of Standards and Technology AI Risk Management Framework Core gives organizations a working cycle: govern, map, measure and manage; and the EU AI Act creates a risk-based legal framework for high-risk systems, including requirements for risk management, data governance, technical documentation, logs, transparency, human oversight, accuracy, robustness and cybersecurity. ISO/IEC 42001 adds a management-system approach, with the Global Digital Compact placing AI governance inside a wider international agenda for inclusive digital cooperation. These approaches may suggest that a policy framework is in place, but the more important question is how that framework can be translated into traceable metrics.

The proposed Prosocial AI Index tries to make those principle-oriented baselines usable for policy makers, boards, regulators and public agencies. It translates governance duties into a 16-cell dashboard using color ratings: four Ts (Tailored, Trained, Tested and Targeted) read against four Ps (Purpose, People, Profit and Planet). Each cell asks for auditable evidence: green means the evidence is documented, monitored and owned; amber means the evidence is partial or there is an unresolved dependency; and red means evidence is missing, there is acceptable exposure or there is a deployment condition that requires a named decision maker.

On the T side, Tailored asks whether the system fits the setting: language, workflow, infrastructure, accessibility, law and affected groups. For a public agency, this would translate to local validation before procurement approval. Trained asks whether data, labels and optimization goals reflect the decision at hand. Tested asks for evidence before and after release: performance, bias, robustness, cybersecurity, usability, human-factors assessment, incident reporting and complaint routes. Lastly, Targeted asks whether the system is used for an authorized purpose, within clear boundaries, with escalation, appeal, audit rights and off-switch authority.

The four Ps aim to widen the accountability frame. Purpose covers mission fit and legal basis. People covers citizens, patients, students, workers, applicants, communities and frontline staff. Profit covers durable economic value; in the public sector it reads as stewardship, including total cost, service quality, procurement risk, liability, vendor dependency and resilience. Planet covers energy, water, hardware, model size and lifecycle effects. The International Energy Agency report Energy and AI, the OECD work on AI compute and environmental impacts and the United Nations Environment Programme’s lifecycle note on AI make the environmental cell a mainstream governance question.

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A Policy-Maker-Friendly Scoring Rule

This index should sit inside the same workflow regularly used for budgets, procurement and regulatory sign-off. It can be completed in a 90-minute review for low-risk systems and expanded into a formal assurance file for high-risk uses. The rule is simple: every green cell needs a document link; every amber cell needs an owner and a deadline; and every red cell needs scaling blocked until the accountable official supplies evidence, narrows the use case or accepts the risk in writing.

The following table outlines examples of what this entails:

A city that buys an automated employment decision tool, for example, can use the index before tender award. Tailored x People would require accessibility for candidates with disabilities and language access for applicants who may use translated instructions, while Trained x People would require evidence that historical hiring data has been checked for bias. A few examples already exist, such as New York City’s Local Law 144 that now requires bias audits for covered automated employment decision tools. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidance for workers makes clear that federal employment discrimination protections apply when AI is used in workplace decisions. A prosocial AI score could turn these legal duties into procurement clauses and release gates.

A ministry of health comparing triage tools should, for example, include benchmark accuracy, frontline conditions and maintenance capacity in the same review. The World Health Organization regulatory considerations for AI in health emphasize risk-benefit assessment, evaluation and performance monitoring, but the external validation of the Epic Sepsis Model found poor discrimination and calibration in predicting sepsis, illustrating why local testing before wide deployment matters. In this case, the index would reward a slightly less complex model that frontline staff can use safely and maintain over time.

In benefits, debt recovery and fraud detection, a welfare agency using AI to flag suspected fraud needs stronger evidence than administrative efficiency. The Australian Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme report and the Dutch system risk indication judgment summarized by the Library of Congress show what happens when automated risk logic enters welfare administration with insufficient legality, transparency and human safeguards.

At the same time, when exams, school places or scholarships are influenced by algorithmic tools, Tested x People should require distributional analysis before results are released. Targeted x Purpose should require a clear appeals path and a communication plan that families can understand. The UK Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation interim report on 2020 exam grading offers a useful policy lesson: a technically motivated standardization model loses legitimacy when students, teachers and universities experience the decision as opaque, unfair and rushed. A dashboard review would have forced an earlier discussion of cohort effects, small schools, private candidates and remedy design.

Lastly, implementations for public safety or retail surveillance should score red when false-positive risk, demographic performance and remedy routes are undocumented. The Federal Trade Commission action against Rite Aid banned the company from using facial recognition for surveillance purposes for five years after allegations that the system falsely tagged consumers, particularly women and people of colour, as shoplifters. In Prosocial AI Index terms, Tested x People and Targeted x Purpose would have required demographic performance evidence, use restrictions, human verification, incident logs and a mechanism for affected people to correct the record.

For ministers and agency heads, the index supplies a plain language brief: which AI systems are ready, which need conditions and which require a pause. For procurement officials, it converts AI ethics into tender clauses, evidence requests, service-level terms and audit rights. For regulators, it creates a common framework for comparing systems across sectors. In other words, transparency becomes a lever for hybrid trust.

The practical question is straightforward: What value does this AI create, for whom, under which legal and policy duties, at what cost, with which safeguards, and with which evidence of improvement over time? The Prosocial AI Index gives policy makers a way to answer that question before the public carries the risk.

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

About the Author

Cornelia C. Walther is a senior fellow at CIGI, the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health, the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative/Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative and the Harvard Learning and Innovation Lab, professor at the Sunway Institute for Global Strategy and Competitiveness, as well as an adjunct associate professor at the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

On February 26, 2022, two days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the country’s minister of digital transformation sent a public message to Elon Musk on Twitter asking for Starlink. Within 48 hours, the first terminals arrived in Ukraine.

Russia’s opening moves in the war followed a familiar script: sever fibre-optic routes, strike mobile towers, disable infrastructure, isolate the population and flood the information vacuum with Russian state media. What Russia did not anticipate was that Ukraine could route around all of it — not by rebuilding on the ground but by looking up. Low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems, owned and operated by foreign commercial actors, allowed Ukraine to maintain connectivity independent of any terrestrial network Russia could destroy.

For the first time, LEO had become a theatre of war, with Ukraine becoming a testing ground for the future of warfare.

Innovation Amid War

Before 2022, Ukraine’s internet infrastructure relied primarily on terrestrial fibre and mobile networks. The country had extensive broadband coverage and high 4G penetration, while satellite communications were limited largely to geostationary services for broadcasting. Ukraine did not operate its own LEO satellite constellation, and frontline connectivity in eastern Ukraine was often dependent on aging and unstable 2G and 3G mobile networks.

That changed rapidly after Russia’s invasion. Following then-Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov’s request for Starlink access from Musk, the first shipment of terminals arrived in Ukraine within two days. Emergency regulatory approvals followed in April 2022, authorizing Starlink use for critical infrastructure and later for broader civilian deployment under martial law.

