I. The Current State of the World and Field

I. The Current State of the World and Field 

A. The Crises in Global Security
 

On January 27, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history. The Science and Security Board (SASB), which sets the Clock, noted, “Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers.”2

Growing nuclear risks are evident. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has threatened nuclear escalation many times in its war against Ukraine. In summer 2022, the CIA reportedly estimated that the probability of a Russian tactical nuclear strike to stem Ukrainian advances was fifty-fifty. The rapid increase in the size of the nuclear arsenal in China encouraged the United States to reject an extension of the New Start Agreement and promise instead to build “a golden dome” defense for the country. A new arms race has begun. These changes in policy, combined with the explicit threats President Trump has made to the security and territorial integrity of allies, have led some political leaders in Germany, Poland, South Korea, and even Japan to discuss building their own nuclear weapons. The outcome of war with Iran is currently unknown, but the war has upended global energy markets and has led some leaders in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey to suggest that they might need nuclear weapons in the future for their security.

Conventional war risks are increasing as well. The number of state-based conflicts has almost doubled since 2009,3 the number of armed conflict incidents worldwide in 2025 was twice that in 2021,4 and states are targeting civilians at levels not seen since the peak of the Syrian civil war. Autonomous and unmanned weapon systems are proliferating, with more than 450 different groups using drones in attacks since 2020.5 Global politics are now defined by the emergence of a revisionist bloc (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) whose conflict with the free world has already produced three regional wars. Beyond the threat of war, many newer transnational threats are intensifying, including accelerating climate change, potentially unregulated AI, and the risk of bioemergencies. Coping with these emerging challenges will require more, not less, innovative and interdisciplinary research, which again stretches the attention and resources available.
 

B. Rapidly Changing International Order
 

Intensifying security risks are taking place in the context of dramatic changes to the international order. The cumulative effect and likely impact of rapid systemic change are poorly understood. Major changes include:

• An ongoing shift in the relative distribution of power as the U.S. share of global purchasing power decreases, China becomes the world’s preeminent manufacturing power and a major player in technological innovation, and the locus of population and economic growth moves to the Global South.
• Intensifying geopolitical rivalry between China and the United States that is likely to continue regardless of possible short-term trade deals, with leaders in both countries using increasingly zero-sum terms to describe their relationship.
• Shifting international alliances as long-standing commitments and partnerships come into question, including notably U.S. relationships with the EU, NATO, and allies in Asia.
• The reconfiguration of supply chains and economic dependencies, as states seek to manage geopolitical risks and introduce new trade barriers,6 including threats to free transit through the Strait of Hormuz in the wake of the war in Iran. 
• Global governance regimes breaking down in the security and economic domains, including both the post–Cold War arms control framework and potentially the World Trade Organization’s dispute resolution processes.
• Erosion of respect for international law, including the law of armed conflict, as well as the declining power of powerful social “taboos,” as witnessed in the increase in leaders’ nuclear threats, threats to target civilian energy infrastructure and desalination plants, and even threats to destroy an entire civilization. 
• Declining international cooperation around public health, as exemplified by the United States pulling out of the World Health Organization in January 2026 and the political divisions precipitated by COVID-19, reducing the ability to engage in effective disease surveillance, prevention, and early treatment of emergent pandemic disease as well as intentional use of biological weapons. 

None of these changes make increased conflict inevitable, and some may also have pacifying effects. But they collectively mean that we are in a fundamentally different security environment than the Cold War or post–Cold War eras.
 

