On Series: A founding statement
A founding statement, May 2026
Series is Core Group's long-form work, made public. Three tracks of writing and conversation produced as part of the firm's analytical practice, published when ready rather than on schedule.
This document declares what Series is for, what it commits to, and what it refuses. It is the editorial frame within which Polemos, Statecraft, and Maimonides operate. It is meant to be referred to by readers who want to understand what kind of work the firm is doing in this catalogue, and by future editors who will inherit the project and may need to recall what it was meant to be.
The firm exists to produce decision-ready analysis on the Levant and the broader region. That analysis takes operational form in Briefs: daily Dispatches, Source Files, the Estimate, the Convergence platform. The work is calibrated to the speed at which situations change. But analysis at operational tempo, however disciplined, cannot ask certain questions. It must accept inherited categories. It must work within the political and conceptual frames it is given. It cannot stop to interrogate those frames or to ask what they make possible to see and what they make impossible to see.
Series exists because those questions are real, and because a firm that produces serious operational analysis is positioned to ask them.
Series engages two territories.
The first is conflict transformation in the Levant. The phrase carries a specific orientation. The firm approaches conflict not as a problem to be resolved through negotiation between fixed positions, but as a field of political and social relationships that can be transformed through sustained engagement at multiple levels. The work is attentive to psychological and social as well as political dimensions, and committed to the long-horizon question of how the conditions that sustain conflict's reproduction might be changed. The Levant (Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Syria, Jordan, and the broader post-Ottoman space that has shaped how all of them are understood) presents the questions this approach is best equipped to engage.
The second territory is the statebuilding project of Lebanon. The phrase is deliberate. Statebuilding is not state-rebuilding, not state-reform, not state-recovery: those terms presuppose a state that once worked properly and to which return is possible. Statebuilding names the project as it actually is: the ongoing question of what kind of state Lebanon could become, under what political and economic conditions, with what institutional architecture, in what relationship to the regional and global orders that constrain it. This is a long-horizon question. It cannot be answered through technocratic reform or through reactive crisis management. It requires sustained work, and the firm is doing some of that work.
Lebanon as a statebuilding project also illuminates comparable cases (post-collapse states, post-conflict reconstructions, post-imperial institutional inheritances) and Series engages those cases where they make Lebanon's situation more visible or where Lebanon's situation makes them more legible.
Three modes of work, each doing something the others cannot.
Polemos is philosophical critique. Its work is on the categories through which conflict is analysed: the inherited binaries, the vocabulary, the periodisations, the conceptual machinery that the operational analysis must otherwise treat as given. Each issue takes one such premise and asks whether it holds up: whether the framework it provides illuminates more than it obscures, whether the concepts it relies on do the analytical work they claim to do, whether what counts as a war or a peace or a settlement or a transformation is what we have assumed it to be.
Polemos's scope is regional and global. It is written from Beirut and from the post-Ottoman space, engaging the traditions that produced our categories (political philosophy, conflict studies, the literatures of state formation and dissolution, post-colonial scholarship in its various inflections) rather than borrowing their vocabulary. When a tradition is invoked, it is engaged. When a concept is used, it is interrogated.
The work Polemos does is upstream of operational analysis. It does not propose policy. It does not solve problems. It opens conceptual space that proposals can later occupy, or makes visible the limits of frames that proposals currently presuppose.
Statecraft is policy work. Its mode is the bridge from thinking to doing. Each issue diagnoses a structural feature of the Lebanese state, or of comparable states in comparable conditions, and either proposes specifically or refuses to propose. When it proposes, the proposal is named with constraint-acknowledging specificity: who would build, who would resist, what oversight architecture would make the proposal defensible, what failure modes are anticipated. When it refuses to propose, that refusal is itself the argument.
Statecraft is grounded in the firm's operational analytical practice. A Statecraft issue draws on Source Files, Estimates, damage assessments, calibration data, or other analytical artefacts the firm has produced. The link is visible: a reader can trace the path from the firm's analytical work to the issue's policy diagnosis. Statecraft does not write from interviews and the development literature. It writes from analytical instruments the firm itself maintains.
The work Statecraft does is downstream of operational analysis and upstream of action. It approaches policy questions through their political economy: who benefits from current arrangements, who would lose under proposed reforms, who would have to be defeated for any given proposal to proceed, what oversight makes the proposals survivable. These questions are part of the work itself, not complications added afterward.
