What is the role of elites in shaping foreign policy? Did unaccountable foreign policy elites shape the post-1945 world order? Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations were vital in America's shift from isolationism to globalism, and in Britain's shift from Empire to its current pro-American orientation and were also fundamental in engineering public backing for a new world order. Inderjeet Parmar presents new evidence to show how well-organized and well-connected elite think tanks helped to change the world.

Abelson focuses on a host of high profile think tanks - including the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and the Project for the New American Century - and on the public and private channels they rely on to influence important and controversial foreign policies, including the development and possible deployment of a National Missile Defense and George Bush's controversial war on terror. In the process of uncovering how some of the nation's most prominent think tanks have established themselves as key players in the political arena, he challenges traditional approaches to assessing policy influence and suggests alternative models.

This book examines changing international dynamics through the lens of some of the leading think tanks from the emerging powers in the world. Through twelve case studies, the authors explore how security and international affairs think tanks in emerging powers collaborate with their policy makers to meet current and anticipate future foreign policy and security challenges. Overall, the book illustrates and analyzes how think tanks in a variety of political and economic contexts are able to contribute to their respective policy-making processes. Included in the discussions are the problems or successes that each respective nation’s think tanks face, where they feel the emerging nation will be positioned, and where they are failing to meet the policy challenges they face. The book provides a comprehensive look at successful foreign policy formulation to serve as examples for other think tanks in similar political and economic conditions.

Questions about the role and influence of think tanks in matters of foreign policy and geopolitics are both timely and important. The reconfiguration of global power, explosion of social media, shifts away from traditional print and oral-based ways of imparting knowledge, and the dramatic increase in the volume of information and ideas clamoring for the attention of policy-makers are changing the landscape of foreign policy-making and the pathways through which influence is achieved. This book explains the impact of think tanks on the framing of domestic and international conversations on matters of foreign policy and geopolitics. An international group of prominent experts examine these issues in specific countries and also across national and regional borders to better understand how governments and actors in civil society are influenced by the activities of think tanks.

Over the past half-century, think tanks have become fixtures of American politics, supplying advice to presidents and policy makers, expert testimony on Capitol Hill, and convenient facts and figures to journalists and media specialists. But what are think tanks? Who funds them? What kind of “research” do they produce? Where does their authority come from? And how influential have they become? In Think Tanks in America, Thomas Medvetz argues that the unsettling ambiguity of the think tank is less an accidental feature of its existence than the very key to its impact. By combining elements of more established sources of public knowledge—universities, government agencies, businesses, and the media—think tanks exert a tremendous amount of influence on the way citizens and lawmakers perceive the world, unbound by the more clearly defined roles of those other institutions. In the process, they transform the government of this country, the press, and the political role of intellectuals. Timely, succinct, and instructive, this provocative book will force us to rethink our understanding of the drivers of political debate in the United States.

Think tanks have become increasingly important in American politics foreign policy. In the last thirty years think tanks have emerged as major actors on the political stage, comparable in influence to large interest groups, political parties, and government agencies. In the same time span these think tanks have replaced universities as the main source for new policy ideas and the background research and arguments to justify them. This book discusses think tanks in general but focuses specifically on the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) in Philadelphia. Though a smallish "tank," FPRI has been enormously influential, feeding its ideas into government and policy debate even at the level of presidential politics. The author discusses FPRI within the context of the growing influence of presidential politics. The author discusses FPRI within the context of the growing influence of think tanks over public policy in general and foreign policy in particular.