An exclusive online briefing with Canada’s former Ambassador to Venezuela, Ben Rowswell.
About the Speaker
Ben Rowswell is a consultant with Catalyze4, a strategic advisory to help companies with Canada’s new nation-building strategy. He served as Canada’s most recent ambassador in Venezuela, from 2014 to 2017. This capped a 25-year career in Canadian diplomacy which included assignments as Representative of Canada in Kandahar, Deputy Ambassador to Afghanistan, Chargé d’Affaires to Iraq, as well as junior assignments to Canada’s Embassies in Washington and Cairo and at our Permanent Mission to the UN.
Throughout his career, Ben’s principal thematic focus was on democracy and human rights. He launched a Democracy policy unit within headquarters in 2006 as well as the Protection of Democracy Fund, and led innovations into the use of social media to advance human rights in Iran and other authoritarian countries, an approach known as Direct Diplomacy. While on leave from the government he worked with the NGO known as the National Democratic Institute in Baghdad, with the thinktank known as the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, and he launched a software startup to crowdsource civic action called Betterplace. From 2018 to 2023 he served as President of the Canadian International Council.