The speed of the rollout reflected operational necessity. Restoring fibre-optic connectivity in active combat zones was often impossible, while mobile networks remained highly vulnerable to strikes and blackouts. LEO satellite systems, by comparison, offer low-latency communications independent of terrestrial infrastructure, making them uniquely suited for battlefield coordination and drone operations.

Starlink quickly became central to Ukraine’s wartime communications architecture. There are as many as 200,000 terminals currently active in Ukraine, with thousands being used by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Satellite connectivity now supports military command and control, drone operations, emergency services, hospitals, municipalities and civilian internet access during outages.

Importantly, these systems are being used not only inside government-controlled Ukraine but also in contested and occupied territories, where communications infrastructure has become part of the broader struggle over information control and governance. For example, portable satellite terminals enabled Ukrainian military units and local administrations in frontline regions such as Donetsk and Kherson to maintain communications even after Russian strikes disrupted cellular towers and fibre-optic networks. Ukrainian cross-border operations into Russia’s Kursk region showed how satellite connectivity now supports mobile command posts, drone coordination and real-time battlefield intelligence during manoeuvre operations, allowing forces to operate beyond the reach of stable terrestrial infrastructure.

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Legalities and Practicalities

Despite that advantage, the operational realities behind this connectivity are far less seamless than the public image of satellite internet often suggests. In active war zones, satellite terminals are concealed or utilized only intermittently to reduce the risk of detection. In a battlespace saturated with electronic surveillance, any signal can become a target. Ukrainian and Russian forces alike have adapted by constantly relocating terminals, limiting transmission windows and dispersing command nodes to avoid geolocation through radio-frequency emissions. Russian forces, after losing access to unauthorized Starlink terminals this year, began relying on improvised Wi-Fi bridge antennas as a substitute communications network. According to soldiers from Ukraine’s 59th Separate Assault Brigade, those antennas often have to be mounted in exposed positions with a clear line of sight, effectively revealing the locations of drone pilots or electronic warfare units to Ukrainian reconnaissance teams.

In Ukraine, satellite connectivity has become essential not only for combat operations but also for hospitals, municipalities, humanitarian actors, journalists and civilians attempting to communicate during infrastructure blackouts. The line between civilian and military communications infrastructure has therefore become increasingly blurred.

At the same time, the Russian war has accelerated the integration of commercial satellite systems into military operations while exposing the strategic vulnerabilities that accompany such dependence.

Ukraine’s reliance on privately operated infrastructure has become one of the clearest examples. Ukrainian officials have openly acknowledged concerns regarding overreliance on Starlink and the risks of service restrictions or disruptions. During the war, Starlink coverage limitations reportedly affected Ukrainian drone operations in occupied Crimea and constrained certain long-range strike capabilities. The system’s geofencing restrictions highlighted a new strategic reality: a state’s wartime communications capacity may now depend partly on the technical policies, political calculations or commercial decisions of private companies.

This dependency is forcing governments to rethink communications sovereignty in more practical terms. Ukraine’s experience has demonstrated that wartime connectivity now relies heavily on privately operated satellite constellations and the ground infrastructure that supports them. Yet building a sovereign alternative is far beyond the immediate reach of most states: LEO systems require extensive launch capacity, satellite manufacturing, spectrum coordination, secure terminals and years of sustained investment. As a result, even governments seeking greater strategic autonomy remain reliant on commercial operators that already possess functioning global networks.

Ukraine and its European partners have therefore focused less on complete independence than on diversification. Since early 2025, Ukraine has expanded the use of OneWeb terminals provided through Eutelsat to support government continuity and critical infrastructure resilience. In parallel, Kyiv is pursuing the planned UASAT GEO/LEO system in cooperation with Hughes Network Systems, GomSpace and other European partners, while broader European Union-backed GOVSATCOM initiatives aim to create more resilient and politically sustainable alternatives to reliance on a single provider.

Russia is drawing similar conclusions. According to Ukrainian military officials, Moscow is actively developing its own battlefield-oriented satellite internet constellation intended to reduce reliance on foreign systems and provide military-grade connectivity comparable to Starlink. These developments point to a much broader governance challenge that extends far beyond Ukraine.

The New Rules of Wartime Connectivity

Despite that context, current international frameworks are poorly equipped to regulate the role of commercial satellite infrastructure during armed conflict. Many of Ukraine’s wartime approvals occurred under emergency legal mechanisms. In early 2026, the Ukrainian government, working with SpaceX, introduced a national “whitelist” system requiring Starlink terminals to be verified and registered through state platforms such as Diia or local administrative centres. Only approved terminals are permitted to operate, while unauthorized devices can be disconnected remotely. This measure was designed to prevent Russian forces from using black-market Starlink systems for drone operations and battlefield communications.

Existing legal frameworks, including the Outer Space Treaty, the International Telecommunication Union Radio Regulations and the Geneva Conventions together with broader international humanitarian law, were largely designed for an earlier era in which states, rather than private corporations, controlled most strategic space infrastructure. As a result, these frameworks provide only limited guidance on questions such as whether commercial satellite operators can be considered participants in conflict, how civilian communications services should be protected when they support military operations, or what obligations companies have when governments request geofencing, service restrictions or cybersecurity cooperation during wartime.

The result is a growing gap between technological reality and regulatory preparedness. As commercial satellite networks become increasingly embedded in military command, civilian governance and critical infrastructure resilience, states are being forced to navigate strategic dependencies and legal ambiguities without a clearly established international framework defining the rights, responsibilities and limits of private operators during armed conflict. Therefore, governments should treat the developments in Ukraine as a warning.

First, states need clearer legal and regulatory standards governing commercial satellite operators during armed conflict. Minimum obligations should include transparency around service restrictions, protocols for emergency continuity, cybersecurity requirements and coordination mechanisms with national authorities during crises. Decisions affecting battlefield connectivity should not be made through opaque, ad hoc arrangements between governments and private executives. For example, France tightened oversight of commercial satellite operators through regulatory and national security mechanisms and updated space legislation that explicitly links commercial space operations to national defence interests.

Second, countries should avoid dependence on single-provider architectures for critical communications infrastructure. Ukraine’s experience demonstrates the risks of concentrating military and civilian resilience within one commercial ecosystem. Diversified multi-provider systems that combine terrestrial and orbital infrastructure should become part of national resilience planning.

Third, democratic governments should establish formal frameworks for protecting civilian connectivity during conflict. In modern wars, communications infrastructure is no longer simply a commercial service; it is a core component of public safety, emergency governance and societal continuity. The ability of civilians to communicate during wartime increasingly carries strategic and humanitarian significance comparable to access to electricity or water.

Fourth, states and international organizations should begin developing shared norms governing the militarization of commercial space infrastructure. As private satellite systems become embedded in military operations, they also become potential targets. Existing legal frameworks have not fully addressed the consequences of commercial constellations functioning as dual-use wartime infrastructure.

Finally, countries should invest in sovereign or allied communications capabilities before crises emerge. Ukraine’s push toward domestic satellite capacity reflects a wider lesson now visible across Europe and beyond: Digital sovereignty increasingly depends on resilient access to space-based communications systems that cannot be easily disrupted, politically constrained or monopolized by a single actor.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an early case study in a new kind of war — one in which the fight for territory on the ground extends all the way into orbit. Control over that infrastructure is no longer a technical consideration; it is the new front line.

