Expert advice on navigating complex geopolitical situations, responding to trends and anticipating future developments globally and in specific regions and countries.
The world is increasingly interconnected. The impact of decisions made in one part of the world can have unforeseen consequences elsewhere. Globalisation and localism are developing hand-in-hand, increasing the need for successful businesses and institutions to clearly understand and adapt to changing local conditions. Our Geopolitical Advisory Service provides independent expert advice, specifically tailored to our customers’ needs, often through long-term partnership arrangements. We will help you to prioritise your strategic decisions, based on anticipated geopolitical risks and opportunities and we will ensure you have the skills and knowledge to operate successfully internationally.
Access to world-class experts, consultants and GIS exclusive business and political networks at all levels throughout the world.
We all know that business and politics are based on relationships between people, but these can take time to develop. It is difficult to enter unfamiliar markets without having good access to networks of people who understand the specifics of the target country or region. Our Global Networks Service fast-tracks you to local networks around the world to help you achieve your objectives.
Customised intelligence briefings, reports and presentations set within their geopolitical context, to address specific corporate and political situations
The world is awash with information. However, it is difficult to find relevant, reliable and robust intelligence, provided in a concise and accessible format, to inform your specific international business situations. Our Intelligence Reports Service addresses this, saving you valuable time and resource. This service identifies and interprets the information you need and provides bespoke intelligence briefings, papers and presentations to help you to confidently address your specific situations. We also have an Intelligence Report Subscription Service, publishing 250 reports a year in English and German. These will help your business to develop a full understanding of international affairs and identify the issues that really matter in this fast-changing world.
Geopolitical coaching, training and development sessions to CEOs and senior executives of internationally oriented companies.
Our face-to-face Geopolitical Coaching and Training Service provides senior executives with the skills they need to be successful in unfamiliar markets. It applies geopolitical and economic knowledge into practical solutions to complex challenges, equipping business leaders with the ability to take a sophisticated and long-term view of political and economic development. In either small groups or on a one-to-one basis, we analyse possible scenarios, appraise international trade and investment risks and opportunities, and we explore how to operate effectively within different cultures and legal and political systems.
We are active in all priority regions in the world:
Our growing global network of experts provides relevant geopolitical and economic information, strategic analysis and exclusive contacts. This enables our clients to operate confidently internationally, providing them with competitive advantage.
More than 100 experts around the world. Read about them.
Our Experts
Our intelligence consultant specialized in world oil and gas and energy policy.
Dr Carole Nakhle is the founder and Director of Crystol Energy. An Energy Economist by training, she is Associate Lecturer in Energy Economics at the University of Surrey (UK) and Associate of the Surrey Energy Economics Centre (SEEC), in addition to her roles as Research Fellow at the Lebanese Centre for Policy Studies (Beirut) and Scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Centre (Beirut). She also acts as External Expert for the Fiscal Affairs department at the IMF, Consultant for the World Bank and the Commonwealth Secretariat and is a visiting lecturer at international institutions such as The Graduate School of International and Development Studies in Geneva, and the Levantine Training Centre in Limassol. She is the founder and director of the non-for-profit organisation “Access for Women in Energy” and is Program Advisor to the Washington based International Tax and Investment Centre (ITIC).
Our intelligence consultant specialized in Middle East and Northern Africa
Professor Dr Udo Steinbach is a Middle East specialist who teaches at the Centre of Near and Middle East Studies at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany. He was Director of the German Institute for Middle East Studies, a research institute dealing with the contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia from 1976 to January 2007, before becoming Director of GIGA Institute of Middle East Studies (IMES) from February to December, 2007. Professor Dr Steinbach , 68, was awarded a Phd in Arabic and Islamic Studies in Freiburg and Basel and has written numerous books and publications on political and social developments in the Middle East. He is a counsellor and expert for various public and private institutions. His main areas of research are political and social change in the Arab countries and Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan; the manifestations of political Islam and the Middle East in the international system.
