SCHOLARSHIP IN ACTION: POLICY-SAVVY SCHOLARS WITH REAL IMPACT
The International Peace and Security program at Carnegie Corporation of New York is motivated by the belief that good policy is informed by good ideas – and good ideas are not formed in a vacuum. With the support of the Corporation's 12th president, Vartan Gregorian, and the foundation's board of trustees, the program’s Bridging the Gap subprogram has long sought to provide scholars and policymakers with opportunities to share their knowledge and positively influence foreign policy decision-making.
While most U.S. foundations that support academic research are interested in addressing real-world challenges, the Corporation is among the very few primarily focused on political science and the subfield of international relations. Since 2006, the Corporation has provided $33.5 million to 18 institutions with the aim of connecting policy and academic communities through professional networks, training, publishing opportunities, research, and fellowships that place academics in government roles.
The Corporation’s investments in these areas have made a difference, including by promoting changes in incentive structures within higher education to favor policy relevance and engagement and by supporting media platforms that disseminate academic insights in an accessible form to policymakers and the public.
On a general level, our grantmaking has expanded and strengthened a network of policy-oriented scholars who are moving into positions of influence in higher education, think tanks, and government. Within higher education, our grantees have reported a gradual shift toward a culture more amenable to rewarding policy-oriented research. Participants in our programs have not only attained tenure-track positions in diverse faculties across the country but also gradually assumed positions on hiring, tenure, and promotion committees that give greater prominence to policy-relevant scholarship and public service. Still, practical barriers remain, hindering broader change at the systems level.
We commissioned the report, Bridging the Gap: How Scholarship Can Inform Foreign Policy for Better Outcomes, to assess what has been achieved to date and offer recommendations for the future, as funders look across sectors to connect rigorous and relevant research to policy and practice. We hope that our Bridging the Gap subprogram provides an exemplar in fields beyond international relations for leaders, organizations, and grantmakers who are interested in advancing institutional changes and introducing policy-relevant ideas, reforms, and research that can help solve problems across disciplines and around the world.
Bringing Brittney Griner Home
Text by Kathleen Carroll
WNBA All-Star and two-time Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner, who was detained at an airport near Moscow and charged with illegal possession of cannabis, leaves a courtroom after a Russian court found her guilty of smuggling and storing narcotics on August 4, 2022. (Credit: Kirill Kudryavtsev/ AFP via Getty Images)
On February 17, 2022, WNBA all-star Brittney Griner landed at Sheremetyevo International Airport near Moscow. It was a familiar journey — she had spent her off-seasons playing in Russia since 2015 and helped win four EuroLeague championships. But the two-time Olympic gold medalist never made it to her team.
After police dogs sniffed hashish oil in her luggage, Griner was detained, convicted of large-scale drug smuggling, and began a nine-year sentence at a penal colony. In early May, the U.S. government had declared she was “wrongfully detained.”
A long-standing U.S. position bars negotiating with terrorist organizations. But what if the detained American is held by an autocratic state, under pretext of some illegal act? As kidnapping scholar Danielle Gilbert explained in a widely read essay in the Carnegie Corporation of New York–supported Washington Post blog The Monkey Cage, the “wrongfully detained” designation empowered the U.S. to negotiate for Griner’s release as a political hostage.
Given Griner’s high profile, the blog post opened the door to a new role for Gilbert: sought-after narrator to the public, and trusted interlocutor of the White House, State Department, WNBA, and Griner’s management. During the player’s 10-month detention, Gilbert explained hostage diplomacy and Griner’s possible paths to release to outlets including NPR, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. She wrote for USA Today and the Washington Post and appeared on ABC, NBC, CNN, C-Span, Al Jazeera, and ESPN.
“I thought it was important to participate and address different kinds of audiences, because if I didn’t say yes to an interview, maybe someone else would, and I can only control what I say or bring to the table,” Gilbert says.
Gilbert, a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth University who will become an assistant professor at Northwestern University in the fall of 2023, credited her public engagement work to the support and preparation she received from programs funded by the Corporation. She participated in the New Era Foreign Policy Conference (today, the New Era Workshop) in 2014, the Responsible Public Engagement Institute in 2021, and the International Policy Summer Institute (IPSI) during Griner’s detention in 2022.
Crucially, the 2022 institute included a hands-on media training component that gave Gilbert on-camera practice time, feedback, and concrete tips to speaking clearly and effectively on camera. That same week, she put this training to use in an interview with Good Morning America. A meeting with a Foreign Affairs editor at the conference led to her publishing a definitive essay on hostage-taking later that summer.
“That article has opened up many doors with the hostage recovery enterprise in the United States government, and they are thinking very seriously about and engaging with the arguments I made in that piece,” says Gilbert. Her engagement with the White House included a closed-door brainstorming session with policymakers before Griner was ultimately released in a prisoner swap in December 2022. More recently, she has briefed the Wall Street Journal on strategies to free Evan Gershkovich, a Moscow-based correspondent who was arrested and charged with espionage in March 2023 and has been declared “wrongfully detained” by the U.S. government.
“The Responsible Public Engagement training became so important to me as I thought through what ethical engagement would look like in this process. How much should I be focused on the truth versus being helpful? How much does it matter that the White House and Brittney Griner’s community and other entities are happy with or unhappy with what I am saying?” she says. “The outlet of The Monkey Cage, the training of the Responsible Public Engagement Institute, the training of IPSI have all worked together to make me as prepared as I could have been.”