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

About the Author

Anna Romandash is an award-winning journalist and author of Women of Ukraine: Reportages from the War and Beyond (2023). She is a visiting fellow at the Digital Policy Hub.

For more insights, visit CIGI Online.

As the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act advances out of the US Senate Banking Committee and moves closer to becoming law, long-standing questions of regulatory clarity take on renewed urgency. In the United States, regulators and courts are trying to fit digital assets into legal categories designed for a financial era long gone. At the centre of these efforts is the question of appropriate legal classification: whether certain tokenized assets should be treated as securities, commodities or payment instruments as forms of money. While these may sound like mere technical legal distinctions, they carry real consequences. Legal classification determines who regulates a financial instrument, which obligations apply to its issuer and to what extent private digital assets can enter domains traditionally tied to monetary authority.

The consequences of this classification were evident recently, when reports that US law makers could restrict stablecoin arrangements offering yield resulted in a sharp decline in the stock price of Circle Internet Group, an issuer of USDC. This episode shows how quickly questions of legal classification can shape market outcomes. As other jurisdictions look to the United States’ approach for guidance, the risk is that solutions developed within a particular legal and financial system could be adopted elsewhere without sufficient regard for the institutional assumptions that make them work.

At the centre of the United States’ approach is an interesting idea: an asset’s legal status need not remain fixed throughout its life cycle. Under certain conditions, an instrument may begin as part of an investment contract subject to securities law, while it may later or simultaneously be treated as a commodity, once the managerial or promotional efforts of the original investment are no longer essential to its value. For example, an oil and gas exploration agreement with a partnership interest in the drilling program that is subject to securities law can coexist with a separate commodities contract for the oil produced from the same venture, with each instrument governed by its respective regulatory framework. Recent proposals and joint guidance from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have sought to make that transition more explicit by implementing a regulatory hand-off from one authority to another once the investment relationship with the issuer is deemed to have ended.

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This “decoupling” strategy, separating an asset from the fiduciary relationship that initially defined it, is not entirely new. Financial law has long distinguished between assets and the legal arrangements built around them. However, applying this logic to digital assets at scale depends on conditions that are not universally present. Essentially, it requires regulators to determine when a fiduciary relationship has truly ended, to transfer oversight to a specialized commodities trading regulator without gaps or loss of accountability, and to rely on markets deep enough to sustain trading once the primary relationship with the issuer is no longer central to the asset’s value.

Where those conditions exist, this decoupling approach may be manageable. In systems with deep capital markets, clear regulatory divisions and currencies that already benefit from strong global network effects, the shift from securities to commodity treatment, as well as periods when an instrument may effectively straddle both classifications, can be absorbed without significant disruption. Market liquidity can sustain trading even as the issuer’s importance declines or the fiduciary relationship ends; regulatory authority can shift or overlap without creating gaps in oversight; and the broader financial system can accommodate new instruments without undermining existing channels of credit and settlement. In such environments, legal classification may, at least in part, track the asset’s evolving economic role.

However, digital assets such as stablecoins bring this presumed seamless transition into sharp focus. Unlike many digital tokens, stablecoins depend on the quality of the reserves, ongoing management efforts and continued confidence in the institution behind them. As such, their value does not stand apart from the entity that supports and issues them in the first place, even when they are described as non-security crypto-assets, payment instruments or commodities. In this sense, the fiduciary relationship does not disappear and is not expected to end. In fact, the relationship is reflected in the continued dependence on the issuer’s balance sheet, its management of reserves and its ability to honour redemption requests. All of these influence the network effects necessary for the adoption of stablecoins.

Why the Model Doesn’t Travel

For countries without the same market depth, regulatory coordination or monetary reach as the United States, adopting a similar approach may not produce the same results. Rather than clarifying the regulatory landscape, it may further blur it, thereby weakening oversight, eroding economic sovereignty and complicating the allocation of responsibility as these instruments cross borders. This dynamic is already visible in stablecoins, most of which are backed by US dollars and whose network effects extend beyond their domestic systems.

In more pronounced cases, privately issued digital instruments that are treated as both securities and commodities in the United States may begin to function as alternative stores of value, as well as transaction and investment media, beyond their borders. As these instruments circulate, they can reallocate liquidity away from domestic financial institutions and into external or less regulated channels, with implications for credit intermediation, market structure and the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission. While these effects are increasingly well understood, the more difficult question arises when the relationships underpinning their classification as securities or commodities become unclear, making it harder to determine where such relationships exist, who is responsible and how such instruments should be governed.

In a global financial system that is increasingly heterogeneous, and in which new “actors” and “agents” — including AI-driven systems — may enter markets without clear legal status, the basis for legally accepted or recognized fiduciary responsibility becomes less stable. The decoupling logic in the United States, which supports the transition from securities to commodities, depends on the idea that reliance on an identifiable actor can come to an end. Yet in contexts where market activity is increasingly shaped by systems that cannot bear duties or be held legally accountable, the reliance on an identifiable actor does not disappear entirely; it simply becomes harder to locate, and in some cases, impossible to assign.

Before codifying the United States’ approach into legislation and adopting a similar coordinated regulatory framework, policy makers from all countries would be well advised to consider whether the conditions that support it are present in their own systems. Ultimately, what appears to be a flexible solution to a classification problem may, in practice, be a context-specific strategy. More importantly, it could be a solution that acts as an extension of US policy influence rather than as a framework for adoption by jurisdictions seeking to preserve economic sovereignty.

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

About the Author

Odun Olowookere is research director of digital economy at CIGI. His professional experience spans areas such as commercial litigation, corporate finance, financial transactions, energy infrastructure development regulation, and fintech and banking regulation. With an interdisciplinary background in law and finance, Odun’s work focuses on how technological change is reshaping money, monetary institutions and the global financial system.

For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

Digital asset regulation has moved beyond its first phase. The early debate focused on perimeter questions: whether crypto-assets should be treated as securities, commodities, payment instruments, deposits or something entirely new. That debate remains important, but it is no longer sufficient. The harder question now is supervisory: how can regulators see, interpret and supervise digital asset activity across users, service providers and products that traverse jurisdictions and legal regimes by virtue of the infrastructure they choose?

To start off, the blockchain itself is not the main blind spot. Ledgers, whether permissioned or public, already generate abundant transaction data. The deeper problem is that the information most relevant to regulation remains fragmented. This information includes elements such as identity, tax residency, nature of the asset, nature of the entity, beneficial ownership and other attribution data, which is needed when applying rules relating to counterparty status, risk, investor eligibility, transfer restrictions, tax attributes and legal responsibility. This data is also inconsistently structured and lacks interoperability and coordinated enforcement across the supervised financial system. In fact, during a 2025 review, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which leads global action to tackle money laundering, terrorist and proliferation financing, found that a majority of jurisdictions have been unable to supervise or enforce rules surrounding cross-border payments, including its Recommendation 16 on payment transparency — also known as the “Travel Rule” in relation to virtual assets — partly due to the laws’ recency and their implementation timelines.

