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By Renée Gearhart Levy

In 1980, the Soviet Union was viewed by most as an indomitable superpower, an aggressive threat to world peace and security. But Daniel Patrick Moynihan had his doubts.

He could see the fault lines of divisiveness, the simmering conflict among disparate ethnic groups suppressed by a totalitarian regime. “The defining event of the decade,” Moynihan wrote that year, “might well be the breakup of the Soviet Union.” It was not a popular opinion. In fact, about the only politician who shared his view was Ronald Reagan, with whom Moynihan otherwise saw little eye-to-eye.

That prescient analysis, remarked upon to this day, was not Moynihan’s only one. In 1965, he predicted that the increase of single-mother households and illegitimacy would bring social disaster to our cities. He would tell Richard Nixon that the most pressing social movement of the seventies would be women’s rights. As the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the mid-1970s, Moynihan denounced Ugandan dictator Idi Amin as a “racist murderer.”

In each case, time proved him correct.

“For more than 40 years in and out of government, Moynihan became known for being among the first to identify new problems and propose novel, if not easy, solutions,” wrote the New York Times when Moynihan died in 2003.

Not a bad role model.

Last year, Congress completed a $10-million grant to the Maxwell School to rename its Global Affairs Institute in memory of Senator Moynihan, who began and ended his academic career as a Maxwell faculty member. The money was earmarked as a permanent endowment, expected to bear a little more than $400,000 a year, effectively doubling the institute’s base budget.

The Global Affairs Institute already had a well-established reputation. With the Moynihan endowment, it has the possibility to do even more and increase that reputation proportionally. Indeed, if the interest borne by the Moynihan fund is viewed as providing seed money—helping create a stable infrastructure, making the institute attractive to additional external funders—the federal grant has the potential to launch the Moynihan Institute to a whole other level.

During months of brainstorming and planning, a faculty steering committee considered how to create a Moynihan Institute that is genuinely transformed and likely to develop further. It linked Maxwell’s signature strengths—interdisciplinary research and the translation of theory into practice—with those of Moynihan to build an institute to study emerging world problems in comprehensive and meaningful ways.

“Senator Moynihan had the skill to identify problems that were not yet part of the public debate but would soon occupy center stage,” says Margaret “Peg” Hermann, Gerald B. and Daphna Cramer Professor of Global Affairs and director of the institute. “Once he had identified such a problem, he integrated what was known from the research and practitioner communities, often transforming the very nature of a problem.”

On March 14, the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs officially opened its doors. In a day-long celebration, the School dedicated its new institute while memorializing the man whose name it carries. It was a glorious day, charged with an aura of great promise.

“There is every reason to believe that with this endowment we can move to the front ranks among the pre-eminent international affairs research organizations in the country,” says Dean Mitchel Wallerstein.

U.S. Senator Charles Schumer—who, in Congress, played a lead role in advocating for and funding the Moynihan Institute—goes further. “I truly believe this institute could be the vehicle for creating some of the great minds of the 21st century,” he says.

As important as the endowment is—and it is very important—the Moynihan name itself brings value and focus to the venture.

“The renaming of the institute is not a matter of pouring old wine into new bottles,” says Wallerstein. “Pat Moynihan was known as the intellectual statesman. The expectation is that whatever has his name on it is going to share the characteristics he exemplified.”

Called “one of the great minds of our times,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan began his academic career as an assistant professor of government at the Maxwell School from 1959 to 1961. He left to begin what proved to be a distinguished public career. He was a member of the cabinet or sub-cabinet of four consecutive presidents. In these positions and during his 24-year-career in the U.S. Senate, he was well-recognized for his work on domestic issues such as public transportation, social security, and welfare.

But Moynihan, who served as U.S. ambassador both to India and to the United Nations, had interests far broader and overlapping than any one policy arena. He studied and wrote on the trade-offs between liberty and security, reducing clashes between cultures, the role of international law, the relevance of space and place to the definition of community, human rights, economic development, family change, and the problems associated with population aging.

“Moynihan was a broad-thinking individual who felt very deeply about international affairs,” says faculty member Melvyn Levitsky, a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer and former ambassador who knew Moynihan. “That identification will be very valuable to us in the international arena.”

