Our History
With over 60 years of groundbreaking public scholarship, the Institute for Policy Studies is the nation’s oldest multi-issue progressive research organization.
Over those decades we’ve partnered with virtually every major social social movement — including movements for peace, civil rights, LGBTQ and gender equality, economic justice, global human rights, and the climate. We’ve advised policy makers at the highest levels, worked hand in hand with organizers in the grassroots, and built generation after generation of progressive scholars and activists.
Below are just a few milestones on that journey, which continues today.
Speaking Truth to Power
Institute for Policy Studies co-founders Marcus Raskin and Richard J. Barnet met in 1961, when Raskin was a White House aide and Barnet was a State Department lawyer.
Both had joined the Kennedy administration with high hopes of advancing demilitarization and an end to the Cold War. They soon became disillusioned by the continued global arms race and concluded that systemic change can only happen through the power of social movements.
In 1963, Barnet and Raskin founded the Institute for Policy Studies, where they could more freely “speak truths to power.”
For more than six decades, IPS scholar-activists have provided critical support for major social movements by producing seminal books, films, and articles; educating policymakers and the general public; and crafting practical strategies in support of peace, justice, and the environment.
Since its founding, the organization has stood firmly on three key principles:
Public scholarship
Only in the nexus of policy research, advocacy, and grassroots activism can ideas be turned into action.
Independence
Speaking truth to power requires financial and programmatic independence from governmental funding and corporate influence.
Local, National, Global
Partnering with allies and social movements on the ground, IPS operates simultaneously on the local, national, and global levels because we believe that transformation requires engagement at every level.
IPS pioneered the modern politics of ideas in the capital.
Washington Post, 1986
Peace and Foreign Policy
Economic, Racial, and Gender Justice
Environmental Justice
1963-1965
As soon as IPS opened its doors in 1963, 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.
1967
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. Early the following year, Raskin was indicted along with four other prominent antiwar activists on charges of conspiracy to encourage young men to resist the military draft.
IPS also organized Congressional seminars and published numerous books that challenged the national security state, including Gar Alperovitz’s Atomic Diplomacy and Barnet’s Intervention and Revolution. The FBI responded by infiltrating IPS with more than 70 informants, wiretapping its phones, and searching through its garbage. The Nixon administration placed Barnet and Raskin on its “enemies list.” In 1971, Barnet and Raskin played a pivotal role in providing the first cache of Pentagon Papers documents to Neil Sheehan of the New York Times.
1976
In 1976, the Institute’s destiny became irrevocably 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.
IPS has worked with a wide array of international allies to achieve measures of justice for Letelier and Moffitt, including an indictment of Pinochet in 1998. (You can read more about the path to accountability for the assassination and information about our annual Letelier-Moffitt human rights awards program here.) Right after the assassinations, IPS hired Orlando’s widow, Isabel Morel de Letelier to run IPS’s Human Rights Program. Isabel also created a Third World Women’s Project which brought over three dozen women from the Global South on educational tours from Capitol Hill throughout the United States.
1977
IPS was also on the cutting edge of the anti-apartheid movement. In 1977, it began a South Africa project that produced a series of studies and books on the subject. In 1985, Fellow Roger Wilkins helped found the Free South Africa Movement, which organized a year-long series of demonstrations that led to the imposition of U.S. sanctions.
1980-1990
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 to challenge U.S. policy in the region. In 1983, PBS aired Saul Landau’s exposé of the CIA’s dirty war, “Target Nicaragua,” and in 1985, several members of Congress joined an IPS press conference to release the report In Contempt of Congress: The Reagan Record of Deceit and Illegality on Central America, which documented 77 examples of false or misleading statements and violations of law by U.S. officials.
1991
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.
1997
In 1997, IPS launched its Foreign Policy In Focus website, which provides commentary and analysis on the entire range of global issues, with a number of prominent public scholars from the global South.
2002
In 2002, 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 served on the coalition steering committee and produced 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 organized resolutions to bring the troops home and against war in Iran.
2007
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.
2017 – now
In 2017, IPS invited the National Priorities Project to join IPS, where it serves social movements with data and analysis on the tradeoffs between skyrocketing military spending and urgent domestic needs. In 2023, under the leadership of Phyllis Bennis and Khury Petersen-Smith, IPS helped a wide range of activist groups come together around Ceasefire Now to address the crisis in Gaza.