The missing layer in digital asset regulation is therefore not simply a data layer, but rather a governance layer: a way of making legally relevant information machine-readable and interoperable across regulated ecosystems, while preserving domestic legal authority, sector-specific mandates and democratic accountability.

Convergence Without a Single Global Code

Global standard setters and major jurisdictions are converging on functional regulation, organized around activities, intermediaries and integrity risks associated with crypto-asset service providers, and have issued separate recommendations on various aspects of decentralized finance (DeFi). The Financial Stability Board (FSB) focuses on financial stability and activity-based oversight, while the FATF remains centred on anti-money laundering (AML) activities and measures to counter the financing of terrorism (CFT); licensing; supervision; and implementation of the Travel Rule. The Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is narrower still, focusing on tax transparency and exchange of information, and the European Union has also kept market regulation and transfer traceability institutionally distinct through the Markets in Crypto-Asset Regulation (MiCA) and Regulation (EU) 2023/1113. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision adds a distinct, prudential mandate: its standard for banks’ crypto-asset exposures, with an implementation date of January 1, 2026, sets capital and disclosure treatment for regulated banks.

In other words, the emerging global framework for DeFi regulation does not support the idea of a universal code for all tokens, all markets and all legal questions. Rather, it supports a more practical proposition: interoperable, machine-readable standards for regulated intermediaries; accountable arrangements; and regulated transaction flows.

A survey of the domestic regulation for DeFi’s closest cousin, digital public infrastructure, shows that frameworks and implementation often take distinct paths to arrive at the same destination. Doing otherwise would require states with different legal traditions, monetary regimes, capital markets and developmental priorities to collapse their choices into a single framework. Essentially, a federated standards layer does not require one global regulator or one legal taxonomy. It simply requires the adoption of standards that enable sufficient interoperability for relevant information to travel across firms, sectors and borders in ways that are meaningful to the competent authority receiving it.

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From Data to Machine-Readable Supervision

The next stage of digital asset regulation should be understood as a move toward machine-readable supervision. Regulated firms already collect significant information about customers, wallets, transactions, counterparties and risks. The problem is that this information is often trapped inside institutions, expressed in incompatible formats and difficult to transmit across supervised boundaries.

A standards layer should begin in sequence, starting where templates, schemas and adoptions already exist. AML/CFT is the natural first step, followed by counterparty status as assessed by the regulated intermediary, transmission rules and interoperable risk flags as the unfinished work. Tax standards follow, where the OECD’s CARF shows how due diligence, reportable transactions and domestic reporting can be structured for cross-border exchange. However, market-facing standards are the hardest front, with no comparable template yet for investor status, eligibility conditions, transfer restrictions and product-level supervisory attributes. The purpose here is not surveillance but a more structured supervision of regulated flows. A regulator, intermediary or counterparty may need to know whether an instrument is circulating in a legally permitted way; whether the holder meets a threshold condition; whether the transfer is restricted by geography, lock-up, governance rule or institutional channel; and whether an accountable person or service layer stands behind the activity and modes of law enforcement.

Building a standards layer would allow regulatory meaning to move with digital assets without requiring regulatory sovereignty to disappear.

What Standards Can and Cannot Do

The risk, however, is that enthusiasm for structured data outruns legal analysis. Machine-readable standards can improve observability, reduce compliance friction and support more consistent reporting, while also making some conditions auditable and verifiable closer to execution. But they cannot, by themselves, decide title, custody, settlement finality, insolvency treatment, investor rights, redress or priority of claims.

A transfer, for example, can carry impeccable metadata and still leave unresolved whether ownership has legally passed. A smart contract can execute atomically and still leave unanswered whether legal finality has occurred. A token can be fully attributed and still leave open whether it is the authoritative legal record or only a wrapper around an off-chain claim.

The policy conclusion is simple: standards are a complement to legal certainty, not a substitute for it.

This is particularly important for emerging markets. Jurisdictions with weaker legal infrastructure may be tempted to leapfrog directly to technical solutions such as smart contracts, tokenized registries, automated compliance or machine-readable reporting.

Tokenized Finance Is Not Generic Crypto

A common technical rail is no longer mistaken for a legal perimeter, thus creating a sui generis class of asset. Jurisdictions acknowledge that tokenized securities, fund units, payment instruments, insurance-linked products or deposit-like claims should not be collapsed into a crypto bucket simply because they use similar technological components.

In the European Union, MiCA (Regulation (EU) 2023/1114) is instructive because it regulates crypto-assets not already covered by other EU financial services legislation. In the United States, the GENIUS Act brought a federal regime for payment stablecoins while relying on existing nstitutions and laws such as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Options Clearing Corporation and the Bank Secrecy Act. Those choices reflect a broader principle: a change in technological representation does not automatically displace the legal framework governing issuance, disclosure, custody, governance, servicing, redress and enforceability.

Tokenization is a way to democratize access to financial assets, improve liquidity and reduce intermediation costs, but inclusion requires enforceability. If retail investors, small firms or low-income users receive access to tokenized claims without clear rules on custody, disclosure, redress and insolvency, tokenization may widen participation while shifting risk downward.

A development-sensitive approach must therefore ask not only whether users can access tokenized assets, but whether they understand the claim they hold, whether it is legally enforceable and whether recourse exists when infrastructure fails.

Accountable Service Layers, Not Just Gateways

Digital asset policy often says regulators should regulate gateways rather than protocols. That intuition is useful but incomplete. The better approach is to identify accountable intermediaries, interfaces, service layers and responsible persons.

Users rarely interact with base protocols alone, and when they do, they can be warned of the risks. Most often, they encounter digital asset markets through exchanges, wallets, brokers, custodians, stablecoin issuers, token managers, interfaces, routers, oracle-dependent systems, governance structures and institutional wrappers. Even where infrastructure is distributed, economically significant control or influence often sits somewhere in the surrounding stack.

Regulation should therefore attach where actors exercise meaningful control, benefit economically or provide access to regulated activity. That approach would avoid two extremes: first, trying to regulate base protocol code as the primary target, and, second, accepting that anything labelled “decentralized” lies beyond law.

The same logic applies to unhosted wallets and self-custody. Self-custody, that is, when the holder has the only key, should not be treated as unlawful or inherently suspicious. But higher-risk or institution-facing flows may justify additional verification, credential presentation, interface-based controls or routing through accountable entities. These verifications and credentials can, in turn, be enabled through protocols and open tools such as privacy-preserving credentials, public registries and zero-knowledge proofs. The goal is not to abolish autonomy, but rather to calibrate trust, traceability and accountability according to the transaction’s risk and legal significance.

In other words, the right model is not blanket anonymity or blanket traceability, but context-specific proof: enough information to satisfy the legal requirement, without building a general-purpose surveillance architecture.