“Whatever we do will reflect on Senator Moynihan’s memory,” says Hermann. “His legacy is now associated with us. It’s a big responsibility.” To meet it, she hopes to inculcate Moynihan’s strengths into the institute’s programming.

It is the mission of the Moynihan Institute to facilitate faculty and student research on the problems raised by an interdependent world of diverse cultures, economies, and political systems; to broaden public knowledge on the challenges affecting the quality of governance, citizenship, and leadership globally; and to bridge theory and practice by maintaining a dialogue between academic and policy-making communities.

In broad strokes, that was ostensibly the mission of the former Global Affairs Institute, too. The name change, however, facilitated a reinterpretation of institute activities in light of who Moynihan was. “Moynihan was ahead of the curve on so many issues. We asked ourselves how we could respect his legacy by also being ahead of the curve, posing politically important questions that are just beginning to appear on the academic and political radar screens,” says Stuart Brown, professor of economics and international relations and a program director in the Moynihan Institute.

The result is a refocusing of the current research groups of the Global Affairs Institute around three broad themes: the impact of non-state actors on the development of civil society; the causes and consequences of the transnational movement of ideas, people, capital, and information; and issues related to societal security.

Hermann is excited about what the faculty and students can do in each of these three areas. Globalization, migration, and democratization have unleashed a plethora of cross-national challenges and opportunities for those engaged in the development of civil society. Among the challenges is defining what constitutes an effective civil society and how context-specific such a definition must become. Among the concerns are poverty alleviation, refugee flows, human rights, fair trade, environmental degradation, and participation by under-represented citizens.

The Transnational NGO Initiative falls in the civil society theme. The initiative is just beginning an interview study of around 200 transnational non-governmental organizations (NGOs) exploring their increasing influence on local, national, and global activities—the so-called transnational sector in global politics. Although some 45,000 organizations are registered with the Union of International Associations, estimates place the actual number in excess of 300,000.

“We’re really interested in the impact NGOs have on the formation and development of civil society, particularly in transitional countries,” says Hermann. “You can find them from the Arctic Circle to the South Pacific pursuing environmental goals, helping to set up educational systems, and immunizing children.”

The so-called “mobility” theme addresses the diffusion of ideas, jobs, people, and money from one country to another. Research on this theme is being coordinated by Brown, who joined Maxwell three years ago after stints at the International Monetary Fund and as the head of emerging market research for two investment banks. “Globalization is largely an economic phenomenon,” he says.

A current concern in this area has to do with remittances—the money people send home when working in a foreign country. These remittances are accounting for an increasing amount of the GDP of developing countries. “There’s a big debate over whether this kind of migration is helpful to the countries from which the workers come,” explains Brown. “Is it a brain drain or is it a form of welfare enhancement?”

The third thematic area focuses on concerns of societal security, which may be closest to the minds of the mainstream public. “We’re trying to create a greater understanding of how people feel secure in this era of global terrorism,” says Levitsky.

Researchers are studying non-official, third-party interventions in identity-based conflicts, otherwise known as Track Two Diplomacy. The goal is to gauge the effects of such interventions on peace-building and peace-making efforts around the world. Under what circumstances does informal people-to-people diplomacy work? What are the mechanisms involved in getting former enemies to interact with one another?

Another project is being conducted with colleagues in Sweden and the Netherlands around the management of crises that cross boundaries and jurisdictions like the tsunami in December 2004. With a database involving close to 100 cases, the group is gaining some answers regarding how problems of governance are exacerbated when crises cross borders. Increasingly, the group is called upon to develop scenarios and simulations to help those in charge better understand and manage such situations.

In addition, the institute houses centers that emphasize three regions: South Asia, Europe (embodied in both the Center for European Studies and the Maxwell European Union Center), and Latin America and the Caribbean. Hermann hopes to expand these centers to cover more of the world.

“We’d like more expertise on China, more on the Middle East and Africa,” she says. “We’re continuing to expand so that we truly represent the globe.”

