Keisuke Minai. (2026, April 12). Qatar's mediation diplomacy strength: An analysis of reactions to Israel's September 2025 attack. The SAIS Review of International Affairs. https://saisreview.sais.jhu.edu/qatars-mediation-diplomacy-strength-an-analysis-of-reactions-to-israels-september-2025-attack/

Keisuke Minai used the Formal Bilateral Influence Capacity (FBIC) Index and Global Power Index (GPI) from the Pardee's Institute's Diplometrics research program to explore Qatar's use of mediation diplomacy following an air strike in its capital in September 2025. According to Professor Minai, their advanced statistical analysis "confirms that Qatar’s mediation activities are positively associated with its international influence in the long term, while its national power plays a role in the short term."

Hughes, B. B. (2025, July 22). Analysis of integrated global SDG pursuit: Challenges and progress. Sustainability, 17(15), 6672. https://doi.org/10.3390/su17156672

How can we more fully analyze potential progress toward the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, globally and by country? Methodological challenges include (1) the comprehensiveness of issue coverage, integration of causal elaboration, and geographic detail in available models; (2) clear quantification of goal targets; and (3) specification of scenario interventions that connect meaningfully to the potential leverage of agents. This study uses a large-scale, global but country-based analytical system that tightly integrates multiple issue-area models to push against methodological challenges. It explores the prospects for progress toward selected quantified targets across all goals, using scenarios that consider potential agency-linked interventions relative to the Current Path (CP). The scenarios distinguish interventions focused on Human Development (HD) and natural system sustainability (NSS) plus a Combined SDG scenario (CSDG). Even with a large, integrated push through 2030 and 2050, the world in aggregate will fail to reach many targets, and a great many of the 188 countries represented will fall short. Also of interest is possible tension between the underlying thrusts of HD- and NSS-oriented interventions. Both the Current Path of key variables and intervention leverage constraints make NSS goals harder to reach than HD goals. Because synergies of action considerably outweigh trade-offs, however, complementarity better characterizes the two intervention sets.

Moyer, J., Meisel, C., Szymanski-Burgos, A., Scott, A., Casiraghi, M., Kurkul, A., Hughes, M., Kettlun, W., McKee, K., Matthews, A., (2025, March 17). When heads of government and state (HOGS) fly: Introducing the country and organizational leader travel (COLT) dataset measuring foreign travel by HOGS. International Studies Quarterly, Volume 69, Issue 2, June 2025, sqaf013, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqaf013

Despite representing a crucial day-to-day diplomatic tool, travel by heads of government and state (HOGS) has remained an under-investigated topic in international relations, inhibiting our ability to better understand how these visits change foreign aid, interstate conflict, diplomatic affinities, and more. Here, we fill that gap by introducing the first global dataset on the foreign visits of state leaders, the Country and Organizational Leader Travel (COLT) dataset, which allows us to present descriptive analysis and assess the monadic and dyadic drivers of foreign travel by HOGS. We find evidence consistent with previous literature explaining the motives of leader travel: development, trade, conflict, institutional co-membership, and regime type. In addition, we show a potential further application of the dataset, presenting original results on the relation between diplomatic visits and international trade. Overall, these data represent a unique indicator of international interaction that cuts across levels of analysis.

Andrijevic, M., Zimm, C., Moyer, J.D., Muttarak, R., et al. (2025, February 4). Representing gender inequality in scenarios improves understanding of climate challenges. Nature Climate Change. 15, 138–146. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02242-5

Achieving gender equality can increase societies’ capacities to deal with climate change. Here we highlight empirical connections between gender equality and climate change adaptation and mitigation to propose a structured and detailed inclusion of gender-related aspects in the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway framework. The introduction of hypothetical pathways of gender (in)equality in the scenario space can help analyse interactions with other socioeconomic drivers and subsequent implications for adaptation and mitigation options. The extent of challenges to climate change adaptation and mitigation may substantially change depending on the rate at which societies progress towards equal access to resources and opportunities for self-realization for all genders. We propose steps that the scenario community could take to enrich the next generation of socioeconomic pathways.