C. Domestic Instability 
 

The new international environment is also driven, in part, by domestic political changes in many large democracies, including:

• Deepening economic inequality and the concentrations of economic, technological, and political power.
• The growing force of populism and populist parties in established and emerging democracies that question the need for international cooperation and risk-sharing, and have lower respect for traditional forms of policy expertise on security matters.
• Democratic backsliding, with declining respect for the rule of law in some places and strong views on the need for fewer restraints on the exercise of executive power elsewhere, both with implications for states’ security relationships.
• Instability in civilian-military relations across many advanced democracies where the commitment to the norms that undergird healthy civil-military relations, such as the importance of preserving the political neutrality of the military, are being called into question.
• A steady increase in corporate and personalized power, along with the growing influence of politically engaged ultra-rich individuals, making national governments’ intentions less stable and transparent over time. In the past, national leaders often believed that arms treaties and trade agreements made with another country would last beyond the administration that signed them; this is no longer necessarily the case.
• Decreasing trust in government alongside increasing distrust of information in the face of fractured media environments and rapidly improving deepfake technology. New methods of weaponizing information erode societal cohesion and increase polarization, making effective collective action against external adversaries more challenging.
• Increasing leader inconsistency in many countries, making it more difficult to engage in long-term strategic thinking or planning.
• Accelerating political polarization, which challenges the ability to properly address large-scale societal challenges and problems, further reducing trust in government and other social and political institutions. 

As with the changes to the international environment, none of these changes necessarily make increased conflict inevitable, and once again some are arguably pacifying. Taken together, however, they mean that the domestic pressures on security policy are significantly different and less predictable than they have been for much of the last 75 years.
 

D. Emerging Risks
 

Technological change is adding to the list of risks that the next generation of security scholarship must consider. Some of the most important potential challenges stem from:

• Dislocations to global economies, societies, and militaries as AI-enabled systems create new opportunities, change the productivity of labor across a wide range of industries, and introduce new kinds of decision-making risks.
• New military capabilities being developed at breakneck pace, including novel cyber weapons, hypersonic missiles, AI-enabled targeting and battle management systems, quantum computing, and increasingly autonomous low-cost precision weapons and sensors, some of which are being used today on battlefields in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf.
• Climate change–driven migration shifting demographic and economic relationships across a wide range of fragile and conflict-affected countries, as well as an increased rate of climate disasters and the associated stresses on state and societal institutions.
• New energy technologies and the falling costs of renewables creating winners and losers among states and industries, potentially shifting the balance of power between nations and regions.
• Developments in synthetic biology that promise great opportunities for improvement in global health and well-being, while at the same time generating new risks—given the potential of bioengineering to be used by state or non-state actors in nefarious ways in peacetime, crises, or war.

Scholars and analysts studying these risks cannot always build on the same research base that those addressing more traditional security issues lean on, including case studies they have examined from the Cold War and post–Cold War eras. Here the field may need to integrate insights from research into the adoption of general-purpose technologies in economics, the history of science, and technology studies, as well as research on environmental and ecological change, epidemiology, and biosecurity. There is more foundational interdisciplinary research needed to build the intellectual scaffolding to understand and influence how emerging technologies and capabilities will shape the international security environment.
 

E. Policy Relevance and the Research Funding Crisis
 

After the end of the Cold War, political science departments deemphasized the importance of policy-relevant research and fewer scholars in STEM fields joined interdisciplinary projects with policy relevance as war and security dropped down the priority list for universities. History departments moved even further away from security studies with few positions in diplomatic or military history. While university research centers and public policy schools emerged as partial solutions to this shift, these organizations depend critically on external funding to support research and maintain academic talent development pipelines.

Over the last 15 years the security studies field came to rely heavily on Department of Defense (DoD) support, through the Minerva Research Initiative (MRI), and on social science research funding, including from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other federal sources. During this period, foundation support to national security research began to shrink, roughly in proportion to federal government investments. From 2015–2020, for example, the MacArthur Foundation invested roughly $100 million in grants to the nuclear field (a substantial portion of which supported nuclear security and arms control–related research) but then began a drawdown that ended its investment in the field in 2024. In 2025, the U.S. government withdrew more than $30 million/year in funding when DoD ended the MRI and implemented a broader pause on funding social science research through DoD research labs. The NSF is moving to dissolve the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. Though some foundations continue to fund security-related work, the dramatic funding cuts have put pressure on the entire field, limiting the potential for governments to be informed by security studies research in the future.

That gap will be keenly felt because security studies research has policy impact in at least four broad ways. 

