Robert Blair has been named the 2025 recipient of the Theda Skocpol Emerging Scholar Award, which recognizes outstanding early-career contributions to the field of comparative politics.
Derrick Zantt earned his master's degree in public affairs from Brown in 2016. A fourth-generation service member, Zantt currently works as an analyst for the Department of Defense, where he puts his belief in open data and the knowledge he acquired at the Watson Institute to influence policy.
A new Costs of War report titled “Profits of War: Top Beneficiaries of Pentagon Spending, 2020–2024” finds that military contractors received over half of Pentagon spending from 2020 to 2024.
Sonia Cuesta, who earned her Master of Public Affairs (MPA) degree from Brown in 2017, was happy to give back to the program that helped her establish a career in human rights and international relations. During the spring 2025 semester, Cuesta supervised a new generation of MPA students' Policy in Action project from her position at the United Nations.
Ieva Jusionyte’s 2024 book, "Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border," has won multiple awards, including the Juan E. Méndez Book Award and two awards from the Association of American Publishers.
Brown's first new school in over a decade, the Thomas J. Watson Jr. School of International and Public Affairs, launched on July 1. Plans for the new school include broadening the scope of research, expanding the faculty, and breaking down traditional barriers between disciplines to address the world's most pressing economic, political, social and policy challenges.
John Friedman recently testified before the UK House of Lords’ Social Mobility Policy Committee, which is exploring ways to improve social mobility through education and employment integration.
From May 12-14, the Watson Institute's Master of Public Affairs (MPA) program held its annual Policy in Action (PIA) Symposium, in which students presented the results of work they did for government, nonprofit and private sector organizations over the spring semester.
Peter Andreas recently published "The Illicit Global Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know," a new book that explores the unauthorized cross-border flows of goods, people and money shaping global trade and politics.
Jennifer Hadden recently published a book titled "Crowded Out: The Competitive Landscape of Contemporary International NGOs," examining how global nonprofits are being squeezed by competition, specialization, and dispersion—even as global needs grow.
A new Costs of War paper titled “The Militarization of Video Game Culture” examines how the U.S. military leverages gaming for recruitment, training, and public relations.
The Watson Institute’s Policy Labs — created with the goal of turbo-charging research on critical policy issues by bringing together students and researchers — were highly productive during their first year of operation. The Civil Conflict and Democratic Erosion Policy Lab, the Justice Policy Lab, and the Realizing Rights Lab created cutting-edge social science research while enhancing student research skills.
Senior International and Public Affairs and environmental science concentrator Charlie Adams, who graduates this month, grew up around policy and politics. Naturally, he found himself at home in the Watson Institute's International and Public Affairs (IAPA) concentration.
The Watson Institute's Africa Initiative is the only U.S. partner in the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA), an organization dedicated to building a vibrant multidisciplinary African academy that produces world-class research.
Mark Blyth recently co-authored a book titled "Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers," which challenges conventional thinking on inflation and calls for new policy approaches.
The Massachusetts Book Awards recently named Exit Wounds to its 2025 nonfiction longlist, recognizing author Ieva Jusionyte’s powerful examination of gun trafficking across the U.S.-Mexico border.
A new Climate Solutions Lab white paper highlights the rapid rise of green banks in the U.S. over the past decade as a vital tool for financing the green energy transition.
Mark Blyth co-authored a paper for Review of International Political Economy as part of a special issue on macrofinance and the green transformation, titled "Macrofinance and the green transformation: nudging, attracting, and coercing capital towards decarbonization."
Mark Blyth co-authored a paper for Review of International Political Economy as part of a special issue on macrofinance and the green transformation, titled "Decarbonising national growth models: derisking, ‘hobbled states’, and the decarbonisation possibility frontier."
Brown University’s Office of the Vice President for Research awarded Ieva Jusionyte a Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award in social sciences for her project titled “Extradition: Can Justice Be Exported?”
Driven by a curiosity to push our collective spatial imaginaries, Amienne Spencer-Blume, a 2023 graduate of Watson's International and Public Affairs (IAPA) concentration and current sociology Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins University, is researching how the configuration of space, at the micro- and macro-scales, impacts social structures and politics.