Moynihan Institute News, Research and Commentary

Devashish Mitra, Gerald B. and Daphna Cramer Professor of Global Affairs, argues that tariffs can't do what they promise: trade balances are governed by macroeconomics, not trade policy, and the cost of a tariff falls largely on the country that imposes it. 

Part-time instructor of anthropology Fethi Keles's review of the book On the Record: Papers, Immigration, and Legal Advocacy, written by Susan Bibler Coutin, was published in the International Journal of Refugee Law.

“The role of politics in shaping the global currency hierarchy is seen as secondary to…baseline economic fundamentals,” wrote Daniel McDowell, professor of political science, for the Atlantic Council’s Geoeconomics Center. But that’s changing. “In the great global currency debate, market forces have never been more passé and political forces have never been so prominent.”

Devashish Mitra, professor of economics and Gerald B. and Daphna Cramer Professor of Global Affairs, has co-edited a new reference work, Elgar Encyclopedia of International Trade (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2026), with Priyaranjan Jha, professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine. The volume is part of the Elgar Encyclopedias in Economics and Finance series.

“I think his strategy now is the same as it's really been from the very beginning, which is to try and figure out how to subjugate Ukraine. And that's the goal he's been after. And he's using really most of the means at his disposal to try and achieve that. If you look at his recent interviews, he does not want to concede at all that Russia is facing any serious problems,” says Brian Taylor, professor of political science.

“This disaster throws a wrench in the White House and State Department plan for securing and stabilizing the circum-Caribbean region that includes Venezuela,” says Gladys McCormick, Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-U.S. Relations.

“In China, the response is more centralized and top-down,” says Yingyi Ma, professor of sociology. “AI is being built into national education planning and new majors. In the U.S., the response is more decentralized. Individual universities, schools, departments and faculty variability is huge.”

The article, co-authored by Associate Professor of Public Health Bernard Appiah, was published in BMC Public Health.

Lauren Woodard, assistant professor of anthropology, has written Ambiguous Inclusion: Migration and Race on the Russia-China Border (University of Toronto Press, 2026). The book draws on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow and Vladivostok, Russia, and Almaty, Kazakhstan. 

Glyn Morgan, associate professor of political science, writes on CapX how the trade deal the U.S. and EU agreed to during meetings in Turnberry, Scotland, in 2025 exemplifies the changing relationship between the two from one built on mutual benefit to one that is fully transactional.

“I think this idea that the Iranians are going to turn uranium over is really posturing. They're not going to turn the uranium over. What they may be willing to do is actually downgrade the uranium to a certain level under UN or international auspices and the United States is going to have to agree to that,” says Osamah Khalil, chair of the International Relations Undergraduate Program. 

Glyn Morgan, associate professor of political science, has written The Rise and Fall of American Europe (Polity Press, 2026). The book traces how the post-World War II American-led project of European integration—a political order grounded in U.S. military protection and transatlantic trade—came to be, and why it is now unraveling. 

The article, co-authored by Professor of Economics Devashish Mitra, was published in the Journal of Development Economics.

The $27,000 Wilson C. “Bill” Levis Fundraising Research Grant will support survey-based research into what motivates donors to give nonprofits maximum flexibility.

Co-authored by Yilin Hou, professor of public administration and international affairs, the study was published in the Journal of Housing Economics.

“We have a distorted global economic system that rewards fossil fuel extraction, that rewards fossil fuel dependency. And as a result, it is harder for smaller countries that are worried about their own energy security, their own economic security, their own social social development to forgo an oil discovery,” says Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment.

“This is a story of how Arizona was colonized. It’s kind of cute, it’s funny. There’s a little pyramid with a camel on top. It seems innocuous, but that’s the violence of the colonial project,” says Natalie Koch, professor of geography and the environment and native of Tuscon, Arizona.

“In his short but incisive account, he [Glyn Morgan, associate professor of political science] argues that the decisive shove for postwar European integration came not from Europeans but from America. It was the U.S., alarmed by Soviet domination of eastern Europe, that saw integration as key to turning Europeans into prosperous and stable allies,” says reviewer Simon Nixon.

Authored by Associate Professor of Political Science Erin Hern, the article was published in Party Politics.

“There is room for negotiation on the nuclear program. But one of the things Iran is looking for is the following: they want the United States to agree, or at least to recognize, its right—Iran's right—too enrich uranium under the nuclear non-proliferation agreement that Iran signed and other countries have signed,” says Osamah Khalil, chair of the International Relations Undergraduate Program.