Contact

Nizar Manek

Founder & Managing Director

Before founding Periplus Research, built proprietary methodology, interlocutor and coordination networks, and legal and compliance protocols underpinning hundreds of engagements for the top-tier strategic intelligence and disputes advisory firms, arbitration practices, development finance institutions, European foreign ministries, and Track II peace processes; member, UN Security Council Affairs Division Pool of Experts.

Earlier career as a correspondent for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, and Africa Confidential, covering the Horn of Africa and Red Sea, Middle East and North Africa, and West Africa and Sahel, with work in the Financial Times, Jane's Intelligence Review, Foreign Affairs, Le Monde Diplomatique, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, and London Review of Books. Academic work on political economy and ethnography with Harvard's Center for International Development; citations from the European Press Prize, Overseas Press Club of America, Foreign Press Association in London, Transparency International. Education: LSE, Columbia Law and Business Schools, SOAS. Based in London; previously Addis Ababa, Cairo, Tunis, Istanbul, Yerevan, Athens.

Nizar Manek

Periplus Research works selectively with clients through professional referral or direct enquiry, typically in hard cases where formal analysis leaves the decisive variable unresolved. Engagements are structured as retainer, project, or phase-based arrangements across defined geographies and sectors. Initial conversations explore alignment, regional scope, and methodological fit. Enquiries are confidential. For counsel-led matters, Periplus works within privilege-sensitive workstreams and can produce chronologies, corroboration notes, provenance and chain-of-custody documentation, and evidentiary pathways for use alongside legal strategy.

Discuss a prospective engagement

“Ministerial relationships weren’t the issue. Periplus identified the provincial and traditional authority requirements that were actually blocking us.”
General Counsel, Telecommunications Operator

“Due diligence covered regulatory. Periplus gave us ministerial thinking and the enforcement picture our advisors couldn’t access. Repriced the deal.”
Managing Partner, Infrastructure Fund

“Our lawyers cleared collection. Periplus mapped the relationships—judicial, political—that would actually determine enforcement. Saved us from a write-off.”
Investment Committee Member, Arbitration Fund

Periplus operates under strict compliance, independence, and ethical review standards.

Delivery, Compliance & Independence

Periplus Mosaics offers quarterly field research from our network.

Subscribe to Periplus Mosaics

Periplus Circles explores the anthropology of power and knowledge.

Express interest in Periplus Circles