This course equips participants with the analytical infrastructure to produce structured political intelligence and to read and understand the political and social environment within which they work. It is designed for practitioners who need to develop or sharpen a rigorous analytical practice, as well as for technically skilled professionals across disciplines — including investigative journalists, forensic analysts, data scientists, researchers, economists, and others — who need the tools to contextualise their outputs and make sense of the systemic conditions shaping the environments they work in. The course is presented in six modules. Modules can be taken individually or as a complete sequential course.
The analytical foundation. How to interrogate information rigorously, identify logical gaps, recognise bias, and reach grounded conclusions before committing to interpretation or action.
Reading the information environment structurally — tracking political and institutional narratives as early warning signals, identifying what is being said, what is absent, and what the patterns reveal.
Disciplined, evidence-based inquiry into political dynamics, institutional behaviour, and policy trajectories. Question-driven and historically grounded — resistant to confirmation bias and narrative convenience.
Mapping the actors in a political environment — understanding what drives their conduct, where their power and constraints reside, and how to engage them strategically to advance institutional objectives.
Integrating intelligence into structured judgment under uncertainty — assessing conditions, identifying options, and reasoning about likely trajectories without forecasting or false precision.
A dedicated course on the seven-lens analytical architecture for reading the structural configuration of power, legitimacy, and accountability in any political system. The course works through each lens — The Terms of the Elite Pact, Impunity and Accountability, Nationhood and Belonging, Consent and Electoral Systems, Institutional Compliance, State Function and Delivery, and Socioeconomic Conditions — and applies two operational filters, the Balance of Power and the Elite-Citizen Alignment, to produce the Anatomy of Power: a structural picture of how power is held, contested, and reproduced in any given system. Participants leave with the analytical tools to apply the framework independently. Explore the Refraction Framework in detail →
The method is analytical.
The practice is rigorous.
The instrument is learnable.