Why Emerging Markets Need a Different Lens

Digital asset regulation is often written from the perspective of advanced economies with deep supervisory capacity, mature legal systems and sophisticated compliance infrastructure. That lens is incomplete.

For emerging markets, digital assets carry both promise and risk. Tokenized assets, stablecoins, central bank digital currencies and programmable payment systems may lower remittance costs, improve cross-border settlement, expand access to savings and investment products, and create new infrastructure for small and medium enterprises. But they may also accelerate capital flight, weaken monetary sovereignty, expose consumers to poorly understood products and create dependence on foreign technology providers.

A standards layer that is too complex, too costly or too dependent on proprietary compliance vendors could deepen governance inequality. Machine-readable regulation should not become another channel through which powerful jurisdictions export compliance models that others must absorb. Nor should emerging-market financial systems become dependent on foreign analytics firms, cloud providers, identity vendors or compliance utilities to participate in tokenized finance.

A development-sensitive agenda should include open technical schemata, capacity building, shared supervisory tools, privacy-preserving compliance infrastructure and regulatory sandboxes that enable cross-border learning without surrendering domestic authority. The objective should be regulatory interoperability without regulatory dependency.

Regulatory Interoperability

Regulatory interoperability means that different legal and regulatory systems remain distinct but can exchange relevant information, recognize certain compliance outcomes and coordinate around shared risk thresholds, and be continuously adaptive and capable of co-evolving with financial innovation in (near) real time, effectively eliminating the regulatory delta. It accepts that securities law, tax law, AML law, payments law and private law will not be fused into one global regime, and considers how the information required by each regime can travel reliably and proportionately. Regulatory interoperability should rest on five principles:

1. Mandate specificity: Information should be collected and shared because a competent authority has a legal mandate, not because it may be useful someday.

2. Legal subordination: Machine-readable standards should support law, not replace it.

3. Proportionality: Higher-risk flows may justify stronger verification, while lower-risk activity should not face surveillance-grade compliance.

4. Portability: Regulated information should be reusable across institutions where appropriate, reducing duplication and compliance costs.

5. Contestability: Individuals and firms must be able to correct inaccurate data, challenge erroneous classifications and seek redress when automated or semi-automated systems cause harm.

The Missing Governance Layer

Digital asset regulation does need a stronger standards layer. What it does not need is a myth of universal convergence. The emerging global framework is better understood as partial alignment across different mandates. The International Organization of Securities Commissions, the FSB, the FATF, the OECD and the European Union are not building one global code. Instead, they are revealing a shared operational problem: regulated digital finance cannot scale safely if legally relevant information remains fragmented, non-portable and trapped inside institutional silos.

The next phase should therefore build a federated, mandate-specific, machine-readable standards layer for regulated intermediaries, accountable service arrangements and regulated transaction flows. That layer should improve due diligence, reporting, traceability and verification, but it must also remain subordinate to legal architecture. It should not pretend to resolve title, custody, finality, insolvency or investor rights by technical means alone. The real frontier is not whether digital assets can be seen, but rather whether the right forms of legal and supervisory meaning can travel with them. That is the missing governance layer.

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

About the Authors

S. Yash Kalash is a senior fellow at CIGI and an expert in strategy, public policy, digital technology and financial services. He has a distinguished track record advising governments and the private sector on emerging technologies.

Abhishek Sankritik is director, policy and programs at Finternet Labs and a policy specialist at the Cambridge Digital Innovation and Regulation Initiative, where he designs the legal and regulatory frameworks for open and interoperable finance.

For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

African citizens must be more than passive recipients of foreign technology — or of governance frameworks that shape it. Their voices, priorities and lived experiences must drive the agenda from the outset. Across the continent, digital transformation is accelerating on several fronts: connectivity is surging, mobile economies are scaling and a youthful, digitally fluent population is reshaping Africa’s future. As national, regional and global entities grapple with how to govern this fast-evolving space, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and Afrobarometer are centring on the most consequential constituency in that conversation: African citizens themselves.

As a policy research institution, CIGI’s goal is to move the conversation from viewing Africa as a consumer of global technologies to recognizing the continent as a co-designer and innovator in the global tech governance architecture. Continental digital and governance initiatives and frameworks abound, including the Malabo Convention, the African Continental Free Trade Area and subsequent Digital Trade Protocol, the African Union Continental Artificial Intelligence Strategy and Smart Africa, numerous domestic efforts — for example, in Ghana and Kenya — and key events, such as South Africa’s Presidency of the G20, where digital transformation was a major focal point.

This opportunity builds among key questions: What does tech governance look like when underpinned by African political philosophy? How can African digital governance take a decolonial approach? What is the relationship between tech diplomacy and sovereignty, especially in a period of geopolitical strategic behaviour? How can momentum be sustained in a watershed moment, even with growing investment gaps due to cuts in foreign assistance?

In this regard, Afrobarometer emerges as a critical partner. Afrobarometer is the world’s leading source of high-quality data on what Africans are thinking — supporting African development anchored in the realities and aspirations of its people. With a network of 40-plus national partners responsible for data collection, analysis and in-country dissemination of findings, Afrobarometer conducts public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, the economy, society and — most recently — digital transformation. Its mission: to make citizen voices a key pillar of African policy and decision making.

The data collected by Afrobarometer since 2024 has revealed how African publics are navigating, experiencing and engaging with new technologies and digital spaces. At the same time, it signals what governance must address to keep pace with this growth. Below are some of its most significant findings.

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Platforms and Access to the Internet

Among adults with internet connectivity, a clear majority (84 percent) say they access the internet daily or a few times a week, with mobile phones serving as the primary gateway to online content. Young Africans (aged 18–35) are frequent internet users (85 percent), far more so than those over 55 (74 percent). Africa is clearly leapfrogging fixed broadband: a mobile-first, youth-led user base means that digital services, financial inclusion tools, civic engagement channels and public sector platforms need to be mobile phone–friendly to reach the population at scale and translate connectivity into real economic and social dividends.

Digital Security and Online Harms

As internet adoption accelerates across the continent, so too does public concern about online safety and security, turning a once technical issue into a governance challenge. Across seven countries that Afrobarometer surveyed in late 2024, more than half (52 percent) of internet users expressed concern about the security of their personal information online, and a large majority (81 percent) believe mobile phones are more vulnerable to harmful online activity than are computers or other devices. This matters acutely because the continent’s digital economy, including especially mobile money and banking transactions, is almost entirely mobile-first. If users are concerned about the vulnerability of the very devices they use for financial transactions and other digital services, adoption of fintech, e-commerce and e-government could stall. Closing this trust gap through strong data protection laws and visible platform safeguards is a critical precondition for Africa’s digital transformation.

Digital Privacy and Risks

Digital privacy literacy remains thin across the continent, with only about a third of (32 percent) of respondents considering themselves “somewhat” (22 percent) or “very” (10 percent) familiar with the tools and skills needed to protect their personal information online, underscoring an urgent need for public education and platform-level safeguards. The data does reveal one bright spot: 72 percent of respondents report using strong passwords to protect their online accounts, signalling that basic cyber hygiene is taking root, even if a handful of countries, most notably Benin (52 percent), still lag well behind the curve. But the picture weakens quickly beyond the basics. Only one in three users (33 percent) report using two-factor authentication, 30 percent use antivirus software and barely one in five (21 percent) use virtual private networks, leaving most Africans dependent on a single line of defence — strong passwords.

