Institute for Policy Studies Peace and Security Project

The end of the Cold War and demise of the Soviet Union offered the U.S., as the unchallenged preeminent global power, an opportunity and responsibility to redefine its military, intelligence and foreign policies. The Clinton administration, however, has offered only cosmetic redefinitions of the threats and security needs currently facing the U.S. and the rest of the world. IPS’ Peace & Security Program believes that today’s threats are rooted as much in environmental degradation, growing inequalities, and fragmenting nations as they are in the more conventional military sense of security. The Peace & Security Program aims to move U.S. policy away from a narrow emphasis on stockpiling weapons and using force and toward addressing all kinds of threats, whether they are military, economic, or ecological, through nonmilitary and, most often, multilateral, means. The goal of the Peace & Security Program is to help rebuild a broad-based, activist and analytical peace movement linked to economic and social justice, environmental protection, and human rights. It seeks to do so through research, policy papers and books, public speaking and media work, a website and online discussions, coalition-building, congressional seminars and public forums, and creation of a "Foreign Policy Brain Trust" composed of several hundred progressive foreign policy experts and activists from the U.S. and around the world.

The Peace & Security Program includes the following distinct projects:

Break the Chain Campaign

The Break the Chain Campaign is a coalition of legal and social service agencies, ethnically-based organizations, social action groups and individuals devoted to protecting the rights of the migrant domestic workers brought to the United States on two special visa categories - A-3 and G-5 - to work for either diplomats or employees of international agencies, including the World Bank, IMF, and United Nations. The Campaign seeks to provide social and legal services to A-3 and G-5 domestic workers, to raise public awareness about abuses, and to work to strengthen and reform the legal and administration protections for these workers.

Drug Policy Project

The IPS Drug Policy Project advocates for reform by reaching out to non-traditional allies and employing innovative tactics to promote a sustainable, constitutional, and humane drug control policy. Both internationally and domestically, the Project explores the intersection of race and poverty in the drug war and seeks to promote holistic alternatives.

Economic Conversion and Disarmament

The Peace and Security Program of the Institute for Policy Studies includes the Economic Coversion Project (ECP) dedicated to educating the public on the need and the means for an orderly transfer of military resources to civilian use.

Current ECD projects include:

Research comparing the size of world markets for arms and for environmental technologies, and the federal programs supporting our exports of each.

Research documenting successful conversion examples and linking them to federal public investment.

New Fellowship: The Institute for Policy Studies is pleased to inaugurate the Seymour Melman Fellows program. The program will support fellowship grants each year to new scholar/activists to pursue original work on a range of issues from demilitarization to workplace democracy. More Info. You can learn more about Professor Melman's work at www.AfterCapitalism.com

Foreign Policy In Focus

Foreign Policy In Focus was launched in September 1996. The project works in collaboration with scores of other organizations, institutes, and individuals.

This multi-faceted project is assembling a network of progressive experts and activists in the U.S. and abroad to analyze current U.S. foreign policy and define the principles that should guide U.S. international relations. In shaping a new foreign policy, the U.S. must move from unilateral actions to multilateral responses, from military superiority to demilitarization and economic conversion, from free trade to economic justice and environmental protection, from a narrow emphasis on elections to a broader definition of democracy, and from rhetorical to actual support for human rights.

GLOBAL FOCUS
U.S. Foreign Policy at the Turn of the Millennium

Global Focus offers a penetrating critique of current U.S. foreign policy through a series of original essays by leading progressive scholars. This second biannual volume portrays the challenges and questions facing Americans and their government at a time when a new global order is being defined by transnational corporations, when the dimensions of U.S. military power bear little relation to threats, and when most global crises call for international solutions. The volume outlines the principles, practices, and policy alternatives that would help to make the U.S. a more responsible global leader and global partner. Its provocative essays, comprehensive charts and graphs, and topical sidebars make it a key reference book for foreign policy analysts and advocates, policy makers, and academics.

February 2000
St. Martins Press
$19.95

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