Institute for Policy Studies

In an interview with TRT World reacting to Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire, Chuck Collins, Director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good and author of Burned by Billionaires, explains why this milestone is less a story about innovation than about the unchecked concentration of political power. “I think it’s a dark day for democracy. It’s a dark day for those of us concerned about concentrations of wealth and power,” Chuck says.

It has long been the dream of the U.S. foreign policy elite to bring Japan and South Korea into a tighter alliance. Notoriously dismissive of history, American leaders don’t understand why the two countries can’t just overcome their past differences. For these Americans, the imperative of strengthened security in the region is so much more important than the legacy of colonialism, disputes over textbooks, or the territorial squabble over Dokdo.

Para publicación inmediata Contacto de prensa abajo Guate, Guatemala – Un nuevo informe del Transnational Institute (TNI) y el Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) analiza cómo el sistema de arbitraje entre inversionistas y Estados (ISDS por sus siglas en inglés) ha sido utilizado por empresas mineras y energéticas para demandar a Guatemala por cientos de millones de dólares en medio de conflictos vinculados a la defensa del agua, los territorios y los derechos de los pueblos indígenas.

For Immediate Release Press contact below Guatemala City, Guatemala – On June 18, the Transnational Institute (TNI) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) released a timely new report that reveals how the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system has been used by mining and energy companies to sue Guatemala for hundreds of millions of dollars amid conflicts over local communities’ defense of water, land, and Indigenous rights.

The Republic of Colombia celebrated elections on May 31. Two candidates — Iván Cepeda on the left and Abelardo de la Espriella on the right — advanced to the final round to succeed President Gustavo Petro, the country’s first-ever leftist president. The final vote will take place on June 21. There were 13 candidates who threw their hat in this year’s presidential race, but only three contenders were seen as viable.

In this zoom event, we will launch three free online courses elaborated by the Global Working Group Beyond Development.

On June 1st, despite a ceasefire ostensibly underway in the US-Israeli war on Iran, Israel’s prime minister launched a major escalation against Lebanon, including threatening airstrikes against the Lebanese capital. The US president called the Israeli leader, furiously demanding an end to Israel’s escalation. Six days later, Israel attacked Beirut’s southern suburbs, long understood to be a red line for Hezbollah.

This week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was on hand in Normandy for the eighty-second anniversary of the D-Day invasion. He made the usual remarks about U.S. dedication to defending freedom, just as he did last year on a similar occasion. This time around, however, Hegseth veered off into controversial territory. Not that you can figure this out from the War Department’s anodyne summary of Hegseth’s speech.

In the three years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT and the emergence of similar technologies as ubiquitous in modern society, a handful of alarming stories about mental health crises linked with large language model-powered chatbots have broken through otherwise positive coverage of artificial intelligence. The parents of a 16-year-old from California sued OpenAI in the fall of 2025 alleging that ChatGPT encouraged him to take his own life.

In a wide-ranging interview with DW News, Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, explains why the discovery of a sophisticated 2,000-foot drug tunnel near San Diego — and the $45 million cocaine seizure that came with it — tells us far more about the failures of U.S. drug policy than it does about any victory against the cartels.