1964
In 1964, several leading Black activists joined the staff and turned IPS into a base of support for the civil rights movement in the nation’s capital. Fellow Bob Moses organized trainings for field organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Council on the links between civil rights theory and practice, while Ivanhoe Donaldson initiated an assembly of Black government officials.
1966-1974
In these early years, IPS was also at the forefront of the feminist movement. Fellow Charlotte Bunch organized a historic women’s liberation conference in 1966 and later launched two feminist periodicals, Quest and Off Our Backs. Rita Mae Brown wrote and published her path-breaking lesbian coming-of-age novel Rubyfruit Jungle while on the staff in the 1970s. In the early 1980s, Barbara Ehrenreich, later renowned for Nickel and Dimed and other bestsellers, led the Institute’s Women in the Economy Project. In 1985, Ehrenreich’s “Women’s Economic Agenda Working Group” highlighted the “feminization of poverty” and produced a national agenda for change entitled “Toward Economic Justice for Women.”
IPS has been a leader of economic justice movements since the late 1960s. For example, through the Appalachia Project, IPS worked with mine workers on occupational safety and health and regional economic development. In 1975, IPS initiated the Conference on Alternative State and Local Public Policies, which brought together progressive legislators to develop more equitable legislation. This work continued through IPS’s Cities for Progress project, which connected local officials pursuing innovative policies.
1974
Richard Barnet’s 1974 path-breaking examination of the power of multinational corporations, Global Reach, and his follow-up 1994 book with former IPS director John Cavanagh, Global Dreams, became required reading in many college courses and helped catalyze the movement against corporate-driven globalization.
Cavanagh was a leader of the movement to cancel developing country debts in the 1980s, as well as the Alliance for Responsible Trade and the International Forum on Globalization in the 1990s. Through these and other networks, IPS has promoted just, sustainable trade and investment policies, winning important advances in debt cancellation, scuttling plans for a hemispheric trade pact, and rolling back investment policies that prioritize corporate profits over the public interest.
1990-2000
In the 1990s and early 2000s, IPS became a leading source of analysis and solutions to the country’s skyrocketing levels of economic inequality. In 1994, Sarah Anderson published the first edition of Executive Excess, now the longest-running annual report series documenting how excessive CEO pay undermines the well-being of ordinary Americans.
IPS research and advocacy have contributed to successful efforts at the federal level to require disclosure of CEO-worker pay ratios and impose taxes on CEO pay-inflating stock buybacks, as well as municipal taxes on companies with huge pay gaps.
IPS also played a key role in convening the Congressional Progressive Caucus — and an associated research council that puts movement and researched-backed solutions at the center of Washington policymaking.
In 1991, newly elected Vermont Representative Bernie Sanders organized the first meetings of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC). IPS worked with other progressive groups to launch annual CPC alternative State of the Union events to lay out bold proposals to advance peace, justice, and the environment at the federal level. IPS helped gather hundreds of people in the Capitol from progressive groups and leaders of the CPC in 1997 to launch a comprehensive “Fairness Agenda for America.”
These efforts led to the creation of a parallel progressive organization, now called the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center, that brings together movement groups, unions, and progressive research and policy groups that catalyzed support behind the massive government spending initiatives of the first two years of the Biden administration.
2002
In 2002, IPS began managing Inequality.org, the nation’s premier portal for data, commentary, and strategies related to our growing divides.
2006
In 2006, long-time IPS collaborator Chuck Collins joined IPS, bringing a wealth of experience in campaigning and writing about fair taxation, including Wealth and Our Commonwealth, co-authored with Bill Gates, Sr. IPS has contributed to successful efforts to defend the estate tax and raise taxes on the rich at the federal and state levels.
2008
In June 2008, the IPS inequality team partnered with The Nation magazine on a prescient special issue on “extreme inequality.” After bonus-chasing bankers drove the U.S. economy over a cliff only months later, this special issue received the prestigious Sidney Hillman Foundation Prize in Magazine Journalism.