Our intelligence consultant specialized in Middle East and Northern Africa
Charles Millon is a French politician who served as France’s Minister of Defence from 1995 to 1997 in Alain Juppe’s government and French Ambassador to the United Nations from 2003 to 2007. He is one of the leading specialists on Africa. He is the founder and trustee of the Thomas More Institute, a European Think Tank in Brussels, Belgium, and founding partner of the Cabinet Intelstrat firm in Paris. Mr Millon started his career as a legal counsel and tax consultant, founding Lyon-based law firm DMG, which is currently the sixth largest law firm in France. He began a long political career following his election as Mayor of Belley in eastern France in 1977.
Our intelligence consultant specialized in International and Security Affairs
INTERNATIONAL security advisor Dr Uwe Nerlich is a founding director of the Centre for European Security Strategies (CESS) based in Munich, Germany. The centre provides an international network for research and consultancy supporting governments, international organisations, industry and the media to understand and meet strategic threats. It draws on expertise from many countries and disciplines seeking to integrate strategic, operational and technical approaches and deals with international crises, environmental and natural disasters and terror scenarios through analyses, policy studies, scenario development, risk assessment and tool development.
Our intelligence consultant specialized in China and South East Asia
Timothy Beardson, one of Hong Kong’s most successful entrepreneurs. He founded and ran Crosby Financial Holdings, the largest independent investment bank in the Far East, which at its height employed 650 staff in 17 cities in 13 countries from New York to Beijing, with an annual transaction volume of US$ 20 billion. He is an integral part of Hong Kong’s economic ascendance. He is the Chairman of Ilex Partners Limited, an investment banking firm specializing in linking China with the West. He is the Chairman of the China Oxford Scholarship Fund which provides financial support to highly talented Chinese graduates from disadvantaged families to study at Oxford University. He is also a shareholder in Gatcombe which is a consultancy firm focusing on independent educational advice to Chinese families. With his experience in consulting together with his Asian networks, he is the perfect consultant for corporations who want to develop their business in the Far East as well as to governments that want to understand the developments in China and other Far East countries.
Our intelligence consultant specialized in Georgia and Caucasus region
EKA TKESHELASHVILI is the President of the Georgian Institute for Strategic Studies. She was the Vice Prime-Minister and State Minister of Georgia for Re-Integration. In this role she oversaw the implementation of state policy towards the occupied territories of Georgia and the national policy on minority integration. She previously served as Secretary of the National Security Council of Georgia after serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prosecutor General and Minister of Justice. Mrs Tkeshelashvili was also the chairperson of the Tbilisi Appeals Court. Mrs Tkeshelashvili graduated from the Faculty of Law and International Relations at the Tbilisi State University. She also has a Masters degree from Notre Dame Law School, US, and a Certificate in Human Rights Law from the University of Oxford. She started her career as a lawyer at the International Committee of the Red Cross. She has also practiced as a lawyer at the Lawyers’s Committee on Human Rights in New York and at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. As a GIS expert and consultant, she helps companies already operating, or looking to invest, in the Southern Caucasus or Central Asia, by analysing the geopolitical environment and the macroeconomic challenges of its constituent countries. She also undertakes legal analyses and works with businesses to advance their strategic communications within the region. Mrs Tkeshelashvili, who speaks Georgian, English and Russian, also provides expert advice to businesses with interests in Ukraine and Moldova.
Our intelligence consultant specialized in European Union, economics of the Euro.
ENRICO Colombatto is a professor of economics at the University of Turin, Italy. Professor Colombatto is also Director of Research, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Fiscales (IREF) in Paris. Among his other current positions and affiliations are that he is a Member of the Scientific Committee of IEL - Doctoral programme in Law and Economics and Economics of Institutions, Member of the Council of Public Policy, Munich and Berlin (since 2001), Member of the Board of IREF - Institut de Recherches Economiques et Fiscales (since 2002), Member of the Academic Advisory Council, Centre for the New Europe, Brussels (since 2003). Adjunct Scholar to the Mises Institute, Auburn (since 2003), Member of the Board of Advisors, Centre on Entrepreneurial Innovation, Independent Institute, Oakland, California (since 2005), Adjunct Scholar to the Centre for the Rule of Law (since 2005), and a Member of the Academic Advisory Council, Liberales Institut, Switzerland (since 2007).
