Moynihan Institute News, Research and Commentary

“The release of Hubbard was a gesture to Trump, nothing more, and does not imply a larger willingness on Putin’s part to make concessions or end the war,” argues Brian Taylor, director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.

International students and workers also support the economy beyond their universities or workplaces. By living in the U.S., foreign students and workers create jobs as they buy goods and services, says Devashish Mitra, Gerald B. and Daphna Cramer Professor of Global Affairs.

“One thing that people don't often think about is the land and the air that also belongs to this equation because increasingly, gas turbines are being built near data center sites to support the energy supply needs and they're driven by the ever-expanding agentic AI use globally,” says Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment.

“The danger for the U.S. is a slow erosion of its appeal to attract talent that compounds over decades. By the time the effect shows up in the data, it is hard to reverse,” says Yingyi Ma, professor of sociology.

“Political leaders in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are starting to look more closely at their balance sheets, they are also noticing that many of these splashy investments are not nearly as lucrative as they had thought or as their proponents had promised,” says Natalie Koch, professor of geography and the environment.

Co-authored by Maxwell Advisory Board Professor of International Affairs Daniel McDowell, the article was published in International Studies Quarterly. 

“You have a unique and distinctive state form, call it American Europe, and that's been around for 80 years. It replaced an earlier state form I call Imperial Europe, which America really hated and wanted to destroy because it was a pure competitor and new American Europe was not a competitor,” says Glyn Morgan, associate professor of political science.

Maxwell’s Fethi Keles will examine how refugees create social networks as they create new lives in the United States. 

“Nepal is owed something more substantial than sympathy and more useful than a loan charging interest on damage it did not cause. Monitoring of unstable ice and glacial lakes concerns the whole basin and should be funded on a standing basis, with hydrological data crossing borders as a matter of routine rather than negotiation,” writes Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment.

“I think Putin's strategy is unlikely to work and unlikely to change the basic trajectory of the war, which is still that his strategic objectives that he set out at the very beginning of the invasion, which is basically to control Ukraine will not be achieved. And he's only made the Ukrainian population more resistant to any kind of submission to Russian political domination,” says Brian Taylor, director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs.

The article, authored by Lauren Woodard, assistant professor of anthropology, was published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

The originality of Associate Professor of Political Science Glyn Morgan’s book “lies in its claim that European unification—first the European Coal and Steel Community, in 1951, then the European Economic Community, in 1957, and finally the European Union, in 1993—was more an American creation than a European one. Postwar Europe, he argues, was made in America’s image,” says reviewer Ian Buruma.

“Russians generally are tired of the war and want it to end,” says Brian Taylor, director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. “They are well aware that the full-scale war against Ukraine started in 2022 has already lasted longer than the ‘Great Patriotic War’ against Nazi Germany.”

“A strong military makes a currency more appealing because it’s a signal to foreign investors that their assets are safe,” says Daniel McDowell, Maxwell Advisory Board Professor of International Affairs. “It matters because a strong defense projects security of assets in a way that is distinct from the financial regulations in a country.”

Jiahuan Lu, associate professor of public administration and international affairs, has co-edited a new research handbook, Nonprofit Organization Management in China: Research and Practice (Routledge, 2026). The volume examines nonprofit management in China through a comparative, organizational lens rather than the state-society framework common in earlier scholarship. 

The article, co-authored by Professor and Chair of Political Science Seth Jolly, was published in the Journal of Politics.

Bernard Appiah, associate professor of public health, delves into the power of combining entertainment and engagement in public health communications.

Four faculty members have received tenure in their promotion to associate professor, while one has been promoted to full professor and another to associate teaching professor.

Bob Bifulco has joined the dean’s office leadership team and faculty have stepped into new roles guiding the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs and the Law, Society and Policy program.

“In fact, that statistic was completely wrong. It was not like those deaths were not excess deaths. They were just South Asians who happened to die in Qatar from this time period,” says Natalie Koch, professor of geography and the environment, about the report in The Guardian that stated more than 6,500 guest workers died since the cup was awarded to the country.