The ARISE II project developed actionable recommendations to sustain a competitive U.S. research enterprise. This work was designed to foster new relationships across the disciplines and between the private and public sectors.

This project traced the development of the modern general-purpose philanthropic foundation and assessed its role in philanthropy as a whole, as compared with the roles played by government, business corporations, company-affiliated foundations, individual donors, community-service organizations, and other participants in philanthropic activity.

Using the field of chemistry as a case study, this project probed how the expansion of electronic communications is altering the collection, dissemination, and storage of scholarly information.

This project examined superpower relations during the Cold War as a cooperative effort in order to illuminate the constraints and opportunities that will influence possible superpower cooperation in the future.

Published as a double issue of the Academy’s journal, Dædalus, this study is a comprehensive survey of the problems and the status of Blacks in American society, a topic of great urgency at the time. The resulting volume has been considered seminal in explaining the complexities and implications of racial problems in the United States in the 1960s.

This project examined the major political, economic, and security obstacles standing in the way of a durable Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.

This multi-pronged project examined shifts in the boundaries between the internal affairs of member states whose sovereignty is protected by the United Nations Charter and those matters which the U.N. and other international organizations deem to be within their cognizance.

In 1984, as China was reviving its long-neglected education system, a small delegation from the American Academy visited the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to help develop programs that will allow Chinese scholars to learn about developments in Western social science and humanistic disciplines and allow U.S. scholars to learn about scholarly and societal developments in China.

This project investigated the function and historical role of learned societies in advancing research and stimulating communication about scientific and scholarly ideas, not only within the intellectual community but among segments of the larger society.

The Academy conducted a major reexamination of U.S. foreign policy toward Russia. The goal was to develop a comprehensive, coherent, and effective policy on U.S.-Russian relations for consideration by the then new U.S. administration, Congress, and the media.

In 1962, the Academy received a grant from NASA to study the long-range effects of space exploration on American life. At a time when the nation was committing enormous and unprecedented financial, scientific and manpower resources to the NASA program, the Academy study was charged with investigating the potential consequences, intended and unintended, of this mobilization on various sectors of society.

The pervasive challenge of housing affordability requires a comprehensive approach in response. The Academy's project on housing solutions explores and highlights a particular local approach. The focus is on how anchor institutions—universities and colleges, faith-based organizations, and philanthropies—can facilitate affordable housing solutions in their communities.

As the second phase of Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age, this initiative explored challenges created by “new” nuclear weapons states, potential proliferators, and de facto nuclear weapons states.

Between the first meeting for this project and the 1992 publication of the book, the Soviet Union collapsed. This created profound implications for the way Americans and the West thought about security policy. The earlier meetings brought together Soviet and U.S. scholars and security policy specialists to discuss changes in the Soviet Union, and the later session also invited specialists in Eastern European affairs.

This project focused on the critical importance of civic engagement to issues of democratization and economic development, in the U. S. and in developing countries with the aim of sharpening the concept of “social capital” — that is, social networks, norms, institutions and trust — through sustained dialogue among social theorists and empirical researchers.

This project responded to growing concern over new developments in the Soviet-American nuclear competition. The Academy convened a conference to examine the emerging belief that the present second-strike, and thus deterrent, capabilities of missile-carrying nuclear submarines could be eroded by technological advances in strategic antisubmarine warfare.

This project was initiated in response to the widespread recognition, in the late 1970s, that the institution of marriage was experiencing profound but poorly understood changes.

This project brought together American and Japanese scholars and decision-makers to discuss the security problems of East Asia and the Western Pacific. Participants met five times over several years, in the United States and in Japan.

What is corruption? How does it work? Why does it matter? This project examined these questions and investigated the link between corruption and political and economic transformation, as well as the effects of corruption in the larger international setting.

By the early 1970s, much of the conceptual base for arms control efforts remained grounded in the Academy’s 1960 project and special issue of Dædalus on arms control.