The Global Security and International Affairs program area draws on the expertise of policy-makers, practitioners, and scholars to foster knowledge and inform innovative and more substantial policies that address crucial issues affecting the global community. Projects underway in this area engage with pressing strategic, development, and moral questions that underpin relations among people, communities, and states worldwide. Each initiative embraces a broad conception of security as the interaction among human, national, and global security imperatives. Project recommendations move beyond the idea of security as the absence of war toward higher aspirations of collective peace, development, and justice.
Committee on International Security Studies
CHAIR
Scott D. Sagan
Stanford University
MEMBERS
Antonia Chayes
Tufts University
Christopher F. Chyba
Princeton University
Neta C. Crawford
University of Oxford
Karl W. Eikenberry
Schwarzman College
Tanisha M. Fazal
University of Minnesota
Martha Finnemore
George Washington University
Lawrence D. Freedman
King’s College London
Susan Landau
Tufts University
Robert Legvold
Columbia University
Rose M. McDermott
Brown University
Steven E. Miller
Harvard Kennedy School
Barry R. Posen
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Adam Roberts
British Academy
Jennifer M. Welsh
McGill University
Paul H. Wise
Stanford University
Project
Rethinking the Humanitarian Health Response to Violent Conflict
Rethinking the Humanitarian Health Response to Violent Conflict project seeks to understand and address current trends in humanitarian contexts that pose new or evolving challenges for humanitarian health responders. This project brings together political scientists, legal and security experts, health professionals, and humanitarians to examine challenges to effective humanitarian action and to develop new strategies for preventing civilian harm and delivering critical health services in areas plagued by violent conflict.
Current work includes a focus on responding to some of the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on humanitarian health needs in conflict areas and other violent settings. Building on its efforts to address the political and security dimensions of pandemic response in areas of weak governance and violent conflict, the initiative published two research papers as part of a workstream on global cooperation and pandemic control.
Another area of work explores Regional Humanitarian Responses to Pandemics, Criminal and Political Violence, and Forced Migration and is publishing peer-reviewed journal articles that present the findings of field research conducted in partnership with the University of California, San Diego, and El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. This work focuses on understanding the impacts of COVID-19 on migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
A Dædalus volume, forthcoming in Spring 2023, will synthesize the findings from across all components of the project, with tailored resources prepared for select audiences, including policy-makers and practitioners.
Project Chairs
Jaime Sepúlveda
University of California, San Francisco
Jennifer M. Welsh
McGill University
Paul H. Wise
Stanford University
Project Staff
Melissa Chan
Program Coordinator
Kathryn Moffat
Senior Program Officer
Tania Munz
Chief Program Officer
Michelle Poulin
Program Associate
Islam Qasem
Program Director
Funders
Louise Henry Bryson and John E. Bryson
Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation
Project Publications
Peace Operations at the Intersection of Health Emergencies and Violent Conflict: Lessons from the 2018–2020 DRC Ebola Crisis, Dirk Druet (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2022)
International Cooperation Failures in the Face of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Learning from Past Efforts to Address Common Threats, Jennifer M. Welsh (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2022)
Ietza Bojorquez-Chapela, Steffanie A. Strathdee, Richard S. Garfein, et al., “The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic Among Migrants in Shelters in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico,” BMJ Global Health (2022)
Ietza Bojorquez, Jaime Sepúlveda, Deandra Lee, and Steffanie Strathdee, “Interrupted Transit and Common Mental Disorders among Migrants in Tijuana, Mexico,” International Journal of Social Psychiatry (2022).
Project
Promoting Dialogue on Arms Control and Disarmament
Unlike the Cold War, the current nuclear age is characterized by a simultaneous collapse of arms control agreements and the absence of any strategic dialogue among the three main nuclear players. One strand of work in the Promoting Dialogue on Arms Control and Disarmament project consists of a series of Track-2 dialogues between experts and former policy-makers from the United States, Russia, and China, which is designed to identify critical short-term goals in arms control that would serve to minimize and reduce the potential risks of nuclear arms-racing and escalation. The meetings identify areas for cooperation and promote conceptual thinking about measures that might strengthen strategic stability and help to reduce the significant dangers of nuclear weapons being used in the future.
