Core Focus
Conflict & Risk Analysis
Understanding a crisis starts with naming what's actually driving it — which actors matter, what's fueling instability, and how likely it is to escalate. Crisis Lens builds conflict analysis, risk assessments, and measurement indicators to answer exactly that: structured risk frameworks, political violence indicators, actor and stakeholder mapping, and country- or region-level fragility assessments. This work is used by national governments assessing country risk, multilateral institutions building risk into program design, and NGOs that need a clear read before committing to work in a specific place — at whatever scale the question requires, from a single district to a full region.
Early Warning & Anticipatory Action
Early warning systems are only as good as the assumptions and data behind them — which means they don't always perform the way the people relying on them need them to. Crisis Lens works on early warning and anticipatory action design: identifying where forecasting models fall short, and recognizing that the people living through a crisis are often best positioned to say what those models are missing. This has meant identifying gaps in existing early warning approaches and designing community-informed methodology to close them — work anticipatory action programs can put directly into practice.
Program & Policy Evaluation
An evaluation only matters if it changes what an organization does next. Crisis Lens conducts mixed-methods evaluations of humanitarian, peacebuilding, and governance programming, focused on producing recommendations organizations actually put into practice. That has meant evaluating how analytical products get used in real humanitarian decision-making, and delivering recommendations clients have gone on to implement.
Applied Lenses
Gender & Conflict Analysis
Conflict and political violence don't affect everyone the same way, and analysis that leaves gender out misses a real part of the picture. Crisis Lens brings a gender lens to conflict, peace, and security work — research, indicator design, and program strategy — for organizations that want gender treated as a defined line of analysis.
US Political Violence
Crisis Lens treats political violence within the US as a focus area in its own right, applying the same analytical rigor used in its international conflict work. This means analyzing how mobilization and unrest cluster geographically, what conditions tend to precede escalation, and how it shifts around elections, protests, and periods of heightened polarization — work aimed at helping organizations operating domestically build that risk into their own planning rather than react to it after the fact.