The International Summer Symposiums on Science and World Affairs
David Wright 
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 Participants at the 2nd Symposium, Princeton 1990  Participants at the 15th Symposium, Moscow 2003 |
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While INESAP marks an important milestone this year in celebrating its tenth anniversary, another process to engage and train technical researchers around the world is also marking an anniversary. The fifteenth meeting of the International Summer Symposiums on Science and World Affairs was held this summer (July 2003) in Moscow.
These meetings, which have included many of the same people who have long been involved with INESAP, began with a meeting in the summer of 1989 organized by the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). This meeting grew out of conversations between physicists Roald Sagdeev and Frank von Hippel about how to involve a new generation of Soviet scientists in technical research on arms control and international security. It brought together a group of scientists from the Soviet Union (and a small group from China) with scientists from the United States and Britain who were working on these issues. This meeting led to two important events.
The first was the founding of the Center for Arms Control, Energy, and Environmental Studies at MIPT by physics professor Anatoli Diakov. This was Russia's first independent center on these issues. It has produced a number of excellent Russian researchers who continue to work on these issues, and it continues to teach courses and train students in these areas.
The second event was a decision by a small group of us who took part in the first meeting (George Lewis, Lisbeth Gronlund, Valerie Thomas, and myself) to continue this process and organize future meetings. We also decided to change from the "school" format of the first meeting, in which established researchers gave a series of lectures, to a "symposium" format in which all participants give presentations and take part in discussions. Through the 5th Symposium in 1993 the meetings included – at the request of the Russians – an additional focus on energy and environmental issues, and included researchers and parallel sessions on these topics. By 1993, the meetings were growing very large and the security section decided to split off the following year to allow it grow to accommodate the surprisingly large number of scientists we were finding who were interested in attending.
The Symposiums have now included some 275 people – primarily scientists – from more than twenty countries. The central purpose of the Symposiums is to encourage and support the development of young scientists working on policy-oriented international security and arms control problems, particularly in countries where there is not a strong tradition of public interest science, and to integrate them into the international community of researchers with similar interests and backgrounds. For many participants, the Symposiums were their first involvement with the international security community, and many of these young participants went on to full-time careers in technical security analysis.
The meetings are intended to help develop analysts who know not only the technical issues, but who also understand the policy context and implications of these issues, and who understand ways to try to bring about policy change.
The Symposiums have as their core philosophy the idea that the security of individual nations is best attained by enhancing the security of all nations. Thus the Symposiums seek to develop in the participants a truly international perspective of security that is at the same time informed by an understanding of the security concerns of individual countries. Throughout each meeting, the organizers encourage participants to approach security issues (and their own research) not just as citizens of their home country but to adopt an international perspective and to bear in mind that there is more than one side to every security question.
Each Symposium includes roughly 40 participants, each of which is required to give a presentation on research they are doing or are planning to do. Each participant is allotted 45 minutes, with about half the time allotted to presenting his or her research and half to comments and discussion. The Symposium is not organized around specific topics; instead each participant talks about a research on a security issue that he or she has been conducting, or is preparing to conduct. In addition to individual talks, we also use some time slots at the meeting for group discussions on topics of special current interest.
Participants at each meeting are chosen to have a range of experience and expertise in the field, so that the new participants can learn from the more established participants. We have found in the past that this form of 'peer mentoring,' which continues beyond the time of the Symposium itself, has worked very successfully.
Moreover, the Symposiums have been particularly successful at fostering the exchange of information between researchers in different countries and in leading to international collaborations on research projects and conferences. They have been important in the development of new academic programs on security issues, such as the Program on Arms Control and Regional Security at Fudan University and the Arms Control Program in the Institute for International Studies at Tsinghua University.
In addition, we have used the Symposiums to identify candidates for fellowships and post-doctoral training and research positions in the United States. Since 1990, nearly 30 scientists have had such positions through programs at the Union of Concerned Scientists, MIT, and Princeton.
Primary funding for the Summer Symposiums over the years has come from the Ploughshares Fund and the W. Alton Jones Foundation. The MacArthur Foundation has also provided funding in recent years.
The 2004 Symposium is currently being planned for Tsinghua University in Beijing.
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Information about upcoming Symposiums as well as research and career resources is available at www.summersymposium.org. |
Summer Symposium in Berlin in 2001 
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