IPS opened its doors in 1963 with a simple, straightforward notion: that progressive thought, advocay, and action can build a better society. Over the next three decades that idea proved to be a revolutionary one. It supported grassroots movements that co

IPS opened its doors in 1963 with a simple, straightforward notion: that progressive thought, advocay, and action can build a better society. Over the next three decades that idea proved to be a revolutionary one. It supported grassroots movements that contributed to ending the war in Vietnam; to improving the legal status of African-Americans and women; to weaking the nuclear power industry; to protecting worker rights through US trade programs; to cutting off aid to the Nicaraguan Contras; to curbing disastrous IMF and World Bank structural adjustment policies; to crushing apartheid in South Africa; and to halting the superpowers' nuclear arms race.
The public scholars of IPS provided critical support for these movements by writing seminal texts, handbooks, and articles, making films, educating key politicians and policymakers, and arguing the cause in mainstream journals, newspapers, magazines, television shows, and radio programs. In some instances, IPS fellows were among the principal organizers of these movements.
I.F. Stone once said that the Heritage Foundation is for rightwingers, the American Enterprise Institute for the Establishment - and IPS is for the rest of us. Throughout its history, IPS has amplified the voices and concerns of blue-collar workers, feminists, minorities, peace activists, environmentalists, family farmers, and consumers.
The Institute's success can be measured not only in the policies we changed but in the enemies we made. As we worked with the public to help define the critical issues of the day, to articulate courses of action that would lead to a more peaceful, just, and sustainable future, we became the target of the irresponsible and fearful inside government and out. We were bugged, spied upon, broken into, even bombed.
But today, on our 30th anniversary, the Institute can say with pride that it is stronger and more relevant than ever. With a new generation of scholars and staff taking charge, IPS is continuing to promote the civilizing concepts upon which it was
founded - peace and disarmament, civil and human rights, environmental renewal, economic justice, and social reconstruction - only now, the country is more open to these concepts than at any time in the Institute's history.
The end of the Cold War, along with the election of a Democratic Administration and Congress, has opened up dramatic new opportunities for change. New ways of thinking, new institutions, new political alliances, and new national policies are being born. Many of the ideas that IPS has been pushing for a generation - deep defense cuts, support for UN peacekeeping, economic conversion, progressive tax reform, responsible trade, national health care, guaranteed employment - are now being seriously debated on Capitol Hill. There is greater receptivity in Washington to IPS ideas than before.

THEMES FOR THE 21st CENTURY

Life in the United States after the Cold War will be defined by three overlapping questions: What should be our new defense and foreign policies? How can an environmentally sound economy thrive in an increasingly integrated world economy
that undermines national and community policies? And how can we close the ever widening gap between rich and poor? To answer these questions, IPS has designed three program areas: Global Security, World Economy, and Domestic Policy.

Global Security Program

For decades, IPS has pushed for policies to end the Cold War, cut military spending, reverse the nuclear arms race, and wind down US military intervention abroad. At the same time, IPS has sought to strengthen the requisites of international
peace: a vibrant and just global economy, protection of human rights and democracy, cooperative international relationships, and an empowered United Nations. Today, all these policies are being implemented or seriously considered. The challenge now is to push harder for the following: a 50 percent additional cut in the US military budget; gradual disassembly of the US nuclear arsenal, as part of an international disarmament regime; a non-proliferation regime mandating that all nations, strong and weak, foswear nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; stronger US support for United Nations peacekeeping; dismantlement of most of the CIA and other parts of the now obsolete 'national security state'; more rapid conversion of US military bases and weapons factories to peacetime uses; nonviolent promotion of democracy in every nation, whether friend or foe, or a totalitarian or authoritarian regime; and empowerment of citizens, organizations, and communities worldwide to participate more directly in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy.

World Economy Program

The underlying premise of the World Economy Program is that the rapidly multiplying transnational connections integrating the United States (and every other industrial nation) into the world economy have undermined all existing 20th century ideologies - state socialism, Keynesianism, and the Reagan-Thatcher dogmas of deregulation and free trade. Fundamentally new policies and institutions concerning trade, development, corporate behaviour, and immigration are needed to secure the economic well-being of the majority of the world's people. Among the policies IPS is now advocating are: a 'social charter' in all trade agreements setting decent standards for corporate treatment of workers, consumers, and the environment; national and transnational laws that make mobile multinational corporations more accountable to communities and citizens; substantial reduction in the loans poor nations now owe rich ones; elimination of IMF and World Bank structural adjustment policies; provision of loans, aid, and investment only to development projects that are consistent with the goals of equity, sustainability, full employment, and democratic participation; and an overhaul of the US bilateral aid program to target communities and grassroots organizations in the South.

Domestic Policy Program

After twelve years of conservative administrations, American society is now in deep crisis. With the larger debt of any country in the world, the United States has too little will and too little wallet to solve a growing number of social and economic problems. Even now, Washington remains frozen by political gridlock and corrupted by hundreds of millions of dollars dispensed by political action committees. The results of federal neglect are plain for everyone to see: race riots in the cities,
rising crime, three million homeless wandering the streets, a declining standard of living for working families, and growing equality.
How can America cope with these problems? The Republicans offer the palliative of supply-side economics - even though the 1980s demonstrated that tax cuts for the rich and an unrestrained market mean not prosperity, but luxury consumption, speculation, paper merges, and economic stagnation. The policies offered by the Democrats - slightly higher taxes on the rich, small military cuts, and more corporate incentives - move in a better direction, but hardly far or fast enough.
IPS is now putting a new set of domestic alternatives on the table: revision of the individual income tax to its 1970s level of fairness and a wealth tax on the richest 5 percent of Americans; savings of $ 100 billion per year from military cuts; government-supported jobs for all unemployed Americans who want to work; a more ambitious earned-income tax credit and beefed-up government social welfare programs; a national investment strategy based not on competitiveness but on human needs, equity, full employment, and ecological sustainability; new student-run schools for inner cities; a Canadian-style, single-payer health care system; and a revival of communities as the principal platforms for government action, supported in part through a revived and enlarged General Revenue Sharing Program.

Who We Are

One way to view IPS is as a collection of talented individuals who are dedicated both to producing high-quality public scholarship and to testing their ideas through advocacy, organizing, and experimentation. We currently have seven fellows who are at the core of IPS. But IPS is mich broader than these seven: Each year IPS helps a dozen exceptional scholars design new programs and raise funds.
Every IPS fellow sponsors one or two of these scholars - called 'research fellows' - and works closely with them on designing, raising funds for, and carrying out their projects. The Research Fellows Program enables IPS to work in new fields, without assuming major new financial obligations. It also helps us recruit new fellows and associate fellows.

Transnational Institute

Since 1973, IPS has collaborated with a sister think tank in Amsterdam called the Transnational Institute (TNI). TNI serves as an umbrella for a network of international scholars committed to the values of equity, sustainability, participation, and demilitarization. Through TNI, IPS work on many security, global economy, and development issues is replicated in or exerts influence on other countries.
Twice a year, as many as 40 TNI fellows gather from around the world to discuss important issues of the day and to coordinate their work. Last year, for example, TNI fellows analyzed the wars in the western Sahara and Angola, and new strategies for economic development in the Third World.