Nizar Manek is Founder and Managing Director of Periplus Research, a London-based firm providing human-source intelligence and strategic advice for boards, senior executives, investment committees and legal teams in frontier and emerging economies. Its work centres on government intent and counterparty conduct, informing commercial strategy, transactions and cross-border disputes, principally in infrastructure, energy and resources—with particular depth in Africa.

Over fifteen years, he has built the in-country networks, collection and assessment methods, and compliance protocols behind hundreds of specialised engagements across Africa, the Middle East and Asia, much of this work predating Periplus. Earlier engagements included underlying source reporting and assessment for client assignments delivered under NDA through the top-tier strategic intelligence and disputes advisory firms, alongside arbitration practices, development finance institutions and European foreign ministries. That experience now underpins Periplus’s own assessments and strategic advice.

The practice draws on the Track II tradition of informal diplomacy and mediation. It took form around the Ethiopian civil war and Red Sea corridor through relationships built during years in Addis Ababa. It extended from there, subregion by subregion, at clients’ request, supported by resident coordinators. The networks behind Periplus comprise several thousand in-country interlocutors and have supported work in 52 of Africa’s 54 countries. Engagements span upstream M&A, mining portfolio monitoring, subsea cable transit rights, telecoms market entry and concession liability. The same capability has supported peace processes and mediation, alongside boundary and treaty matters and work concerning the law of the sea.

Earlier career as a correspondent for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, and Africa Confidential, covering the Horn of Africa and Red Sea, Gulf issues, the Middle East and North Africa, and West Africa and the Sahel through multiple regime changes. Work in the Financial Times, Jane's Intelligence Review, Foreign Affairs, Le Monde Diplomatique, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, and the London Review of Books. Academic work on political economy and ethnography with Harvard’s Center for International Development. Member, UN Security Council Affairs Division Pool of Experts. Recognition from the European Press Prize, Overseas Press Club of America, Foreign Press Association in London and Transparency International. Studied at LSE, Columbia Law and Business Schools, and SOAS.

Based in London; previously Addis Ababa, Cairo, Tunis, Istanbul, Yerevan, Athens.