A Tiger Team Plans for War in Ukraine
Text by Kathleen Carroll
In November 2022, local civilians awaited food distribution following the withdrawal of Russian troops in Kherson City, Ukraine. Months before Russia invaded Ukraine, an interagency “tiger team” organized by the National Security Council at the White House and led by alumni of Corporation-funded Bridging the Gap programs planned for a variety of possible war scenarios. This early planning allowed the United States, Japan, and Western allies to pre-position and quickly provide humanitarian aid supplies to Ukrainians, freeze Russian international bank assets, and remain “ready for a range of contingencies” as the war continues, according to a National Security Council report. (Credit Narciso Contreras/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
At the end of 2021, senior leaders in the United States and its Western allies were working frantically toward an urgent goal: dissuade Russia from invading Ukraine. At the same time, an interagency “tiger team” organized by the National Security Council engaged in a series of “what if?” planning exercises, crafting robust plans for a range of potential scenarios, from cyberattacks to a full-scale, mass-casualty invasion.
This commitment to contingency planning was informed by the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Later that fall, as U.S. intelligence agencies tracked a troubling buildup of Russian troops on the Ukraine border, Alexander Bick and Rebecca Lissner cowrote a memo recommending the U.S. actively plan for a variety of possible war scenarios. Both were then directors for strategic planning at the National Security Council and had participated in IPSCON, where senior scholars lead graduate students in team-based analyses of historic foreign-policy decisions at critical junctures. Lissner is now deputy national security advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris and Bick is a senior advisor and member of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State.
“The way we approached the possible invasion was based in part on discussions we had at IPSCON about uncertainty, bureaucratic politics, and the way that people remain focused on the near term rather than thinking about the longer term,” says Bick, now a senior advisor and member of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State.
In Afghanistan, “we had planned based largely on what we thought would happen, not on what might happen,” he says. “With Russia, the main effort was correctly focused on deterring Putin from invading Ukraine. But we couldn’t know if those efforts would succeed, and we did know that if they did not, the consequences would be enormous. Therefore, we laid out a number of scenarios of what might happen, and then enumerated the policy questions that we would need to answer as an administration in the event that any of those scenarios took place sequentially.”
Bick was tasked with leading a tiger team of experts from the departments of Defense, Energy, Treasury, and Homeland Security, as well as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the intelligence community. They probed a series of possible alternative conditions and outcomes, analyzed how these counterfactuals should inform policy, and weighed responses. Over the next several months, the team organized and conducted these “what if” planning simulations, including for cabinet officials, who weighed factors such as the scale of the invasion, both sides’ willingness to fight, and international cooperation, and explored possible complementary actions through military, energy, and banking policy. President Biden reviewed the playbook and was briefed on the team’s analysis.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S., Western allies, and Japan moved quickly to freeze its international bank assets. Early scenario planning also informed efforts to draft public messaging that could dispel disinformation being circulated by Russia and allowed Western allies to preposition humanitarian supplies in and around Ukraine.
“This process enabled us to have a deliberate planning process where we thought through a range of things that could happen, thought through what we would need to do, and began to put those things into motion,” Bick says. “Our readiness enabled us to mobilize a broad coalition of countries to support Ukraine at a critical moment. And it demonstrates the power of programs like IPSCON to bridge the gap, turning the latest academic research and training into better public policy.”
Guarding Against the “China Trap”
Text by Kathleen Carroll
The Chinese spy balloon flying above Charlotte, North Carolina, on February 4, 2023. (Credit: Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
In early February 2023, U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was scheduled to visit China and meet with President Xi Jinping — the first such meeting in six years. But days before the trip, reports of a Chinese balloon floating over Montana made their way into the media. U.S. officials tracked and ultimately shot down a 200-foot-tall, multiton, high-tech “surveillance balloon.” Blinken’s trip was canceled.
Throughout the news cycle, newspapers, magazines, and radio and television broadcasters called on Jessica Chen Weiss, a well-regarded China expert and professor at Cornell University, to share her perspective. Since completing a fellowship as a senior advisor on the policy-planning staff at the U.S. Department of State, Weiss has shared her concerns about a relatively hawkish stance on China that has taken root throughout Washington.
“In some ways, the fellowship was career-defining,” says Weiss. “The exposure and experience that I had while in government, thinking about what U.S. foreign policy ought to be rather than just what China was doing, was a different way of thinking. It put me in a good position to offer both a policy critique and policy suggestions, lent a fair bit of credibility to things that I say, and it sharpened my understanding of the issue set.”
Weiss sought out the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars opportunity during a sabbatical year in 2021–22, with an eye on contributing to China policy in a still-young Biden-Harris administration. At the end of the Corporation-supported fellowship, she published a definitive essay in Foreign Affairs outlining the potential pitfalls of the nation’s confrontational approach. In addition, she has written about the U.S.-China “action-reaction spiral” dynamic for the New York Times and the Washington Post, and has explained her thinking during in-depth podcasts with Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart. She was also profiled in the New Yorker.
“I believe there is an important role for those with deep expertise on China to play, both in terms of training the next generation by teaching from an academic platform, and also by contributing to the public conversation about China and our government’s policies toward China,” she said. “It can be challenging because academia is more analytical rather than prescriptive.”
“That work needs to continue, but what I’m doing right now — which is trying to shape what should be, as opposed to understanding what is — requires deciding that it’s too important to only speak based on what the peer-reviewed research can show. I recognize that if I don’t speak, other people are going to fill that space on the basis of a lot less research and knowledge.”
Addressing the Disconnect Between Research and Effective Policy
To learn more about the foundation's efforts to narrow the gap between researchers and policymakers, read Pew's interview with Stephen J. Del Rosso.
Stephen J. Del Rosso is senior program director of Carnegie Corporation of New York’s International Peace and Security program. Kathleen Carroll, an award-winning investigative and public-service journalist, is the author of Bridging the Gap: How Scholarship Can Inform Foreign Policy for Better Outcomes.
