New Era International (NEI) assesses how scholars and policymakers in key strategic regions of the world view the political and economic choices that will drive global foreign policy over the next 5-10 years. Bridging the Gap partners with a host institution and invites leading thinkers from academia, business, and government for three days of structured discussion focused at each site on a single area of uncertainty in the evolving international environment.

The goals of the initiative are to:

1. Shift the discourse on specific contemporary foreign policy challenges to an analytically useful and empirically relevant framework where the conventional discourses employed in international relations scholarship have proven of limited policy utility

2. Identify and explore the most important tensions and complementarities in the perspectives of global actors

3. Develop concrete insights as well as a research agenda in order to contribute to both scholarly and policy-centered understandings of the challenges facing global decision makers

The first two New Era International workshops were held in Fall 2013 and Spring 2016 in Singapore, in partnership with the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University. These workshops focused on regional views on the definition and provision of regional public goods—infectious disease prevention, energy governance, and cyber-security— in the East Asia Pacific. The workshops employed scenarios and other methods to help participants move beyond their particular national, disciplinary, and occupational perspectives, while drawing on each individual’s distinctive expertise.

New Era International 2017–18 took place over two workshops at American University’s School of International Service and the University of Sydney’s Center for International Security Studies. This iteration of the project seeks to understand how a decline in the capacity of international institutions will affect global public goods provision through case-comparative analysis conducted by scholars with policy-relevant research expertise on the topic.