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Periplus Research

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Nizar Manek

Founder & Managing Director

Before founding Periplus Research, built proprietary methodology, extended interlocutor and coordination networks, and legal and compliance protocols underpinning hundreds of frontier-market 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 through multiple regime changes, 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.

Periplus Research works selectively, through professional referral or direct enquiry, on hard cases where formal analysis leaves the decisive variable unresolved—and where the matter is consequential enough to warrant reaching it. 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, with provenance and chain-of-custody documentation to support legal strategy. Where findings will be tested in proceedings, the work is built to withstand it.

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Ministerial relationships weren’t the issue. Periplus identified the provincial and traditional authority requirements that were actually blocking us.

General Counsel, Telecommunications Operator

Our due diligence covered the regulatory side. Periplus gave us the ministerial thinking and enforcement picture our advisers couldn’t reach—we repriced the deal.

Managing Partner, Infrastructure Fund

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

Independence & Compliance

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Periplus Circles explores the anthropology of power and knowledge.

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