Solórzano, J., Hughes, B., Irfan, M., Xiong, Y., Kwasi, S., Ibrahim, A., Makhamatova, S., Hanna, T., Moyer, J. (2024, December 20). Protocol for making forecasts exogenous in the International Futures model. One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xpro.2024.103414

Understanding future dynamics and trends in human and natural development is foundational for creating appropriate policy strategies to address planetary and development challenges. Here, we present a protocol for adding exogenous series for key variables, such as the shared socioeconomic pathways, to the database of the International Futures (IFs) integrated model. We describe steps for installing IFs and the SQLiteStudio software, understanding the IFs database, importing series, running the model, and extracting results.
For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Moyer.

Abu, T., Achore, M., Irfan, M., Musah, I., Azzika, T. (2024, December). The past, present, and future of Ghana’s WASH sector. An explorative analysis. Water Security. 23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasec.2024.100185

Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) are fundamental to human health and development. Initiatives like the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) propelled WASH inequities to the forefront of development. Several countries have undergone reforms to ensure universal access to WASH. Using Ghana as a case study, we traced the evolutionary path of Ghana’s WASH sector highlighting persistent socio-ecological and political-economic factors shaping the current WASH sector reforms and access. We then engage in an integrated assessment modelling to examine the viability and implications of achieving targets of SDG 6 using the International Futures simulation. We find a more feasible pathway to achieving universal WASH access should prioritize eradicating open defecation and surface water use often experienced in rural and urban slums.

Meisel, C., Moyer, J. D., Matthews, A. S., Kaplan, O., Byrnes, R., Benjumea, K., Cribb, P., & Van Son, C. (2024, August 20). Bearing witness: Introducing the Perceived Mass Atrocities Dataset (PMAD). Journal of Peace Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433241249333

Led by Pardee's Associate Director of Geopolitical Analysis, Collin Meisel, and commissioned by the US State Department to support the Elie Weisel Act, this coding framework is a prime example of the Institute's goal to bridge the gap between academic work and policy-making communities. Congratulations to all of the hard-working Korbel students who contributed to this impressive research and all the co-authors on this outstanding accomplishment.

Abstract:

The risk factors and consequences of atrocities are deeply interconnected with questions of intra- and interstate stability and conflict, economic development, colonialism, and gender equality, as well as atrocity crime monitoring and prevention. However, there is no globally comparable measure of lethal and less-lethal atrocities. The Perceived Mass Atrocities Dataset (PMAD) is a country-year measure of atrocities with accompanying narratives. Built to support the US Congress’s Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018, PMAD enables the systematic comparison of the occurrence and magnitude of seven atrocity types, in addition to group-perpetrated violence against women and LGBTQIA+ groups, with aggregate atrocities indices for 196 countries from 2018 to 2022. PMAD offers a foundation for quantitative studies of atrocities as well as more qualitative, process-focused research of lethal and less-lethal violence with its single, divisible framework. The PMAD data highlight several regions where analysis of atrocities using data on only lethal atrocities would be inadequate, especially Central and Eastern Asia. The data can also facilitate research into the relationships between mass atrocities and gender discrimination, neopatrimonialism, and political polarization.

Hanna, T., Hughes, B.B., Irfan, M.T., Bohl, D.K., Solórzano et al. (2024, April 16). Sustainable Development Goal Attainment in the Wake of COVID-19: Simulating an Ambitious Policy Push. Sustainability. 3309. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16083309

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was not on course to meet key Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including SDG 1 (No Poverty) and SDG 2 (Zero Hunger). Some significant degree of additional effort was needed before the pandemic, and the challenge is now greater. Analyzing the prospects for meeting these goals requires attention to the combined effects of the pandemic and such additional impetus. This article assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on progress toward the SDGs and explores strategies to recover and accelerate development. Utilizing the International Futures (IFs) forecasting system and recognizing the near impossibility of meeting the goals by 2030, three scenarios are examined through to 2050: A pre-COVID-19 trajectory (No COVID-19), the current path influenced by the pandemic (Current Path), and a transformative SDG-focused approach prioritizing key policy strategies to accelerate outcomes (SDG Push). The pandemic led to a rise in extreme poverty and hunger, with recovery projected to be slow. The SDG Push scenario effectively addresses this, surpassing the Current Pathand achieving significant global improvements in poverty, malnutrition, and human development by 2050 even relative to the No COVID-19 path. The findings emphasize the need for integrated, transformative actions to propel sustainable development.