Nizar Manek is Founder and Managing Director of Periplus Research, a London-based firm providing intelligence and strategic advice, in the Track II tradition, on government intent, transactions, and cross-border disputes in frontier and emerging economies.

Over fifteen years, he has built the human-source collection networks, assessment methodology, and compliance protocols behind hundreds of specialised engagements across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Those networks have supplied the underlying source reporting and assessment for client assignments delivered by the top-tier strategic intelligence and disputes advisory firms, alongside work for arbitration practices, development finance institutions, and European foreign ministries, under NDA. Much of this work predates Periplus. The practice took form around the Ethiopian civil war and the Red Sea corridor, drawing on relationships built during his years in Addis Ababa—reading a conflict fought under communications blackout for foreign ministries and investors. It extended from there, subregion by subregion, by request, through a network of regional coordinators.

What that demand built is a network of several thousand interlocutors, drawn on for each mandate to speak within their own extended networks in-country, from provinces to presidencies. The firm’s reach runs deepest in Africa: the networks behind Periplus have been applied in all but two of the continent’s 54 countries, across mandates spanning subsea cable transit rights, telecoms market entry, upstream M&A positioning, mining portfolio monitoring, and concession liability. The same capability has supported mediation, peace processes, and boundary and treaty matters.

Earlier career as a correspondent for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, and Africa Confidential, covering the Horn of Africa and Red Sea, the 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 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. Education: LSE, Columbia Law and Business Schools, School of Oriental & African Studies.

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