About Us

Periplus Research is a London-based strategy and disputes advisory firm for frontier and emerging economies. Through local human-source networks and qualitative assessment, it establishes what the formal record cannot show: how a decision will actually be made, whether a counterparty will perform once relationships replace documents. The firm is for decision-makers who have read the record, taken the advice, and still do not know. The work rests on relationships built over years and held in trust: people who speak inside a situation, in its own language, to someone no outside party can reach. Their words are read in the terms of the place itself: who really decides, who owes whom, what a counterparty will do rather than say. The fragments are assembled, conversation by conversation, into an independent reading of the situation. This is mosaic research, built on the Track II tradition: bespoke collection and intelligence analysis applied to political risk and transactions, particularly in infrastructure, energy, and resources; in contentious matters, it reconstructs the conduct of counterparties and establishes whether an award can be collected. Its networks span 85 jurisdictions across Africa, the Middle East, and South, Central, and Southeast Asia, from provincial administrations and commercial circles through to the centre of government. The firm’s reach runs deepest in Africa: its networks have been applied in all but two of the continent’s 54 countries. The formal record—filings, registries, data rooms, financial models—shows what is legible. The decisive facts are often elsewhere: in what is known but never written, in intent, and in how power actually runs. That gap is why the work grows more valuable, not less, as artificial intelligence improves. What can be digitised and reasoned from, AI now reaches; what was never written down, and never meant to be legible to an outsider, it cannot.