Think Tanks

Our team, along with our partners at the Atlantic Council Foresight, Strategy, and Risks Initiative, has been working with the Zurich Insurance Group to develop forecasts and a series of reports assessing three categories of of risk affecting governments and businesses worldwide: cyber, demographic and geopolitical.

View the report on forecasting cyber risk here and our specialized cyber risk dashboard here. 

View our reference report on geopolitical risk here and another recent report here.

The African Futures Project is an ongoing collaboration between the Pardee Center and the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), headquartered in Pretoria, South Africa. The ISS, established in 1991 as the Institute for Defense Policy, is a pan-African think tank focused on issues of human security. The Pardee Center and the ISS have come together to leverage each other’s expertise and to develop a series of scenario-based, quarterly policy briefs on topics such as the potential for a green revolution or for malaria eradication in Africa (each brief also has a supporting video feature). Together, we provide forward-looking, policy-relevant material like the African Futures 2050 report, a comprehensive look at expectations for human development, economic growth, and sociopolitical change in Africa over the next four decades.

To date, the African Futures Project has received funding from Frederick S. Pardee; the Hanns Seidel Foundation; the Open Society Foundation; the British High Commission; Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada, and the governments of Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) is a leading institution in the global Chronic Poverty Advisory Network. The Pardee Center contributed to a publication of ODI in late 2013 on "The Geography of Poverty, Disasters, and Climate Extremes in 2030". IFs was the tool that ODI personnel used for poverty scenario development.

The Pardee Center has worked with the RAND Frederick S. Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition.  One project was to incorporate information on World Bank and IMF lending into the financial flow system of IFs.  Another was to explore IFs within the RAND Center’s Robust Adaptive Policy or Robust Decision Making approach.  We continue to have connections with our sister Pardee Center.

The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) is a non-partisan, independent institute of the U.S. government charged with promoting peace and resolving conflict. A Pardee Center project for the USIP prepared a study published by the institute reviewing a wide range of projects that assess what are variously called fragile, vulnerable, or failed states. That effort was a foundational piece in our own efforts to build upon such assessments of countries today and historically, so as to create a measure of performance risk and vulnerability to conflict prospectively.