“Magical math hand-waving”

Abstract

Political risk forecasting is an industry that provides specialized analysis to a range of clients, including insurance companies, extractive industries, governments, defense ministries, and NGOs. Risk forecasters aim to help their clients mitigate risks by anticipating political developments that could threaten their investments and assets, especially in the “emerging markets” of the Global South. What can ethnographic analysis reveal about this industry's knowledge practices and how it transforms open-source intelligence into commercially relevant risk forecasts? Based on five years of work experience as Senior Africa Analyst at a commercial intelligence firm, I examine how forecasters select and process risk-relevant events, narrate them as qualitative risk briefs, and finally assign them quantitative risk scores. Through a close reading of a risk firm's internal guidelines and its daily practices, I show how analysts construct risk in African countries in line with entrenched sociopolitical imaginaries, reproducing the coloniality of finance.