Taken together, these findings paint a clear portrait of where African citizens stand. As the technology governance community rightfully focuses on Africa as a critical forum, Afrobarometer’s data will be an indispensable evidence base for CIGI and others to support African-led governance of emerging digital and technological tools, grounding policy recommendations and choices in the lived experiences, concerns and priorities of the people. As the policy agenda gets written, African citizens must take centre stage.

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

About the Authors

Joseph Asunka is the CEO at Afrobarometer, a pan-African survey research organization that conducts public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, the economy and social issues across the continent.

As the director of programs, Dianna H. English is at the nexus of CIGI’s policy research and operations while driving outcomes aligned to the organization’s strategic goals and priorities.

For more insights, visit CIGI Online.

Online prediction markets are many things. Their founders praise them as the apex of capitalist ingenuity. Others see a fountain of crowdsourced insight into financial vibes and global affairs. Critics condemn them as ethically bankrupt.

The complicated truth is they’re all of these at once. And business is booming.

Yet by monetizing the full gamut of reality, platforms have opened Pandora’s box. Basic tenets of liberal society — democratic integrity and respect for human life — are being corroded. Regulators need to step in.

For example, Wealthsimple recently became the second company approved to offer prediction trading in Canada, and is expected to launch Wealthsimple Predict this summer. This, despite how polling data suggests how two-in-five Canadians oppose such markets. That said, Wealthsimple gained its approval on the condition that sports and politics are off-limits. Instead, wagers will reportedly be confined to economic indicators, financial markets and climate trends. If so, it’ll be a major outlier within an industry that’s suddenly worth more than the GDP of Latvia or Tunisia.

Around US$5 billion is now trading weekly across Polymarket, Kalshi and others — hundreds of millions of dollars hinge on geopolitical outcomes. Wagers exist on whether US President Donald Trump runs for a third presidential term. Or a nuclear bomb being dropped before 2027. Trades on Kalshi based on Iran’s former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei being “out” by March 1, 2026, reached US$54 million before the site cancelled payouts after he was killed in US-Israeli military strikes on February 28. The company’s CEO posted that the platform prohibits transactions “directly tied to death.” Users were unimpressed.

“This is American commercial immorality on steroids,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told The Washington Post in early March, as fresh chaos roiling the Middle East sparked a betting bonanza. “Once events that involve good and evil simply become a financial product, I don’t know how right and wrong matters any longer.”

Backlash is mounting. Anonymous, cryptocurrency-based accounts profiting from war and other grim scenarios doesn’t sit well with most people. Still, a surge in criticism has done little, so far, to dent the gambling sites’ magnetic appeal and room to operate.

The New Arbiters of “Truth”

Rather than a bookkeeper (“the house”) creating bets, users self-generate them tied to any conceivable event. Wagers are placed in binary fashion — yes or no — on whether that event will happen. Blockchain technology then matches up users taking opposite sides of the bet in an “event contract.” Odds are adjusted in real time based on the ensuing buy-in activity; platforms collect transaction fees.

The prospect of insider trading is glaringly obvious. A US special forces soldier involved in the January abduction of Venezuela’s former President Nicolás Maduro raked in around US$410,000 by betting with uncanny timing on when Maduro would be ousted from power.

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“This particular bet has all the hallmarks of a trade based on inside information,” the head of financial reform advocacy group Better Markets told CBS News at the time. “It happened very late, right before the very event they were betting on happened; it was a relatively large amount of money; and it happened in a market that is not really regulated and where there is no transparency.” The soldier was later arrested by US authorities on April 23.

Elsewhere, an Israeli Air Force officer was indicted in March along with a civilian accomplice after they allegedly used classified information to previously win more than US$162,000. The pair had correctly forecasted Israeli airstrikes on Iran during the two countries’ 12-day war in June 2025. A Google engineer living in New York was then arrested in late May. Federal prosecutors claim the 36-year-old Italian citizen won more than US$1 million on Polymarket from “Google-related bets” based on his access to company search data.

These are just a few examples within a sea of suspicious trading behaviour. Yet another risk looms on the horizon — a gradual warping of the global information ecosystem. This will be much harder to disentangle.

“On X, both Polymarket and Kalshi have their own accounts that act as news feeds, where they post engagement-baiting and occasionally misleading headlines and speculate about world events that, conveniently, one can bet on via their platforms,” warned tech writer Charlie Warzel. But any claims to objectivity ring hollow, he argued. That’s because platforms don’t acknowledge that countless users also place opposing side bets to hedge against either outcome — a standard gambling technique. “This means that the markets don’t always reflect what people think will happen as much as they reflect what people think other people think will happen,” added Warzel.

What’s more, a recent study by researchers at the London Business School and Yale University found just over three percent of users “showed a predictive ability exceeding random chance.”

Still, public confidence in mainstream media and institutions continues to wither. And people everywhere are clamouring for alternative sources of information. Prediction market firms are thus promoting their betting data as superior to polling, journalism or expert opinion.

Kalshi sponsors branded daily news segments on CNN. Polymarket has forged a partnership with the publisher of The Wall Street Journal to allow reporters inside access to the platform’s data to use in their stories. The Associated Press, CNBC, Fox News and Substack have all struck similar deals. For a brief period, Polymarket bets even began popping up in Google News feeds. Google now plans to integrate both platforms’ data into new AI-powered financial analysis tools.

“Kalshi is replacing debate, subjectivity, and talk with markets, accuracy, and truth,” said its CEO Tarek Mansour. “We have created a new way of consuming and engaging with information.” Polymarket’s CEO Shayne Coplan went even further. In an interview with 60 Minutes in November 2025, he credited his platform as “the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now.”

Yet their financial motives matter. The tech industry has a long history of radiating confidence and doling out hyperbole as advertising tactics. Mansour and Coplan have meanwhile quietly launched a new venture capital fund to reap gains from the spin-off effects of the companies they’ve built.

Not All Bets — or Users — Are Equal

Still, governments are now scrambling to get a grip on an industry that’s treating life like a gameshow. Internationally, regulation swings between non-existent in most nations to platforms being banned entirely in others. Authorities in 34 countries have restricted access to Polymarket in particular. Still, prohibition is a blunt policy instrument that rarely works in the long term.

The White House could easily regulate the industry if it desired. Prediction markets in America are classified as derivative exchanges, overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Yet Trump has a vested interest against doing so. The president’s private media conglomerate has inked a deal with Crypto.com to integrate prediction market betting into his Truth Social platform. Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to both Kalshi and Polymarket as well.