Already, a working group on East Asia has been formed to bring together experts from across campus to provide more exposure on this regional area to students. “We don’t have enough expertise in the Maxwell School alone, but there are faculty members in information studies, in the law school, and in the school of management who teach or do research on East Asian topics. We’re trying to get together to offer courses jointly,” says Hongying Wang, assistant professor of political science. “There is a huge demand within the Maxwell School. Under the umbrella of the Moynihan Institute, we’re trying to bring together these experts for the benefit of students interested in East Asia.”

The cohabitition of broad thematic emphases with well-established regional programs hints at one of the Moynihan Institute’s greatest strengths: the interdisciplinary tradition of the Maxwell School.

When a National Science Foundation grant was recently submitted by the Transnational NGO Initiative, for example, it included 11 faculty members representing nine disciplines.

“That would be unheard of at most institutions,” says Hermann. The Moynihan Institute approaches problems in multidisciplinary teams, faculty members and students from different disciplines side by side. “It’s harder. It takes longer. But the results are often more realistic to solving the problem,” says Hermann. “And the intellectual excitement is highly stimulating because we’re all being challenged by each other.”

When Mitchel Wallerstein became dean of the School in 2003, he set a goal of doubling Maxwell’s external support. The congressional endowment is a step in the right direction.

“To have this endowment permits the Moynihan Institute to go to external funders saying that the School itself is willing to put up money for a project. Asking for matching funds is often a very successful strategy,” he says.

“Our existence as a national resource center depends on government grants, and the more support you have from your institution, the better you look to the granting agencies,” adds Ann Grodzins Gold, director of the South Asia Center, which will reapply to the U.S. Department of Education to maintain its status next year. As part of that process, the South Asia Center will propose core themes to the government, themes that Gold says will undoubtedly mesh with the Moynihan Institute’s themes. “I’m hoping that, by plugging into these institutional themes, we’ll engage in some cross-cultural initiatives among the regional area centers.”

According to Hermann, the interest from the congressional endowment will provide funding for research assistantships, post-doctoral fellowships, visiting scholars, exciting speakers, conferences, and accessible publications—all the sorts of things that bolster good programs into great ones, helping faculty in their quest for external funding.

Already, institute-based programs are leveraging this new status to move to the next level. The Program on Latin America and the Caribbean (PLACA), for example, held its first major scholarly conference this spring. This fall, in a consortium with Cornell University and SUNY Binghamton, PLACA will submit a major grant application to the U.S. Department of Education to turn PLACA into a national resource center, like the South Asia Center. The four-year grant would fund a variety of new initiatives within the program—things that, like the conference, it had never done before.

“There’s no question that we’re working in a changed environment,” says John Burdick, associate professor of anthropology and director of PLACA. Ideas that may have been dismissed as beyond reach now seem possible. “You think, ‘Let’s try it,’” he says. “There’s funding to hire a graduate student to help develop a grant proposal, for example. Before, it seemed too much of a risk.”

Next year, the Moynihan Institute will welcome visiting scholars from Turkey and Iran. Serif Mardin, Turkey’s leading political scientist, has taught at Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford; he will teach a course on the Turkish Republic at Maxwell this fall. Javad Tabatabai, former head of the Department of Islamic Civilization at Encyclopedia Islamica Foundation in Tehran and an acclaimed author, will also join the faculty. “These are very exciting additions we could never have made without the Moynihan funding,” says Hermann.

Hermann expects also to add a post-doctoral fellow in each thematic area, as well as graduate research support and the recruitment of additional distinguished practitioners to the faculty.

And plans are in the works to mark the anniversaries of the Moynihan Institute dedication and Moynihan’s birthday with the awarding of the Moynihan Medal for the Advancement of Global Civil Society to an individual working on improving the quality of life within the global community.

“Senator Moynihan was responsible for convincing President Kennedy to institute the Presidential Medals of Freedom given to exemplary representatives of the democratic ideals that lie at the foundation of the country,” says Hermann. “We thought this an apt extension of that tradition.”

It’s just another way the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs hopes to model Moynihan the man. As evidenced by the former staffers who came for the dedication, Moynihan was extraordinarily astute in identifying young talent.

“He facilitated and mentored them into very important careers,” says Hermann. “That’s what we’d like to think we’re doing with our students. If we could clone Senator Moynihan’s strengths in our students and have them go out into the world and work on problems the way he did, we’d feel we were successful.”

Related: March 14 dedication ceremonies