Towards the analysis and mitigation of serious global risk.

Direction

My long-term aspiration is to work as a high-level geopolitical analyst, with particular focus on the preemptive detection and mitigation of serious political violence — including, but not limited to, organised terrorism and mass atrocities.

This is not a romantic ambition. It is a systems analysis problem. The conditions that produce large-scale political violence are not arbitrary or purely idiosyncratic. They are structured: they emerge from the interaction of institutional failure, incentive misalignment, information asymmetry, and the commitment problems that make preventive intervention difficult.

The question that motivates me is whether those conditions can be detected earlier, characterised more precisely, and addressed more effectively than current practice allows. I believe the answer is yes, and I believe the tools for doing so are partly analytical and partly technical.

The Analytical Frame

Geopolitical risk analysis at its best is not narrative. It is a structured assessment of the conditions that make particular outcomes more or less probable. The relevant variables are not exotic: they include state capacity and legitimacy, economic stress and distributional conflict, information environments and the availability of extremist networks, and the presence or absence of effective international commitment mechanisms.

These variables can be measured, tracked, and modelled — imperfectly, but usefully. Historical case analysis provides a basis for identifying patterns. Comparative analysis across contemporaneous cases allows calibration. Statistical methods can surface structural similarities that qualitative analysis might miss.

The goal is not a prediction system. Prediction in complex social systems is neither reliable nor, at the policy-relevant margin, necessary. The goal is a detection system — one that identifies structural risk conditions early enough that preventive action is possible.

The Technical Dimension

Analytical frameworks without technical implementation remain qualitative and subjective. The contribution I aim to make is in operationalising those frameworks: building tools that allow analysts to work with structured data, track indicators over time, run systematic comparisons, and surface non-obvious patterns.

Peacemetrics is an early version of this ambition: a system that aggregates geopolitical indicators and allows configurable analysis. The conflict pattern analysis project is a more direct application: using historical datasets to identify structural preconditions that precede escalation.

These are prototypes. The goal is a research and analytical infrastructure that supports serious work in this domain at an institutional level.

What this requires

• —Deep familiarity with the academic literature on conflict, terrorism, and political violence
• —Quantitative research methods and the ability to work with large, messy datasets
• —Technical capability to build the analytical tools the domain requires
• —Institutional access — research universities, policy institutions, intelligence-adjacent organisations
• —The patience to work on problems where feedback is slow and uncertainty is irreducible
• —The judgement to distinguish actionable signal from noise in high-stakes environments

A note on seriousness

Work in this domain carries a temptation towards grandiosity. The topics are serious, the stakes are real, and the vocabulary of national security and geopolitical risk can easily become a form of performance.

I am attempting to resist that. The work I aspire to is unglamorous: careful data collection, rigorous analytical method, honest uncertainty quantification, and incremental progress on hard problems. The ambition is serious. The posture should be modest.