The team
People behind
ARC Berlin
ARC combines deep regional expertise with rigorous social science methodology. Our founding members and associates have decades of field experience across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Latin America.
Founding members
Jan Koehler
Managing Director & Founding Member
Jan Koehler is a founding member of ARC GbR. He received his first degree from the Freie Universität Berlin in Social Anthropology and completed his PhD in Political Science (summa cum laude) at the same institution, with a dissertation on institution-centred conflict research — methodology and application.
He has been consulting for the past two decades for international organisations, governments and NGOs involved in development and institution-building. Before founding ARC in 2002, Jan worked for the OSCE in the Caucasus and in Kosovo.
Jan's current focus is Afghanistan and Pakistan, with special emphasis on mixed-method impact assessments, governance, and monitoring & evaluation. His research interests centre on state formation, peacebuilding and institution-centred conflict analysis — a methodology he has applied in cooperation with local colleagues in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the North and South Caucasus, Peru, Mexico and Burundi.
His extensive fieldwork spans Afghanistan and the successor states of the Soviet Union. In addition to his German mother tongue, Jan speaks English and Russian fluently and has a working knowledge of Georgian and Spanish.
Kristóf Gosztonyi
Partner & Associate Member
Kristóf Gosztonyi is a partner in ARC and has been cooperating with the company since 2003. In his consultancy work Kristóf focuses on project evaluations and, as part of the ARC team, on impact assessments and conflict analyses. As an academic researcher he is affiliated with the Berghof Foundation and cooperates with the Poverty Violence Governance Lab led by Beatriz Magaloni at Stanford University, focusing on communal policing in Mexico.
Before joining the ARC team, Kristóf was a senior consultant at the international business risks consultancy Control Risks, specialising in supporting multinational companies in setting up anti-corruption systems and managing corruption risks in high-risk countries. He has also worked for international organisations in Bosnia and Herzegovina (OHR) and Sri Lanka (UNHCR).
Kristóf is a social anthropologist and political scientist with extensive field experience in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mexico and the Balkans. He speaks five languages — Hungarian, German, English, Spanish and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian — and has a basic knowledge of Dari.
Associates & network
ARC works with a network of highly qualified field researchers, data scientists and regional experts in Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, the Caucasus and Latin America. Details on request.