US senators have instead exercised agency by barring themselves from prediction market betting. Individual states are also reaching for their own levers of power. Nevada banned Kalshi for two weeks in March for not having a state gaming licence and therefore engaging in illegal sports betting. Ohio, Massachusetts, Tennessee and others have followed suit. In May, Governor Tim Walz made Minnesota the first state to ban prediction markets altogether. Although this has irked both Trump and the CFTC, which is suing Minnesota and other states for supposedly overstepping their jurisdictional authority.

The Project On Government Oversight, a non-partisan US federal watchdog, highlights several options for more durable fixes. First, to halt insider trading, restrict elected officials, government employees and their families from betting on policy and politics. Plus, have these same individuals report other prediction market activity on required financial disclosure forms. Also, prohibit event contracts “contrary to the public interest” — wagers related to terrorism, assassination and war.

This approach aligns with how most experts believe platforms’ worst instincts can be reined in.

“Some events should not be turned into anonymous profit opportunities,” wrote Vass Bednar, CIGI senior fellow and managing director of the Canadian Shield Institute think tank, in January. “A society doesn’t need a market price for atrocity and nothing says ‘innovation’ like turning coups and chaos into a push notification.”

Absent new rules, the world may be headed in that direction.

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

About the Author

Based in Montreal, Canada, Kyle Volpi Hiebert is a Digital Policy Hub visiting fellow and a researcher and independent political risk analyst focused on globalization, conflict and emerging technologies.

For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

A smart society should not let invisible systems shape choices, rewards and behaviour without giving people a meaningful way to see, question and redirect that influence. With artificial intelligence (AI), society is navigating a slippery slope, moving fast from experimenting with and integrating it toward becoming reliant and eventually addicted. One of the most important questions, however, is whether policy makers are aware of that transition.

Generally, asymmetry means the two sides of a relationship are not equivalent. In digital life, “algorithmic asymmetry” describes a deeper imbalance between two sides: one can observe, model, test and refine its algorithms, while the other mainly experiences their consequences. That imbalance now runs in fields such as hiring, lending, insurance, education, policing, media and the architecture of everyday attention. The consequence is algorithmic agency asymmetry, the inability of users to identify and reject undue algorithmic influence on their circumstances.

Three Layers of Algorithmic Asymmetry

This algorithmic asymmetry can be explained in three different layers. The first layer is opacity and refers to the fact that the organizations that design, deploy or purchase algorithmic systems usually know far more about their goals, thresholds, incentives and weaknesses than the people who interact with the systems. The “opacity problem” explains why this gap persists: some systems are hidden by design to protect intellectual property, some are difficult to understand without technical training, and others are hard to interpret even for specialists. When a system is hard to inspect, its output often looks more objective than it deserves and we encounter the black box fallacy.

The second layer of algorithmic asymmetry is historical bias amplification. Algorithms learn from yesterday’s world, including yesterday’s biases or exclusions. Even apparently neutral systems can reproduce unequal patterns already embedded in data. A biased past enters as training material and exits as a prediction, a score or a recommendation that appears neutral because it is computational. In reality, it is the old hierarchy returning in a modernized, cleaner interface.

The third layer is recursive systems. Systems are not usually just deployed once; rather, users continuously train these systems. Every click, pause, prompt, route, purchase and hesitation becomes data. Recommender systems are designed to learn from those signals and adapt, but the loop does not stop there. With those learnings, the system then shapes what we see next, what feels normal, what seems relevant and sometimes even what feels desirable, with goals that remain obscure for the end user. In other words, we train the system, and it trains us back. “Algorithmic drift” refers to the co-evolving relationship between users and platforms.

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An Agency Problem

Agency is the capacity to judge, choose and act with a meaningful understanding of the forces shaping one’s options. Agency asymmetry emerges when organizations use digital systems — personalized feeds, targeted ads, dynamic pricing, recommendation engines, risk scores and so forth — to test, measure and refine influence and results at massive scales. Marketing has always tried to shape behaviour; the difference now lies in the precision and feedback loop: organizations can observe individual behaviour in real time, segment people into ever-finer categories, run continuous A/B tests and adjust what each person sees, pays or is offered. Individuals, by contrast, usually encounter only the surface of the system: a feed, a score, a price, a recommendation or a rejection, without knowing how their data was used, what objective was optimized or how their choices were steered.

This matters because people adapt to what systems reward. In hiring, the concern is no longer only that applicants polish resumés for human recruiters; automated screening tools and AI-ranking systems can reward particular signals while hiding the logic behind them. A University of Washington study found that large language models ranking more than 550 real resumés favoured those with white-associated names 85 percent of the time and never preferred ones with Black male–associated names over white male–associated names. In education, England’s 2020 grading controversy showed how an algorithmic model could translate school-level history into individual outcomes: Ofqual, the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation, downgraded about 40 percent of students’ centre-assessed grades, triggering public backlash and a government reversal.

Further, newer AI tools create even more risks. In a test of the performance of seven widely used AI detectors using samples from native and non-native English writers, Stanford researchers found that the AI detectors misclassified 61.22 percent of the essays in the non-native English sample as AI-generated, suggesting that some students are more vulnerable to suspicion or penalty because of the way they write. Similar dynamics appear in digital life and work. Facebook’s well-known 2014 news-feed experiment on 689,003 users showed that changing exposure to positive or negative posts affected the emotional language users later produced. In retail, Amazon warehouse workers monitored by algorithmic systems have also described having to meet pace-based targets without knowing how those targets are calculated, a dynamic examined in reporting and research on algorithmic management in Amazon warehouses. These cases show the deeper problem: Digital systems do not merely classify behaviour after the fact. They teach people which words to use, which risks to avoid, which emotions to express and which metrics to chase. Algorithmic agency asymmetry becomes politically significant when organizations shape the conditions under which people think, behave and decide, while individuals experience those conditions only as a score, a grade, a feed, a target or a price.

A Call for Policy

As a result, policy must rebalance the relationship. First, law makers should require meaningful notice and explanation at the point of impact. Users should know when they are interacting with AI, when content is synthetic and when a consequential decision has been influenced by an automated system. The logic behind Europe’s transparency obligations in article 50 of the AI Act points in the right direction. The OECD AI Principles make the same case in broader terms: people need enough information to understand outcomes and challenge them when necessary.

Second, governments should require enforceable impact assessments before algorithmic systems enter high-risk settings such as employment, education, housing, insurance, health care, welfare and policing. Some of the existing approaches offer a foundation, including Canada’s Algorithmic Impact Assessment, Ontario’s Human Rights AI Impact Assessment and Europe’s fundamental rights impact assessments for high-risk AI systems, also in the AI Act. Recent failures show why stronger safeguards matter. In the United Kingdom, the Court of Appeal found the South Wales Police Force’s use of live automated facial-recognition technology unlawful in R (Bridges) v Chief Constable of South Wales Police. In Detroit, Robert Williams was wrongfully arrested after a false facial-recognition match, a case documented by the American Civil Liberties Union. Before deployment, organizations should assess the system’s likely effects, such as infringement of rights, harms to vulnerable groups and error distribution, as well as the need for human oversight, appeal mechanisms and redress, with public reporting wherever possible.

