The Canadian International Council (CIC) is pleased to announce that Ambassador Mokhtar Lamani will be joining the organization as a Distinguished Fellow. Ambassador Lamani joins 14 other experts as part of the CIC’s research program Real & Imagined Security Threats in an Uncertain World. This program peers into and breaks through the politics of fear in Canada and beyond, deconstructing existing threat narratives to assess which are genuine and which are inflated.
Ambassador Lamani was the Head of the Office of the UN-League of Arab States Joint Special Representative for Syria in Damascus from September 2012 to May 2014. Before his appointment in OJSRS-D, Ambassador Lamani was the Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in Canada.
Previously, he served as Ambassador Special Representative of the Arab League in Iraq, appointed by the Arab Summit in 2006. On behalf of the Arab League, he worked to reconcile fractious parties and sectarian groups in Iraq while building peaceful relations between Iraq and neighboring countries.
Prior to his position as Special Representative, Ambassador Lamani served as Ambassador of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation to the United Nations in New York from 1998 to 2004.
His distinguished career in international diplomacy includes a number of positions with the General Secretariat of the Arab League, including Deputy Permanent Observer to the UN, Officer in Charge of the Iraq-Kuwait dispute, Coordinator of Secretariat Reform, and Coordinator of the Euro-Arab Dialogue and Afro-Arab Cooperation, Responsible of European relations. He is also currently a Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa.
About the CIC
The Canadian International Council (CIC) is Canada’s foreign relations council. It is an independent, non-partisan membership organization and think tank dedicated to advancing constructive dialogue on Canada’s place in the world and providing an incubator for innovative ideas on how to address the world’s most pressing problems.
However, the CIC is not a conventional think tank. Its research arm is complemented by a network of 15 branches from across Canada. The branches incorporate the voices and feedback of citizens; engage local communities with programs that involve speakers, seminars, round table discussions and conferences; and organize study groups that generate citizen dialogue and involvement in international affairs. In this way, the CIC reflects the ideas and interests of a broad constituency of Canadians who believe that a country’s foreign policy is not an esoteric concern of experts, but directly affects the lives and prosperity of its citizens.