A second strand of work builds on the Academy’s prior experience organizing educational sessions for the U.S. Congress on a range of topics. Through a series of engagements with members of Congress and their staffs, the project will help to foster and strengthen knowledge on key issues and challenges facing the United States in arms control and international security, with particular attention to careful management of the strategic competition posed by China and Russia.
A third strand of work weaves the project’s expert discussions and policy recommendations together to produce publications on critical debates within nuclear arms control. These publications will be translated into Russian and Chinese for dissemination to policy-makers and the arms control communities in Moscow and Beijing.
Project Chair
Steven E. Miller
Harvard University
Project Staff
Melissa Chan
Program Coordinator
Poul Erik Christiansen
Raymond Frankel Nuclear Security Policy Fellow (September 24, 2020–June 30, 2022)
Doreen Horschig
Raymond Frankel Nuclear Security Policy Fellow
Kathryn Moffat
Senior Program Officer
Tania Munz
Chief Program Officer
Michelle Poulin
Program Associate
Islam Qasem
Program Director
Funder
The Raymond Frankel Foundation
Project Publication
Nuclear Perils in a New Era: Bringing Perspective to the Nuclear Choices Facing Russia and the United States, Steven E. Miller and Alexey Arbatov (American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Russian Academy of Sciences, 2021)
Project
Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age, Phase I
The world has entered a new nuclear era. No longer dominated by two nuclear superpowers, the evolving multipolar nuclear order presents fundamental challenges to the conceptual and practical means of avoiding nuclear war. Moreover, the new era has slowly dismantled the bilateral arms control framework, with no clear prospect that it will be revived and extended. The possibility that a framework or frameworks encompassing other, let alone all, nuclear powers can be achieved seems even more remote. In addition, advances in weapons technology and the opening of new frontiers, such as cyber capabilities and artificial intelligence, make a shifting environment still more complex. The pathways to inadvertent nuclear war have multiplied across more regions and relationships.
Since 2017, the Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age project has worked to identify the major dangers generated by the dynamics of a multipolar nuclear world that pose the greatest threat of inadvertent nuclear war; offer alternative approaches to addressing each of these dangers; facilitate discussions with relevant communities in the United States and abroad; and encourage and assist policy-makers, Congress, the analytical community, and the media to think systematically about our increasingly multipolar world. The publications produced by the project have been shared widely with domestic and international policy-makers, scholars and students of nuclear affairs, and leaders of international organizations.
The Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age project is rooted in the critically important work on arms control that the Academy conducted from 1958 to 1960 to prevent a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. During that time, Academy Fellows gathered monthly to build a cooperative framework between the United States and the Soviet Union based on the limitations of the nuclear stockpile and the establishment of mutual vulnerability between the two rivals. The group included Donald Brennan, Edward Teller, Henry Kissinger, and Thomas Schelling, among others. Today, more than ever, an effort that brings together scholars and policy-makers to examine the wide range of challenges posed by the changing nuclear order is urgently needed. More information about the Academy’s nuclear-related projects is online at www.amacad.org/nuclear.
Project
Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age, Phase II: Deterrence & New Nuclear States
With the emergence of three new nuclear powers (India, Pakistan, and North Korea) and several potential future nuclear states (including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey), the world is on the verge of a new nuclear age. This will demand new thinking about the security implications of nuclear powers that may be in highly hostile environments, suffer from domestic instability, have fewer resources, or be led by personalist dictators. Phase Two of Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age investigates the deterrence and defense implications facing small nuclear force countries and potential proliferators.
The project is producing an edited volume of essays that will be published by Cornell University Press. Outreach activities will be aimed at nuclear policy-makers (primarily in the United States) and academic centers and think tanks with a nuclear studies focus.
