Peace Engineering

The anchor engagement is a multi-year judicial-reform project in Burkina Faso, with a related public write-up from the United States Institute of Peace.

What this domain draws on: systems thinking and system-dynamics modeling to represent how a reform system behaves; participatory design, so the model is built with the people inside the system rather than imposed on them; and a habit of naming assumptions out loud, because in conflict settings the assumptions are usually where the disagreement lives. I try to show uncertainty honestly — a systems model is a way to reason, not a forecast to be trusted blindly.

Institutions are conflict systems, and corruption is one of the ways they fail — so my work in network analysis of corruption, political-economy mapping, and governance diagnostics lives here, as part of peace engineering rather than beside it. Corruption is usually described one actor at a time — this official, that firm. I find it more useful to look at the structure: the pattern of relationships between political parties, state-owned enterprises, and corporate actors that lets influence flow. When you map that structure, anti-corruption work can target the arrangement rather than chasing individuals one by one. This work comes out of a systems-modeling background and uses graph data science to make the structure visible.

The anchor project in this domain maps political-corporate structure as a network. It's presented with illustrative structure only — no real names — because the underlying relationships are sensitive.

What this work draws on: network and graph data science to represent actors and the ties between them; systems thinking to reason about how influence propagates through that structure; and the same provenance discipline I use elsewhere, so a claim about who is connected to whom can be traced to its source. Where I show a network publicly, I use illustrative structure rather than real identities unless the data is already public and safe to attribute.