Our intelligence consultant specialized in U.S. foreign policy and Latin America.
Dr Joseph S. Tulchin is a Latin American scholar with published research on hemispheric security and international affairs, citizen security and police reform, reducing inequality and the governance of cities. His areas of expertise are US foreign policy, inter-American relations, contemporary Latin America, strategic planning, and social science research methodology. Dr Tulchin is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He was visiting Fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. In addition, he worked as an adviser to a company that provided Political Risk Analysis to corporate clients. During his career he taught or lectured in nearly every country in the hemisphere. He has published more than 100 scholarly articles and over 70 books and he has been a consultant to multilateral agencies, such as the World Bank, the OAS and UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme), as well as USAID (United States Agency for International Development). He has made presentations to and held private discussions with senior executives of banks, mutual fund managers, energy businesses and multinational industrial companies.
Our intelligence consultant specialized in economics of Europe
Professor Dr Christoph Schaltegger is an economist, author and academic who specialises in the economics of Europe. Dr Schaltegger is Director at the Swiss Institute of Public Finance and Fiscal Law IFF at the University of St. Gallen and a Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Economics, at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland. He was Dean of faculty from 2012 to 2015.
Our intelligence consultant specialized in Russia and neighbouring countries
STEFAN Hedlund is Professor and Research Director at the Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies, at Uppsala University, Sweden. He trained as an economist and has specialised in Russian affairs since the final days of Leonid Brezhnev in the early 1980s. His research interests have branched far beyond economics over the years but have, above all, included a devouring interest in Russian history. He has published extensively on matters ranging from the Soviet system to post-Soviet transition, and institutional dimensions of the interaction between state and market in a modern economy. He has published more than 20 books, some 200 journal and magazine articles and well over 300 reviews and op-ed pieces.
Our intelligence consultant specialized in economic and political relations in Europe.
Professor Dr Michael Wohlgemuth is an economist and has been Director of Open Europe Berlin since August 2012. He has an MA in economics from Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg, a PhD from Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, and a second PhD from the Private University of Witten/Herdecke, which he was awarded in 2007. His thesis was on ‘Democracy as a Discovery Procedure. Evolutionary Assessments of the Political Process’. Professor Dr Wohlgemuth has been Professor of International Governance at the Faculty for Law and Economics at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, since October, 2011; the Managing Research Associate at the Walter Eucken Institute, in Freiburg since 2002; a professorial tutor at the postgraduate programme ‘Social Market Economy’ of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation; Research Associate at the Centre for European Studies in Brussels, Belgium, since 2009; Associate Fellow at the Ratio Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, since 2009; a visiting lecturer at the Baltic International Academy, Riga, Latvia, since 2008; a member of the Council on Economic Policy at the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Berlin, since 2007; a visiting tutor at the Economics PhD Programme of the Escuela Superior de Economía y Adminstración de Empresas (ESEADE), Buenos Aires, Argentina, since 2003 and Rapporteur of the Working Group ‘European Governance’ within the European Ideas Network (EIN)in Brussels, since 2002.
Our intelligence consultant specialized in Middle East and Northern Africa
Bernard Siman, OBE, is an independent investment and banking professional with a strong bias towards strategic risk analysis and advice. He actively advises investors and insurance operators from the Gulf, Japan and Europe on their global investment and business strategies, and leads on originating and structuring specific investment. He has worked for Jardine Fleming, UBS and Nomura in the UK, Europe and the Middle East, Turkey and Japan, where he obtained an International Graduate Diploma from Kyoto University's Engineering Faculty. He also advised governments on privatisation and economic liberalisation options.
Our intelligence consultants specialized in global energy and cyber security.
