Speaker Bio

Karsten Diethelm Geier is senior advisor for cyber diplomacy at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. As a German diplomat, he has been posted, inter alia, in several South-East European countries, the United States, Afghanistan (as Consul-General in Mazar-e Sharif), and at the Holy See. During his country’s presidency of the European Union in 2007, he chaired the Politico-Military Working Party. He was posted to Germany’s Mission to the United Nations in New York during his country’s membership of the Security Council 2010-2012, coordinating, inter alia, the work of the Al Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committees.
Karsten Geier has been a seconded member of the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina and of the European External Action Service. He also served in the NATO-led Mission Resolute Support as Senior Civilian Representative for Northern Afghanistan.
Between 2013 and 2018, Karsten Geier was responsible for international cyber policy in the German Federal Foreign Office. He was a member of the 2014/2015 UN Group of Government Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Communication Technology in the Context of International Security and chaired the 2016/2017 GGE. In the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, he was instrumental in building consensus on two sets of confidence building measures to reduce the risks of conflict stemming from the use of ICT. (One of those during the German OSCE-chairmanship in 2016.) During this time, he also taught classes on the subject at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, the European Union Security and Defense College, the German Federal Academy on Security Policy, and at the German Bundeswehr’s Command and Staff College.
Apart from serving as Senior Cyber Diplomacy Advisor to the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, Karsten Geier is also accredited as minister at Germany’s Permanent Representation to the European Union in Brussels. He is a non-resident fellow of the School for Management and Technology in Berlin.