• NEW CONCEPTS: Researchers produce original concepts that become widely accepted within and outside the government as the framework for addressing policy choices. Examples include “threats that leave something to chance,” “strategic stability,” “the commitment trap,” “deterrence by denial,” “the responsibility to protect,” “international regimes,” “security dilemmas,” “costly signaling,” and “commitment devices.” 
• INDIRECT INVOLVEMENT: Researchers become involved in Track-Two diplomacy, official policy-advising board roles, classified and unclassified reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), and independent and often bipartisan commissions. They publish in policy-focused journals and think tank reports that shape government decision-making. They also serve on advisory boards for companies and industry initiatives, such as the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights, which are increasingly important for managing security challenges.
• PUBLIC OPINION INFLUENCE: Researchers publish in popular outlets, give public talks, and contribute to television and podcast conversations to inform public opinion.
• HUMAN CAPITAL INVESTMENT: Researchers train future policymakers to analyze security challenges, and researchers enter government themselves.7 This impact does not happen overnight, however, and should be understood as a long-term human capital investment strategy through training in universities. 

It is this last category of policy impact—human capital investment—that has been the hardest hit by recent cuts in government funding and philanthropy. The 91 terminated MRI grants discussed above, for example, would have supported 75–100 postdoctoral fellowships in peace and security based on 2020 data on typical MRI grant profiles.8 To give a nongovernmental example, the 2024 Consortium of Foundation support for nuclear weapons–related research received 128 applications for Next Generation training, none of which were funded. 

The direct impact of losing so many postdoctoral fellowships at research institutions is profound. Such programs have for decades provided a vital opportunity for early-career professionals to build knowledge, identify key policy implications of their work, engage with “operators” in government and the military, and develop networks. Most of the former government officials and heads of research institutions at the workshop stated how influential these opportunities were for their own intellectual trajectory and career success. The loss of funding imperils this pipeline, with negative knock-on effects for both research and education.9

Without intervention, a “lost generation” of young scholars in this domain will emerge, weakening the capacity of the United States and allied countries to produce impartial, policy-informing insights. Global transitions demand rigorous analysis, yet there are few sources of new research funds because many foundations and individual donors largely exited this space as the Department of Defense moved in, and others never returned to the space after the end of the Cold War. This is particularly concerning as the generations of scholars and practitioners who were trained and worked in academic and policy positions in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—decades of high and warranted focus on arms control and the kind of interstate conflict risks that are now returning—are fading away. 

The impacts of reduced support for research and training on the critical security problems discussed above will be profoundly negative on many fronts. These are vitally important problems; reducing violent conflict would save hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars each decade.10 Yet because they lie between traditional disciplinary boundaries, many global problems are being systematically neglected in research and education. Non-state conflict, for example, engages complex issues in economics and political science, but is not central to a subfield in either. Crisis bargaining and economic aspects of geopolitical competition similarly fall into gaps between political science and history or economics, respectively. And when one begins considering future technology-related, biologically-related, or climate-related challenges, the barriers to interdisciplinary work become even greater absent dedicated funding mechanisms for interdisciplinary STEM and social science studies on specific topics. 

The gap in investing in long-term intellectual and human capital emerged in part because funders understandably wanted to support work that offered direct solutions to current problems. And the security field has long highlighted advisory work and the impact of policy-relevant publications as a mechanism for change, whereas other strategies were seen as more indirect mechanisms. 

Participants in our American Academy workshop and subsequent discussions, including prominent scholars with direct high-level government experience, noted there is another critical mechanism by which the field of security studies supports good policy. They argued that an additional and equally crucial “theory of change” lies in the synergy between human capital formation and cutting-edge research. Experts who have careers working inside and around the relevant government bureaucracies bring concepts from early-career academic training to bear in their work crafting intelligence reports, policy options, and strategic plans. This mechanism is potentially more impactful than scholarly publications and translational writing. Support for security research thus effectively subsidizes the training of future government and military leaders in both how to think precisely about new security problems and in the most up-to-date scholarship on these topics. This is part of the powerful case for funding initiatives to support the development of a new intellectual apparatus for conceptualizing the next phase of international security risks and policy responses.