Fletcher School Receives $1 Million Grant

The Fletcher School has been awarded $1 million from the Carnegie Corporation to develop strategies to enhance the legitimacy of fragile states through research and outreach aimed at the media and policymakers. The initiative will explore indicators for state legitimacy across four sectors: political, economic, justice and security.

Carnegie challenged the 22 American members of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs to compete and come up with novel, feasible ways to bridge the gap between academics and policymakers working on foreign policy issues, and made five $1 million awards.

“In practical terms, this grant might help us to understand many of the security threats we see unfolding now in real time—like ISIS, which styles itself an Islamic ‘State,’ or the illegal annexation of Crimea, or the next breakaway ‘nation’ carved out of a European power,” says James Stavridis, dean of the Fletcher School. “The grant will help support the mechanisms that move ideas from the academy into the real world where policy impacts the globe.”

Fletcher’s Institute for Human Security will be the focal point for the initiative, which will also involve the school’s International Security Studies Program, World Peace Foundation and Institute for Business in the Global Context, as well as the Feinstein International Center at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.

Partnerships with outside institutions, think tanks, governments and non-state actors in the business and nonprofit sectors, which will be involved throughout the research process, will help to bridge the academic-policy gap. In addition, media outreach initiatives will be achieved through planned upgrades to the school’s Edward R. Murrow Center for Public Diplomacy.

“These are urgent times that require up-to-date, in-depth research in order to allow the vast learning reservoir of our universities to be of assistance to practitioners in the public and foreign policy domains,” said Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation.