Our Impact

A core tenet of the Belfer Center’s mission is to educate and train the next generation of experts and leaders in science and international affairs. In the decades since the Center's inception, more than 1000 fellows, graduating students, faculty and staff have moved on to influential positions in government, academia, and other sectors in the U.S. and abroad.  A significant portion of our alums stem from the International Security Program, the oldest and largest of our fellowship cohorts. 

Center faculty, fellows, and staff have been called to serve in administrations within the United States and internationally. Among those in the current Biden administration are Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor, Nicholas Burns, Ambassador to China; Samantha Power, Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); and Bonnie Jenkins, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. Former fellows serving in government and policy-related research centers in other parts of the world include Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister of Canada; Alvin Tan, Minister of State for Culture, Community and the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation; National Energy Authority; and Halla Logadóttir, Director-General of Iceland’s National Energy Authority. 

In the global academic arena, Center alumni sit on faculties and lead departments in prestigious and influential academic institutions and security-focused programs around the world. 

Following the coup attempt against Soviet leader and reformer Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, Belfer Center security experts shaped signature U.S. legislation to secure nuclear weapons following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. 

Belfer Center experts produced the first comprehensive analysis of what could happen to the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons and how to control the fate of that arsenal. Soviet Nuclear Fission: Control of the Nuclear Arsenal in a Disintegrating Soviet Union (1991) became known simply as the “Harvard Report.” 

On November 19, U.S. Senators Sam Nunn (D) and Richard Lugar (R) invited then Center Director Ash Carter to give a briefing on the Harvard report and asked him to help draft legislation. With unprecedented speed, Congress passed the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991 (Nunn-Lugar Act) on November 26, 1991, authorizing $400 million to help the Soviet Union move, disable, or destroy many of its nuclear weapons.

Ash Carter, along with the Center’s Graham Allison, Elizabeth Sherwood (Randall), and Laura Holgate were later called to Washington to put the plan into action. 

Few topics in international politics are discussed as widely and intensely as the uses and expressions of power. Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor Joseph S. Nye, also a former Belfer Center director, is connected worldwide with “soft power,” a term he coined in the late 1980s and refined in his books, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (1990), and Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004).

Soft power, Nye wrote, “depends on the currency of attraction rather than force or payoffs; soft power depends in part on how we frame our own objectives.” 

Leaders from China to Europe often cite the term in their public narratives and policy strategies; it has become a feature in national strategies across several U.S. administrations. 

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina raised serious policy questions about how effective disaster recovery management is conducted. “Clearly, there was a leadership role in New Orleans for the Kennedy School,” said Doug Ahlers, then a Belfer Center Senior Fellow who conceptualized and led our Broadmoor Project: New Orleans Recovery. The Project was launched in 2006 to work with residents of New Orleans’ hard-hit Broadmoor community to design and implement a strategy for their post-Katrina recovery.

Graduate students from the Kennedy School and other parts of Harvard put their governance and planning skills into action. They trained and assisted Broadmoor residents in preparing plans to rebuild their community, tracking displaced residents, and writing funding proposals.The Project helped bring the community back to life and facilitated opportunities for Broadmoor leaders to enhance their skills through Kennedy School executive education programs, including LaToya Cantrell, who headed the Broadmoor Neighborhood Association and is now Mayor of New Orleans. 

The highly successful initiative has been recognized as a model for best practices in disaster recovery and emulated elsewhere throughout the U.S. and around the world.

Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which raised serious concerns about the security of the 2020 elections, the Belfer Center launched the Defending Digital Democracy Project (D3P) to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks. The Project prepared and trained election officials across the country to secure their procedures and processes against attacks. D3P also helped shape election security legislation in 2018 and put many of its alumni into the cyber security space.

D3P was led by Eric Rosenbach, along with Co-Directors Robby Mook and Matt Rhoades, former campaign managers for Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney.  Through a series of playbooks and tabletop exercises designed for state and local election officials and political campaigns, D3P developed practical guidance to improve election security and integrity across the U.S. 

Belfer Center experts informed U.S. congressional leaders with balanced assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.  The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) -- an agreement between Iran and the U.S., U.K., EU, China, France, Germany, and the Russian Federation -- was designed to place restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program and include monitoring of Iran’s nuclear activities.

To provide Congress with a concise review of the complex agreement and the accompanying UN Security Council Resolution 2231, the Belfer Center compiled and published The Iran Nuclear Deal: A Definitive Guide and distributed it to all members of Congress. 

Led by Gary Samore, then Executive Director for Research at the Center, the team of experts who prepared the guide included Democrats, Republicans, independents, and internationals. Samore said in 2024, “I remember passing out copies at a closed briefing for the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Some senators eventually voted in favor of the deal; others opposed, but all appreciated having a clear and comprehensive analysis of the agreement to guide their vote.”

Recognizing that climate change is happening faster in the Arctic than anywhere else in the world and determining that it required further study, the Belfer Center created the Arctic Initiative in 2017. Since its launch, the Initiative has established itself as a pivotal player in tackling the challenges of Arctic climate change and its implications for the rest of the world. 

One of the specific areas our Arctic Initiative team is tackling is permafrost thaw, which is accelerating global warming and requiring much greater reductions in human emissions to stabilize the Earth's temperature. In April 2022, we launched Permafrost Pathways, in conjunction with two other organizations, with the goal of informing and developing adaptation and mitigation strategies that address the local and global impacts of Arctic permafrost thaw. 

Along with its research and policy engagement, the Arctic Initiative is helping train the next generation of Arctic leaders. The Initiative has established Harvard Kennedy School courses on the Arctic, student-oriented Arctic Innovation Labs, and workshops that specifically focus on Indigenous youth.

Professor Graham Allison, who heads the Avoiding Great Power Wars Project, met in March 2024 with China’s President Xi Jinping. Allison’s primary purpose in meeting with Xi was to discuss how to avoid a war that neither country would survive. President Xi and his team had expressed special interest in Allison’s book Destined for War: Can the U.S. and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? which argues that “an irresistible rising China is on course to collide with an immovable America.” The likely result of this competition would be war, according to the historian Thucydides.

Our Avoiding Great Power War Project conducted a major study on the competition between China and the U.S. over the past 20 years.  They study was published in 2021 and 2022 as a four-part discussion paper series titled “The Great Rivalry: China vs. the U.S. in the 21st Century,” delving into the technology, military, economic, and diplomatic arenas.

The ideas presented in the Great Rivalry publications have had extensive influence, including informing President Joe Biden’s China policy and the U.S. negotiating agenda ahead of the November 2023 APEC Summit in San Francisco, in which Presidents Biden and Xi announced the resumption of communication between their militaries.

In 1976, Paul Doty and his team founded the journal International Security, the first academic journal to focus exclusively on international security. Since its founding, International Security has been one of the most cited scholarly journals in its field. International Security ranked 4th out of 96 international relations journals for Impact Factor in the Web of Science Journal Citation Reports. It has ranked in the top 5 every year since 1996, and has ranked 1st 10 times.

The journal has published numerous articles that have played important roles in scholarly and policy debates since the journal’s inception. A recent example is “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion” by Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman (Summer 2019). The article drove a groundswell of new research and corrected the conventional wisdom: Interdependence has costs as well as benefits.