Institute for Policy Studies

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not to be confused with the UK-based Policy Studies Institute

Institute for Policy Studies
Abbreviation	IPS
Formation	1963
Type	policy think tank
Headquarters	Washington, DC, United States
Director	John Cavanagh
Website	www.ips-dc.org

Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) is a think tank based in Washington, D.C.. Founded in 1963 by Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet (two former aides to Kennedy administration advisers), it has been directed by John Cavanagh since 1998. Its work is organized into over a dozen projects, all of which work collaboratively.

Writing in 1996, IPS was described by David Dent as a left-wing, or hard-left organisation; and radical-left and Marxist by Scott Steven Powell (1987). Dario Fernández-Morera (1996) called it socialist. Harvey Klehr, professor of politics and history at Emory University, in his 1988 book Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today said that IPS "serves as an intellectual nerve center for the radical movement, ranging from nuclear and anti-intervention issues to support for Marxist insurgencies."

History

The organization was founded in 1963 with a stated mandate to provide "an independent center of research and education on public policy problems in Washington."

The institute was founded in 1963 by two former aides to Kennedy administration advisers: Marcus Raskin, aide to McGeorge Bundy, and Richard Barnet, aide to John J. McCloy. Start-up funding was secured from the Sears heir, Philip Stern, and banker, James Warburg.

IPS' current director is John Cavanagh.

As soon as IPS opened its doors, it plunged into the anti-Vietnam War movement. In 1965, Raskin and Associate Fellow Bernard Fall edited The Vietnam Reader, which became a textbook for teach-ins across the country. In 1967, Raskin and IPS Fellow Arthur Waskow penned "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority," a document signed by dozens of well-known scholars and religious leaders that helped launch the draft resistance movement. IPS also organized Congressional seminars and published numerous books that challenged the national security state. The FBI responded by infiltrating IPS with more than 70 informants, wiretapping its phones, and searching through its garbage.

On September 21, 1976, the Institute’s destiny became linked with the international human rights movement when agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet murdered two IPS colleagues on Washington’s Embassy Row. The target of the car bomb attack was Orlando Letelier, one of Pinochet’s most outspoken critics and the head of IPS's sister organization, the Transnational Institute (TNI). Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a 25-year-old IPS development associate, was also killed. A massive FBI investigation traced the crime to the highest levels of Pinochet's regime.

The Institute for Policy Studies has continued to host an annual human rights award in the names of Letelier and Moffitt to honor these fallen colleagues while celebrating new heroes of the human rights movement from the United States and elsewhere in the Americas. The award recipients receive the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award.

IPS has also worked with lawyers, Congressional allies, researchers, and activists and through the media to achieve measures of justice: the convictions of two generals and several assassins responsible for the Letelier-Moffitt murders, the declassification of U.S. documents on Chile, Pinochet’s 1998 arrest in connection with a Spanish case brought by former IPS Visiting Fellow Joan Garces, and the indictment of Pinochet by Chilean Judge Juan Guzman, a Letelier-Moffitt human rights awardee.

In the 1980s, IPS became heavily involved in supporting the movement against U.S. intervention in Central America. IPS Director Robert Borosage and other staff helped draft Changing Course: Blueprint for Peace in Central America and the Caribbean, which was used by hundreds of schools, labor unions, churches, and citizen organizations as a challenge to U.S. policy in the region.

In 1986, after six years of the Reagan administration, Sidney Blumenthal claimed that "Ironically, as IPS has declined in Washington influence, its stature has grown in conservative demonology. In the Reagan era, the institute has loomed as a right-wing obsession and received most of its publicity by serving as a target."

In 1991, during the first U.S. military foray in Iraq, IPS produced the pamphlet Crisis in the Gulf, which was widely used by the peace movement. Fellow Gail Christian produced a weekly IPS radio program on the war that was broadcast by three dozen public radio stations across the country.

In 2003, IPS convened the meeting that led to the formation of the country’s largest coalition against the Iraq War, United for Peace and Justice. IPS serves on the coalition steering committee and produces talking points, fact sheets, and policy documents for Congress and the peace movement on the costs of the war and how to end it justly. IPS also founded Cities for Peace, which coordinated hundreds of city council resolutions against the war and is now organizing resolutions to bring the troops home and against war in Iran. In 2007, IPS developed a detailed "Just Security" agenda that proposes non-military solutions to the core challenges of climate chaos, global poverty, nuclear weapons, terrorism, and regional wars.

IPS has thus played key roles in the civil rights and anti-war movements in the 1960s, the women's and environmental movements in the 1970s, the anti-apartheid and anti-intervention movements in the 1980s, and the fair trade and environmental justice movements of the 1990s and 2000s. In its attention to the role of multinational corporations, it was also an early critic of what has come to be called globalization.

Current list of Fellows, Research Fellows, Senior Scholars and Associate Fellows

Fellows

Research Fellows

Senior Scholars

Associate Fellows

References

W. Dent, David (1995). U.S.-Latin American policymaking: a reference handbook. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 108. ISBN 9780313279515. The Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) - a left-wing think tank - was formed in 1963, about the same time that CSIS was organized.
W. Dent, David (1995). U.S.-Latin American policymaking: a reference handbook. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 108. ISBN 9780313279515. The Institute of Policy Studies' overall decline was not due just to time and the influence of the Reagan administration, but also to reduced funding, the absence of serious scholars in its ranks, rifts within the leadership, and its hard-left ideological position.
W. Dent, David (1995). U.S.-Latin American policymaking: a reference handbook. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 108. ISBN 9780313279515. Studies critical of IPS such as Powell, Covert Cadre - Inside the Institute for Policy Studies (1987), considers it radical left or Marxist in its policy interpretations with unfounded opposition to weapons systems in particular and American foreign policy in general.
Fernández-Morera 1996, p. 6
Klehr 1988, p. 177
Sidney Blumenthal, Washington Post, 30 July 1986, Left-Wing Thinkers

The Left-Leaning Think Tank by Peter Kovler, from Change (The Magazine of Learning), Vol. 10, No. 5, May 1978
Richard Barnet, IPS, and early critiques of globalization by Abe DeJamminen, United for Peace of Pierce County

Klehr, Harvey (1988), Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today, Transaction Publishers, ISBN 9780887388750.
Fernández-Morera, Darío (1996), American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas, Praeger, ISBN 9780275952648.

External links

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