The Institute for Policy Studies strengthens social movements with independent research, visionary thinking, and links to the grassroots, scholars and elected officials. Since 1963, we have empowered people to build healthy and democratic societies in communities, the U.S., and the world.

Peace

All the world’s people have a right to security. This means economic and social security. It also means internationalist security based on justice – something only possible when governments deal with their people and with each other based on principles of mutual respect, human rights, and international law.  In the short term, those principles lead us to educate and sustain the global movements to oppose the Iraq War and to prevent war in Iran and beyond. In the longer term, our work includes reclaiming the centrality of the United Nations and promoting an entirely new foreign policy for our country, based on fairness instead of inequality, justice instead of power. IPS is promoting a “Just Security” agenda that lays out non-military solutions to the core challenges of climate chaos, global poverty, nuclear weapons, terrorism, and regional wars. We’re working with dozens of organizations to spark a national conversation on our “Just Security” alternative: coordinating hundreds if city council resolutions to bring the troops home from Iraq: and producing talking points, fact sheets, and policy documents for Congress and the peace movement on the costs of the Iraq war and how to end it justly.


Justice

The world’s wealth derives in large part from resources that belong to all of its people.  Thus, extreme income inequality is both unfair and unsustainable.  All people have rights to fair wages, a decent living and other rights set forth in the UN’s International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.  The Institute’s work explicitly links the welfare of people in the United States to the welfare of people in impoverished countries and emphasizes the need to reverse the global policies accelerating inequality. Our annual CEO pay analysis dramatizes the obscene extremes of inequality. IPS also addresses and explains reckless trade and investment policies that drive the global “race to the bottom.” Boosted by the media blitz surrounding our annual “Executive Excess” report, IPS is spearheading a campaign of labor, religious, small business, and other activists to rein in extreme inequality. At the international level, we’re building a broad coalition to end child labor and establish worker rights on Liberian rubber plantations; helping average Americans understand how impoverished country debts undermine U.S jobs, security and the environment; and promoting more just and sustainable alternatives to “free trade.”

Environment

All people also have a right to clean air, land, water, and food.  We have a responsibility to keep the planet habitable for future generations of humans and other living things.   IPS scholars monitor the insidious role of the World Bank and other international financial institutions in climate-altering fossil fuel investment. We collaborate with international efforts to keep the alternative energy movements focused on truly sustainable solutions rather than ephemeral “quick fixes”( like the rush to rebuild the nuclear power industry). And we are convening academic, industry and government experts to develop better strategies for managing and disposing of nuclear waste. IPS is partnering with the International Forum on Globalization to critique false environmental solutions and promote transformational policies that emphasize sustainability, equity and protecting the ‘commons’. We’re pushing the World Bank to expand clean energy lending: organizing a research tem to identify an alternative energy and economic future for the Americas: and bringing activists, journalists and policymakers to Latin America to expose the environmental and human costs of the misguided “war on drugs.”

Richard Barnet and Marcus Raskin founded the Institute in 1963. Reeling from the shock of the Cuban Missile crisis and wary of the looming disaster in Vietnam, they saw their country losing its way, increasingly unable to give human needs priority over an insatiable and permanent national security state. The nation’s capital needed an independent source of policy alternatives.

As Washington’s first progressive multi-issue “think tank,” IPS has served as a policy and research resource for visionary social justice movements for four decades: from the anti-war and civil rights movements in the 1960’s to the peace and global justice movements of the last decade.

In September 1976, the Institute’s destiny became irrevocably linked with the international human rights struggle when agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet murdered two IPS colleagues on Embassy Row. Since then, our annual Letelier-Moffitt human rights awards ceremony has celebrated heroes of human rights in the U.S and Latin America.

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