Maimonides is long-form dialogue. The format holds thinking that does not commit to argument: sustained conversation with one interlocutor at a time, ranging across the questions that the written tracks cannot ask in the same way. The interlocutors come from across the region and across domains: political theorists, historians, practitioners, scientists, religious thinkers, statesmen, dissidents. The intent is to host voices that the standard Middle East circuits do not already saturate.
The firm hosts; the conversation is the interlocutor's. The format does not require the firm to endorse what the guest says, and does not require the guest to align with the firm's other positions. What Maimonides commits to is depth of conversation, breadth of interlocutor, and the editorial discipline of not flattening sustained thinking into clips and soundbites for distribution.
Series holds itself to commitments that govern what passes editorial review and what does not.
Argument over gesture. Each piece commits to a thesis it can defend. Reframings without theses, proposals without specificity, conversations without focus, do not get published.
Citation discipline. Where scholarship is invoked, it is engaged. Where empirical claims are made, they are sourced. Where traditions are drawn on, their actual arguments are addressed, not their vocabulary borrowed.
Falsifiability where applicable. Statecraft issues that make institutional claims commit to indicators that would falsify them. Polemos issues that make historical or empirical claims defend them at the level of evidence the claims require. Maimonides episodes are held to honest engagement rather than to falsifiability.
Authorship. Each piece carries the editorial direction under which it was produced. Where collaboration is involved, the editorial direction is named. The work is attributable.
Production quality. The same standard the firm holds for its operational analytical work. No asymmetry between what the firm produces operationally and what it produces here.
Cadence subordination. Series does not publish to maintain a content rhythm. Each piece publishes when it is ready. Implicit promises of pace are not part of the editorial frame. The work is the discipline.
These refusals are part of the editorial frame. They are stated here so they are clear to readers and so they are clear to the editors who will inherit the project.
Series does not publish commissioned work. The firm undertakes commissioned analytical and advisory engagements, and that work goes to its appropriate channels: Briefs, custom reports, advisory deliverables. It does not appear in Series under the firm's editorial voice. Series is the firm's own agenda, not the agenda of any client or funder.
Series does not pursue donor-shaped topics. Issues are commissioned because the firm's analytical practice has made them visible, because the editorial direction judges them important, or because the firm's regional vantage makes the work possible. Topics are not chosen to align with external funding priorities or with what is currently in vogue in the policy or academic markets.
Series does not borrow register as substitute for engagement. Polemos does not borrow philosophical vocabulary to seem serious. Statecraft does not borrow policy-brief vocabulary to seem analytically respectable. The work earns its register by doing the work the register requires.
Core Group is one practice with two public surfaces.
Briefs is the operational surface. It produces analysis calibrated to operational tempo: what has happened, what is changing, what is likely, what indicators to monitor. It is event-driven and time-sensitive. It serves readers who need to act on the basis of current analytical assessment: diplomats, officials, investors, journalists working in real-time. Most of it is gated to qualified institutional readers; selected pieces are publicly available as demonstration of the work.
Series is the long-form surface. It produces work that does not depend on operational tempo: philosophical critique, policy diagnosis at depth, sustained dialogue. It serves readers who want to understand the conceptual frames within which current events unfold, who want serious policy thinking that engages constraints honestly, who want long-form conversation that does not flatten complexity for distribution.
The two surfaces are not redundant. They are not duplicates of each other at different lengths. They do different work, on different cadences, for different reading occasions. A reader who follows the firm's operational analysis will encounter Series work that engages the conceptual frames the operational work cannot stop to interrogate. A reader who encounters Series first may find their way to the operational work that grounds the firm's analytical authority. Each surface makes the other more legible.
The firm exists in the gap between the two. It is not a policy shop that occasionally publishes essays. It is not a long-form publication that occasionally produces operational analysis. It is an analytical firm whose practice produces both kinds of work, because both kinds are required to do the analysis seriously.
Series is a long project. The work the firm intends to do here will not be visible from any single issue. It will be visible only over the cumulative arc: the catalogue that develops over years, the editorial discipline that holds across issues, the relationships between the three tracks as they mature, the conversations that Maimonides hosts and that ripple outward, the policy questions that Statecraft eventually answers and that the firm is held to account for, the philosophical work that Polemos contributes to traditions the firm respects enough to engage rather than to borrow from.
This document is the frame within which that work proceeds. It will be refined as the work itself teaches us better. It will be defended against drift when drift threatens. It will be the reference for editors and readers who want to know what Series was meant to be and what it has tried to become.
Core Group · Beirut · May 2026