Nation Branding, Risk, and Global Investing: Egypt and UAE 2026
Course Description
Governments spend billions shaping how investors, tourists, and citizens interpret risk—and how much of it they’re willing to price in. Nations compete as much for reputation and soft power as for tourism share, FDI, and capital inflows. Nation Branding, Risk, and Global Investing offers students a toolkit for decoding the politics of perception. The course unpacks these strategies: from sovereign wealth funds moonlighting as branding vehicles, to mega-projects projecting stability and modernity, to celebrity endorsements and global campaigns around K-pop, sports diplomacy, or Thai cuisine—and of course the elevated art of lying with macro statistics.
This course will first focus on the mechanics of branding, narrative-building, and perception management. Students grapple with how propaganda, polarization, and groupthink shape perceptions at home and abroad. The second focus is the discipline of disbelieving: recognizing what matters and what is noise, when image outruns fundamentals, and when “crisis” headlines obscure deeper resilience. Success in emerging markets very often depends on spotting that gap and knowing when to buck consensus narratives. These frameworks are vital not only for investors navigating the global economy, but also for entrepreneurs, marketers, and policymakers.
The course’s primary goal is to deepen students’ understanding of critical country risks and the various ways governments and companies manage or market around them. By examining the shared strategies—what’s spun, what’s hidden, and why—students will be better equipped to assess the risks and rewards in global business, entrepreneurship, marketing, tourism, consulting, or investment.
Egypt and UAE
Our classroom experience culminates in a journey pairing one of the Middle East’s most meticulously branded hubs of stability, wealth, and global ambition – yet with fragilities beneath the polish – with another whose cultural heft, youthful population, and strategic geography remain vital even amid economic strain, political uncertainty, and tourism dependence at a volatile regional moment. While our travel lens is MENA, the conceptual toolkit is global. As we will explore during the course, the same frameworks and strategies apply to Latin American reform cycles, Asian mega-projects, and African sovereign restructurings. Students will leave the course with both sides of the coin: an understanding of how market-moving narratives are created, and the critical capacity to disbelieve them strategically.
Faculty Bio
Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez is a founding partner at Aurora Macro Strategies—a boutique macroeconomic and geopolitical research, intelligence, and advisory firm servicing a select group of financial, commercial and government clients. Having joined the Kellogg Faculty in 2014, his teaching and research focus includes political risk, geopolitics, corruption, country branding, family enterprise in emerging markets, as well as institutional and constitutional development in Latin America.
From 2014-2023 Daniel served as Director for the Latin American region at Greenmantle, a Macroeconomic and Geopolitical Research service advising many of the world’s premier hedge funds. Prior to that, he works as division chief for entrepreneurial development at the Sucre Municipal Government in Caracas from 2009-2010, following other local stints in the Venezuelan public and NGO sector. Other past work experience likewise includes Goldman Sachs, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Daniel frequently appears as an analyst in international media, where he is a frequent guest on CNN, France24, NTN24, Al Jazeera, and NPR. He was a regular political columnist for the Venezuelan broadsheet El Nacional (2012-2018) as well as a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy Magazine, the Financial Times, The Atlantic and the New York Times. He has also written for Forbes, the New Republic, the New Yorker, Harpers, the Washington Post, the Economist, Boston Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books (among others). His academic publications include articles in the UCLA Law Review and the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs among others.
He has taught courses at Harvard University, and guest lectured at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, New York University Stern School of Business, the United States Airforce Academy, and IESA Business School in Caracas.
Concurrent to his current private sector and academic roles, Daniel has been invited to brief various international governments and U.S. government agencies on his views including the U.S. State Department and the Intelligence Services. He has also served as an expert witness or consultant on legal cases involving political corruption and persecution, providing testimony before U.S. Federal, State, and Immigration courts.
Daniel holds a B.A. cum laude from Carleton College, a J.D. from the University of Chicago, and an M.P.P. from Harvard University with a concentration in International Trade and Finance. Having grown up between South Central Connecticut and Eastern Caracas, he now lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with his wife Marianella and their twin daughters Claudia and Michelle.