Dr. Frank Umbach is Research Director of the European Centre for Energy and Resource Security (EUCERS) at King‘s College, London; and Associate Senior Fellow at the Centre for European Security Strategies (CESS) GmbH, Munich. Washington D.C. He also works as a international consultant for the industry, government institutions and international organizations on international energy security, cyber security and protection of energy infrastructures and security policies (i.e. in the Asia-Pacific region). His expertise is in energy, foreign and security policies in Russia, the Caspian region, Asia-Pacific (i.e. China and Japan), the EU and Germany in the areas of energy (supply) security, energy foreign policy, geopolitical risks, global energy challenges, cyber security of energy infrastructures and maritime security.
Our intelligence consultants specialized in Africa and Portuguese speaking countries.
HISTORIAN and political writer Professor Jaime Nogueira Pinto has published several books on Portuguese contemporary history, political science and military and African affairs. He has lectured on these and other subjects at the Portuguese universities of Lusíada in Lisbon, and Católica in Porto and military institutions such as the Portuguese Institute for National Defence and the Military Academy. Professor Pinto is editor of Futuro Presente, a quarterly review published since 1980, and is a columnist in the Portuguese daily newspaper ‘I’ and the weekly ‘O Sol’. He is a regular media commentator on politics and international relations and was a columnist in Portugal’s main weekly newspaper, Expresso. He wrote for the Wall Street Journal in the 1980s and 1990s.
Our intelligence consultant specialized in Middle East, Iraq and the Gulf.
PROFESSOR Dr Amatzia Baram is Professor Emeritus at the Department of the History of the Middle East and Director of the Centre for Iraq Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel. Professor Baram was born in Kibbutz Kfar Menachem in southern Israel and raised and educated there. He served as an officer and commanded tank units in the Armoured Corps during his regular military service from 1956 to 1960 and while in the reserves. He was 'on loan' to the Iraqi desk at Military Intelligence as an analyst when the Iraq-Iran War began in 1980. After release from regular military service he worked on the kibbutz farm, before graduating in biology and teaching sciences at the kibbutz high school.
Argentina's new president will find it hard to make a fresh start
Let’s Change – Cambiemos – led by former Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri, won Argentina’s presidential run-off by less than 3 per cent of the popular vote. Headlines in Europe, the United States and Latin America heralded the opposition coalition’s victory as marking a reversal of the ‘pink tide’ – the swing to the left that has dominated South American politics for the past two decades. There were loud sighs of relief that Argentina would return to international norms and leave behind the populism that had been the hallmark of the governments of Nestor Kirchner (2003-2007) and his successor and widow Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (2007-2015). Some even suggested that Mr Macri’s election would transform the continent’s role in international relations.
Focus on Mongolia:walking the foreign policy tightrope (Part1)
Mongolia is a large, sparsely populated, landlocked country sandwiched between two much stronger neighbours: Russia and China. For much of the past 300 years, the country has been dominated by one or the other of these two powers. Since its transition to democracy and a market economy in the early 1990s, it has pursued a ‘multi-pillar’ foreign policy that looks to balance Russian and Chinese interests, as well as those of other major global players such as the United States. So far, Mongolia has been successful, avoiding domination by foreign powers while attracting investment from around the world. But as the geopolitical environment becomes more complex, Mongolia’s ability to juggle these relationships is coming into question...
Bachelet contends with copper and conservatives to keep Chilean reforms on track
Michelle Bachelet is vowing not to give up on the social overhaul of Chile’s free-market model that won her a second term as the country’s president in 2013. Yet the collapse of global copper prices has largely deprived her of the money to pay for the reforms, while a financial scandal has cost her political clout. President Bachelet’s biggest challenge in 2016 will be to keep even a scaled-down version of her package intact...
We help companies and institutions around the world to make informed decisions, so they can operate internationally more effectively and stay ahead of competitors.
If you are looking to understand, compete and grow, GIS is the partner for you. No matter what industry you are in, our intelligence consultants will help you to make informed decisions and take advantage of emerging opportunities while avoiding threats.
We cooperate with 70 high level experts around the world.