Project Chairs, Phase I
Robert Legvold
Columbia University
Christopher Chyba
Princeton University
Project Chairs, Phase II
Scott D. Sagan
Stanford University
Vipin Narang
U.S. Department of Defense; Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Project Staff
Melissa Chan
Program Coordinator
Poul Erik Christiansen
Raymond Frankel Nuclear Security Policy Fellow (September 24, 2020–June 30, 2022)
Doreen Horschig
Raymond Frankel Nuclear Security Policy Fellow
Kathryn Moffat
Senior Program Officer
Tania Munz
Chief Program Officer
Michelle Poulin
Program Associate
Islam Qasem
Program Director
Funders
Louise Henry Bryson and John E. Bryson
John F. Cogan, Jr. †
Lester Crown
Alan M. Dachs
Bob and Kristine Higgins
Richard Rosenberg
Kenneth L. and Susan S. Wallach
† Deceased
Project Publications
Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age: U.S. and Russian Nuclear Concepts, Past and Present, Linton Brooks, Alexei Arbatov, and Francis J. Gavin (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018)
Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age: Emerging Risks and Declining Norms in the Age of Technological Innovation and Changing Nuclear Doctrines, Nina Tannenwald and James M. Acton, with an Introduction by Jane Vaynman (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018)
Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age: Nuclear Weapons in a Changing Global Order, Steven E. Miller, Robert Legvold, and Lawrence Freedman (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2019)
Contemplating Strategic Stability in a New Multipolar Nuclear World, Robert Legvold (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2019)
“Meeting the Challenges of a New Nuclear Age,” Dædalus, edited by Robert Legvold and Christopher Chyba (2020)
Exploratory Meeting
Checking Kleptocracy: Creating a New Instrument of World Order
On May 19–21, 2022, the Academy convened an exploratory meeting on the efficacy and potential establishment of an international anticorruption court. The meeting built on the Academy’s prior work on anticorruption, including a Dædalus volume on “Anticorruption: How to Beat Back Political & Corporate Graft” published in 2018. The exploratory meeting offered an opportunity to examine closely a proposal for an international anticorruption court, which was developed in an essay by Judge Mark Wolf for the Dædalus volume and has been used since to drive a wider series of discussions.
The participants in the meeting – diplomats, legal scholars, judges with experience in domestic and international courts, and individuals involved in the creation of other international courts – discussed issues central to the question of whether an international anticorruption court could help combat corruption in practice and how it could potentially be established. Among the themes discussed were the dangers and costs of grand corruption and how kleptocrats can best be pursued domestically and internationally; the core principles and mandate that would be needed by a potential new international court; and the strategies that could potentially lead to the establishment of the court.
Meeting Chair
Robert I. Rotberg
Harvard Kennedy School
Project Staff
Melissa Chan
Program Coordinator
Kathryn Moffat
Senior Program Officer
Tania Munz
Chief Program Officer
Islam Qasem
Program Director
Funder
American Academy Exploratory Fund
Exploratory Meeting
The Effects of Prolonged War on Democracy
On September 22–23, 2022, the Academy convened an exploratory meeting on the effects of prolonged war on democracy. The meeting brought together scholars and experts from a range of fields to explore the relationship between long-term militarization, extremism, and democracy from a U.S. and international perspective and to address how mobilization for war, and war itself, fosters or diminishes democratic norms, institutions, and practices.
The participants discussed several topics, including theories, concepts, and comparative perspectives of militarism, democratization, and democracy; militarism and extremism in the United States; and the effects of war on the rule of law, democracy, and state capacity.
Meeting Chairs
Neta C. Crawford
University of Oxford
Scott D. Sagan
Stanford University
Project Staff
Melissa Chan
Program Coordinator
Kathryn Moffat
Senior Program Officer
Tania Munz
Chief Program Officer
Islam Qasem
Program Director
Funder
American Academy Exploratory Fund