Welcome to The Institute of World Politics, a graduate school devoted to the study of statecraft, national security, and international affairs. Statecraft is the use of the various instruments of power in service of national interests and purposes, including the cause of peace with freedom and justice.
The Institute was founded to fill a major national need: to supply professional education in statecraft, national security, and foreign policy that no other school offers and that few people in government acquire except haphazardly by on-the-job experience over the course of an entire career.
We emphasize the development of a capacity to think strategically so as to detect and understand threats and political-strategic opportunities; prevent, manage, mitigate, resolve, and prevail in international conflicts; match the ends and means of policy; and to do all this in ways that minimize the necessity of using force.
At the Institute, we believe that when governments resort to force it is often a sign of the failure effectively to use the many non-military instruments of power. Thus, we maintain that the most fruitful study of statecraft involves study of all the instruments of power – including several that are often neglected – and how they must be used ethically and prudently. When force must be used, we believe that it must be strategically integrated with these other instruments in order to achieve policy goals most effectively and with minimum loss of life.
At IWP, the study of statecraft rests on a foundational curriculum of selected liberal arts that today are seldom mastered sufficiently for purposes of successful professional work in the most sensitive functions of government.
Our curriculum is designed to serve three corollary purposes, each of which we believe is essential to effectiveness in statecraft. One is the cultivation of realism about human nature and the nature of world politics, in order to avoid a recurring tendency toward wishful thinking or willful blindness – what Solzhenitsyn called “the desire not to know,” or what Orwell described as “the will to disbelieve the horrible.” The second is the cultivation of civic virtue and a proper sense of responsibility in the use of power. The third is to instill a spirit of idealism – especially a spirit of service to the public in the defense of civilization. Each of these constitutes an essential part of a time-honored yet contemporary desideratum: character-building education in moral leadership.
Our faculty is truly unique, consisting of professors who not only have the necessary academic credentials, but also substantial experience as practitioners, particularly at the senior levels of government, in the subjects which they teach.
Our location in Washington, D.C. – just blocks from the White House and minutes from the Pentagon, State Department, and other related agencies – has assisted the Institute in establishing an extensive network of current and former senior officials in all branches of government, who are included as guest lecturers in many of our courses.
The Institute has successfully broken into the nation’s most competitive foreign affairs education market, offering a curriculum that is particularly useful to current and aspiring professionals in the relevant fields. The fact that students enrolled for several years at a time when the Institute had not yet launched its Master’s degree program reveals that they found something here more than just formal academic credentials – they found education worth pursuing for the value it adds to professional work in the field. Today, IWP offers three degrees and eight certificates from which to choose.
In recent years, our nation has been reawakened to the need for concern about matters of war and peace, and has recognized anew that national security and peace are the highest public policy priority, upon which everything in our national life depends. In response to this enhanced awareness, The Institute of World Politics is prepared to help educate a new generation of leadership for the nation and the world.
John Lenczowski, Ph.D., Founder, Chancellor, and President Emeritus