Centers & Institutes

The Maxwell School is home to six research centers and institutes. Two more are co-sponsored with other Syracuse University schools. Each of these institutes is organized around a theme or topic within the larger arena of public affairs.

The centers and institutes exist to serve two complementary missions. First, they augment the teaching activities of the degree programs by sponsoring symposia, seminars, speakers, and other activities that capitalize on the diversity and interdisciplinary traditions of the Maxwell School.

Second, they focus and facilitate research projects that fall within their topical areas. They link graduate students with faculty members in study, research, conferences, and publication. Much of the research is undertaken as team projects and reflects the cross-disciplinary character of the Maxwell School. In fact, it is within the centers and institutes, as much as anywhere, that one witnesses the intermingling of professional-degree and social-science scholars, and where theory, policy, and practice mix so freely.

Maxwell’s eight centers and institutes are:

Alan K. Campbell Public Affairs Institute. The institute promotes better understanding of contemporary challenges in democratic governance—particularly, the idea of citizenship, its evolution, and the conditions under which it thrives. Associates explore relationships among governments, nonprofits, media, and citizens to understand how institutions can be made more responsive to the needs and rights of those they serve.

Center for Environmental Policy and Administration. The center explores environmental issues from an integrated perspective that considers technical, social, and humanistic aspects of those matters and prepares leaders who can blend those dimensions as they confront the world’s complex environmental challenges.

Center for Policy Research. The center encompasses Maxwell's Metropolitan Studies and Aging Studies programs and is also the administrative home of the University Gerontology Center. It conducts a broad range of interdisciplinary research and related activities in aging, urban and regional studies. Primary topics of focus include aging and long-term care; urban and regional studies; education finance and accountability; public finance; and social welfare, poverty, and income security.

Center for Technology and Information Policy. The center focuses on the technical dimensions of public policy. It specializes in technology assessments, research-and-development policy, the use of technical information in decision-making, computers in public policy making, computer-based technology for management in public organizations, and technology transfer.

Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism. Co-sponsored with the SU College of Law, this institute examines pervasive questions of national security and counterterrorism law and policy. Topics of specific interest have included laws of armed conflict, information sharing and homeland security, the global war on terror, reorganization of the intelligence community, terrorist financing, investigating and prosecuting terrorists, and violent extremists and the political process.

Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics, and the Media. This institute is co-sponsored with SU’s College of Law and with the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. It addresses a central issue of democratic governance—how political power can be bound by law—by assessing the ways in which judicial independence is established and maintained.

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. The institute is named in honor of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, long-time U.S. Senator, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, U.S. ambassador to India, and a former faculty member of the Maxwell School. Its central mission is to facilitate research on issues raised by an increasingly interdependent world, and to broaden our understanding of challenges to the quality of governance worldwide. The institute houses regional study centers on Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East.

Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC). This interdisciplinary center is dedicated to the enhancement of knowledge about social conflicts; and to collaborative governance and collaborative problem solving through theory building, research, education, and practice.