2014
In 2014, IPS created the Criminalization of Race and Poverty project, focused on exposing how poor people are disproportionately punished by the criminal justice system. This groundwork sparked the creation and spin-off of a new independent journalism project called the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, created by Barbara Ehrenreich, nurtured by IPS’s Karen Dolan, and led by journalist Alissa Quart.
Also in 2014, IPS launched the Black Worker Initiative under the leadership of IPS Associate Fellow Marc Bayard, a project that lifts up Black women as key to the revival of the labor movement and supports innovative worker organizing in the south.
2017
In 2017, the Poor People’s Campaign invited IPS to serve as its research arm, and the collaboration led to the publication of such pioneering reports as The Souls of Poor Folk and A Moral Budget. IPS also collaborated in a comprehensive Congressional Resolution introduced in 2021 and 2023 entitled “Third Reconstruction: Fully addressing poverty and low wages from the bottom up.”
1970-1980
IPS first engaged in work on environmental issues through the anti-nuclear movement, a natural extension of its long history of work on the “national security state.” In 1979, IPS Fellow Saul Landau won an Emmy for his documentary Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang, which tells the story of a cover-up by the U.S. nuclear program and of the hazards of radiation to American citizens.
In 1985, Fellow William Arkin published Nuclear Battlefields: Global Links in the Arms Race, which helped galvanize anti-nuclear activism through its revelations of the impact of nuclear infrastructure on communities across America.
In the mid-1970s, Jim Ridgeway, now a renowned investigative reporter, published The Elements, a monthly IPS newsletter on ownership and control of the world’s natural resources. Through her path-breaking work on debt and hunger, TNI Fellow Susan George exposed the environmental devastation resulting from and contributing to extreme poverty.
1990-2009
In the early 1990s, IPS began monitoring the environmental impacts of U.S. trade, investment, and drug policies. The Institute’s Sustainable Energy and Economy Network was the first to calculate the World Bank’s massive contributions to climate change through its support of oil, mining, and gas projects. Meanwhile the Global Economy Project has helped raise awareness of the environmental impacts of “free trade” through the popular book Field Guide to the Global Economy and other publications. The Drug Policy Project has helped bring activists and policymakers to Latin America to expose the environmental and human costs of the misguided “war on drugs.”
2010 – now
In the 2010s, IPS built a powerful network of international allies to support communities in Latin America that were fighting environmentally destructive mining projects and opposing lawsuits by corporations imposing restrictions on mining. This work led in 2017 to El Salvador becoming the first nation in the world to ban mining to save its rivers, a movement chronicled in Robin Broad and John Cavanagh’s award-winning book The Water Defenders.
In the last two decades, the urgency of the climate crisis has led to an increased IPS focus on preventing environmental collapse, and working toward global climate solutions that center economic and racial justice as key elements of any policy addressing climate change. Through our fellows based both domestically and internationally, working with partners in the Global South, we are developing and promoting policies that put people and the planet first — at the local, national, and global level.
Mentoring the Next Generation
of Public Scholars
In 2003, IPS raised funds to endow the first of its fellowships to mentor a next generation of diverse public scholars. The Carol Jean and Edward F. Newman Fellowship has brought over a dozen young people to IPS for 1-2 years of mentorship, including current IPS Executive Director, Tope Folarin (Newman Fellow 2010-2011)
In 2010, IPS established the first of its state-based fellowships, the IPS New Mexico Fellowship. This fellowship brings a young leader from New Mexico to IPS for a year of mentorship, followed by six months of placement in a New Mexico non-profit.
In 2015, IPS began a paid summer Next Leaders Internship, which brought 12-14 young people to IPS for workshops and immersion in one of IPS’s projects for three-month stints. In 2024, this program was transformed into the Henry Wallace Fellowship Program, which added strategy convenings and an annual Henry Wallace symposium.
In 2017, IPS initiated the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellowship, a mid-career fellowship to work on peace in the Middle East.
Over our 60-plus years, the Institute for Policy Studies has played a critical role — often behind the scenes — in strengthening the social movements that are the real drivers of social change.
Help IPS turn progressive policy ideas into action
Everyone has a right to thrive on a planet where all communities are equitable, democratic, peaceful, and sustainable. Together, we must speak truths to power and challenge the structures that keep us from realizing our full potential as human beings, members of society, and keepers of this planet.
