Dr. Robert Muggah is a political economist focused on geopolitical risk, smart cities, digital safety and security, and climate tech and adaptation. He cofounded the Igarapé Institute, an award-winning think and do tank devoted to leveraging new technologies to tackle global challenges in 2010 . He’s also the co-founder and principal of SecDev Group, a cybersecurity and digital risk firm. He advises senior leadership in government and the private sector in Latin America, Eurasia, South Asia and Africa.
For two decades Robert has provided strategic advisory services to global energy and tech companies (Bytedance, Google, Meta), McKinsey’s, UN agencies, the IADB, IMF, and the World Bank. He is a non-resident fellow at Singularity University, Princeton University, the Graduate Institute in Geneva, the Chicago Council for Global Affairs, Bosch Foundation, and the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.
At WEF, Robert served three terms on the Global Agenda Council on the Future of Cities and Councils devoted to humanitarian action and conflict prevention. He is an advisor to the Global Risk Report (2018-present). Robert is also a fellow with the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime; Know Violence in Childhood Initiative, and Co-Chair of the Lancet Commission on Violence.
Robert provides keynote talks in a wide range of international audiences, including TED talks on fragile and resilient cities in 2019, 2017 and 2015. In 2023 he coordinated a TEDx event in the Amazon, bringing together over 50 speakers and 1,000 participants, including from all 8 countries in the region.
Robert is involved in a number of start-ups and is working on issues of AI governance. He is a co-founder of Bioverse, a forest data inventory company that leverages remote sensing and fixed wing drones to assess biodiversity abundance. He is also supporting SuperNature, a regenerative urban design studio that reimagines the future of cities. With support from GIF, Robert recently set-up a global task force on AI ethics and safety in 2022 which includes representatives from the Americas, Europe, Africa and South and Southeast Asia.
An avid map collector, Robert creates data visualizations and predictive analytics on homicide, arms, and cities, all of which have been featured by the BBC, CBC, CNN, FastCompany, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, New York Times, Washington Post. and Wired. A columnist at Foreign Policy, he is the author of eight books, dozens of articles, most recently Terra Incognita: 100 Maps to Survive the next 100 Years (Penguin/Random House).
Robert has a PhD from the University of Oxford.
The 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington were devastating, including for dozens of countries and cities outside the US. The subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the p...
América Latina es una de las regiones más urbanizadas del planeta. Tres de sus mega-ciudades están entre las mayores del mundo – Buenos Aires, Ciudad de México y São Paulo. Metrópolis cre...
Latin America is one of the planet’s most urbanized regions. Three of its mega-cities are among the world’s largest – Buenos Aires, Mexico and Sao Paulo. Sprawling metropolises like Bogot...
The world is moving to the city. No part of the planet is urbanizing faster than sub-Saharan Africa. The continent’s population of roughly 1.1 billion is expected to double by 2050. More ...
High-profile attacks on major cities in Belgium, France and the United States have set the world on edge. Commentators are talking of a new kind of protracted guerrilla war stretching fro...
It’s official. Global instability is the new normal. Political and economic uncertainties, combined with climate change and the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, are all contributin...
Virtually every government, business and civil society organization around the world has to contend with some kind of fragility. But fragility has uneven effects. When people and institut...
The world is urbanizing at a breakneck pace. But not all regions are moving at the same speed. Most population growth today and tomorrow will occur in the sprawling cities and slums of Af...
A handful of hastily written emails spread shock waves across the United States last month. The threats were familiar, warning of gunfire, backpack bombs and mayhem in schools across New ...
It is hard to know with certainty where and why cities will falter and fail in the 21st century. It is even more difficult to predict which cities are going to thrive and survive. What is...
