The Foundation's program in International Affairs encourages independent critical thinking on major world issues, including the maintenance of peace and security in a nuclear age, the problems of managing an increasingly interdependent world economy, and the causes and consequences of refugee and migrant flows. Support also is given for research and dissemination of information on U.S. foreign policy and on important topics of international and regional relations, particularly those concerning Third World countries. Finally, the Foundation assists efforts to improve the operation of international institutions and to strengthen research and training in certain underdeveloped fields of foreign area studies.

Among the year's highlights were eighteen major grants for research and advanced training on international peace and security; an effort to forge closer links among the worldwide community of economic policy analysts; and a program of exchanges of foreign affairs experts with the People's Republic of China.

INTERNATIONAL PEACE AND SECURITY

Since the late 1950s the Foundation has been an important source of private support for independent scholarly work on peace, security, and arms control, having provided at least $40 million for research and training in both the United States and abroad. Many of the world's leading defense and arms control analysts have received Foundation support. The central purpose of this grant making has been to stimulate the search for new approaches to the preservation of peace and the avoidance of war, particularly nuclear war, and to build an international group of nongovernmental experts capable of providing responsible critiques of official policies.

In a continuation of this effort, the Foundation in 1983 invited more than 120 universities and research institutions in eighteen countries to submit proposals for research and training on themes relating to the East-West conflict, regional security of Third World nations, international conflict resolution and peacekeeping, and nuclear and conventional arms and their control. Analysts were asked to develop fresh approaches that would engage scholars from a wide range of disciplines and different countries and that would also foster public discussion of security and arms control issues. With the aid of a panel of experts, the Foundation awarded grants totaling $3.7 million to sixteen institutions in seven countries.

Of the winning proposals, seven were explicitly for the training of a new generation of analysts in this country and abroad. For example, the University of Illinois received funds to train U.S. and Asian specialists on the security problems of South Asia. A related award went to the Australian National University for training of students from Southeast Asia in international relations, strategic studies, and related topics.

Other grants for training went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which offers a broad array of courses on nuclear strategy, U.S. defense policy, and the technology and politics of arms control; to the Free University of Berlin, which will train a dozen young Germans on East-West security issues and related topics; to the University of Edinburgh, for advanced training in Soviet military theory and practice; to the University of Lancaster (United Kingdom), for a master's program in science, technology, and international relations; and to the Research Institute for Peace and Security (Japan), for training of Japanese scholars on strategic and security issues.

The other awards will support research and, in some cases, training on five broad topics: Soviet security policies and East-West relations; the security of Third World countries; European security; conventional military forces; and the ethical and moral dimensions of nuclear weapons and military competition.

For example, on the theme of U.S.-Soviet security relations, a group of political scientists, psychologists, and specialists on the Soviet Union at Columbia University will examine whether the insights of social psychology can help explain the misperceptions that U.S. and Soviet policy makers have of each other and how these misperceptions influence Soviet-American conflict and cooperation. Columbia also received support for work on regional and superpower rivalries in South Asia and the Persian Gulf region.

The security relations between the northern industrialized countries