Third, human oversight must be genuine, trained and protected. In many institutions, the “human in the loop” has limited power when staff are under pressure to trust the system’s output. Australia’s Robodebt Scheme showed how automated welfare-debt calculations could harm people when officials treated system-generated claims as authoritative. In R (Bridges) v South Wales Police, the UK Court of Appeal found live facial-recognition use unlawful, partly because safeguards around discretion, data protection and equality impacts were inadequate. The UK Post Office Horizon scandal showed a related failure: people trusted flawed software outputs over the lived evidence of hundreds of sub-postmasters. Europe’s article 14 of the AI Act is valuable because it requires human overseers of high-risk AI systems to understand, monitor, interpret, override or interrupt the system. Any institution using consequential AI should name accountable reviewers, train them to detect automation bias and give them real authority to stop harmful outputs.

Fourth, regulation should not end at launch. Models drift, contexts change and incentives mutate. A system that looks acceptable in testing can become discriminatory or manipulative once it interacts with real populations. That is why post-deployment monitoring, logging, independent auditing and incident reporting should be legal obligations. The AI Risk Management Framework from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the provisions on post-market monitoring within the AI Act both recognize this. The Prosocial AI Index can be used to map, measure and monitor the impact of AI systems on humans and their environment.

Fifth, some practices should simply be off limits. Systems designed to exploit vulnerability, distort behaviour through deceptive design, or manipulate children and other captive populations deserve prohibition instead of soft guidance. Article 5 of the AI Act, which bans certain manipulative and exploitative uses, draws a necessary hard line. A healthy digital society cannot rely only on disclosure when the underlying design is built to undermine judgment.

Finally, algorithmic literacy should be treated as civic infrastructure. If only developers, vendors and compliance teams understand how these systems work, agency asymmetry survives even under good regulation. Citizens, teachers, judges, journalists, clinicians and public administrators need practical literacy about synthetic media, ranking systems, behavioural nudges, contestation rights and the limits of model outputs. Europe’s article 4 on AI literacy is a useful signal and should grow into a broader public mission. Beyond AI literacy, this is the time to invest in double literacy, to ensure user awareness of the interplay between personal perception, behaviour and the influence of artificial assets on them.

Ultimately, algorithmic agency asymmetry is not a niche technical concern. Rather, it is a structural imbalance in who can see, shape and resist algorithmic power. One side learns faster, tests continuously and intervenes quietly — the other adapts in partial darkness. Good policy will not eliminate asymmetry altogether, but it can narrow the gap where it matters most by making automated influence visible, contestable, auditable and governable.

That is the democratic task. A society worthy of trust does not ask people to function as frictionless inputs into optimization systems. Rather, it gives them enough visibility, protection and institutional backing to remain authors of their own choices.

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

About the Author

Cornelia C. Walther is a senior fellow at CIGI, the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health, the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative/Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative and the Harvard Learning and Innovation Lab, professor at the Sunway Institute for Global Strategy and Competitiveness, as well as an adjunct associate professor at the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

This piece was first published by Canada’s National Observer. For more analysis, visit CIGI Online.

The Moon has long shaped life on Earth: governing tides, structuring time, and anchoring human understandings of the natural world. What is new is not the Moon’s power, but the extension of ours.

The Artemis II mission carrying astronauts around the far side of the Moon marks the first human journey beyond low Earth orbit in more than 50 years. For Canada, with Jeremy Hansen aboard, it is also a moment of participation in shaping what comes next.

As activity expands beyond Earth orbit, the Moon is becoming a place where systems of infrastructure, governance, and influence are taking shape in real time. This matters not because the Moon will directly transform life on Earth, but because it is becoming the next extension of the systems that already underpin life on Earth—and the power they enable.

The satellites, data, and services that underpin GPS, banking, weather forecasting, and military coordination already shape how we move, communicate, and manage risk every day. As I’ve argued elsewhere, these systems form a critical infrastructure underpinning economic and strategic power. That architecture is now expanding outward.

Artemis is not a return to Apollo. The “flags and footprints” model has given way to a sustained human presence. Efforts now focus on building the tools and infrastructure needed to live and operate on the Moon, including surface habitats, orbital platforms, and supporting logistics. Through the Artemis program, NASA and its partners, including the Canadian Space Agency, are advancing a long-term human base. China is likewise pursuing a permanent International Lunar Research Station with Russia and other partners.

But what is being built is not just missions: it is the infrastructure, rules, and capabilities that will shape who can act in space—and who benefits from it. Water ice in the deep, shadowed craters of the lunar south pole could support fuel production and life support. Communications, logistics, and monitoring systems are beginning to come together to support sustained activity on and around the Moon, and beyond. Interest in resources such as lunar regolith—and, more speculatively, helium-3—reflects efforts to build capabilities for future energy and material use.

These developments are not neutral. What is built—and for whom—will shape who can operate, how, and who gets left behind. Early decisions about infrastructure and access will determine which actors capture the economic, technological, and strategic advantages of sustained activity in space. As these systems take shape, the rules governing them are also being defined.

But these missions are not only testing technology; they are establishing how activity on the Moon will be governed in practice. Principles of the Outer Space Treaty apply to the Moon, including special provisions on non-appropriation and peaceful use, but their interpretation remains contested. The choices made now will shape what counts as acceptable behaviour—and who gets to set the rules.

On space resources, China has emphasized non-appropriation, equitable access, and benefit sharing, alongside stronger state oversight; concerns echoed by the Group of 77. The Artemis Accords, adopted by more than 60 countries participating in NASA-led lunar activities, turn these principles into working rules that manage interference but may also shape access, while asserting that resource use can proceed without constituting national appropriation.

Power in this system is not only material; it is also shaped by language and values. The Moon is both a physical and a cultural domain. Today’s dominant way of talking about the Moon, focused on leadership, access, and capability, informs which activities are pursued. Likewise, the language and standards through which knowledge is produced and shared influence who can participate and on what terms.

In turn, they shape what is seen as legitimate, whose knowledge counts, and what the Moon is ultimately for. Alternative perspectives persist, including those rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems that frame the Moon not as a resource, but as part of a broader relational landscape. This tension reflects deeper questions about use, responsibility, what should be protected, and whose values guide those choices.

These questions are already being worked through in practice—for example, in Jeremy Hansen’s Artemis mission patch, which incorporates Indigenous perspectives alongside more traditional narratives of space exploration.

As humanity continues extending its presence beyond Earth, the Moon is no longer simply a destination. It is the next layer of systems that already shape life—and power—on Earth. As Astroscale’s Tahara Dawkins has argued, exploration establishes what is possible. It also determines who defines those possibilities.

The challenge is not only what we build, but what those choices set in motion by shaping how power is exercised, and by whom, on Earth and beyond. Even if most people never leave Earth, the rules written and the capabilities developed in space will shape the opportunities and challenges we all live with.

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

About the Author

Jessica West is a CIGI senior fellow and a senior researcher at Project Ploughshares, a Canadian peace and security research institute, where she focuses on technology, security and governance in outer space.