Geneva Graduate Institute
The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, commonly referred to as the Geneva Graduate Institute, is a graduate-level research university in Geneva, Switzerland dedicated to international relations, development studies, and global governance.
Founded in 1927 by two senior League of Nations officials, the Geneva Graduate Institute was the world's first graduate school dedicated solely to the study of international affairs. With Maison de la Paix acting as its primary campus, the Institute is located blocks from the United Nations Office at Geneva, International Labour Organization, World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, International Committee of the Red Cross, World Intellectual Property Organization and many other international organisations.
Today, the institute enrolls around a thousand graduate students from over 100 countries, including nearly 90% of whom are foreign-born. It is officially a bilingual English-French institution, although most classes are in English. A member of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs, it runs joint degree programmes with Smith College, Yale University and McGill University, and is Harvard Kennedy School's only partner institution to co-deliver double degrees.
The Institute maintains strong links with the League of Nations's successor, the United Nations, where many alumni have gone on to work, including one secretary-general, seven assistant secretaries-general, and three under-secretaries-general. Alumni have also served as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, International Labour Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and as commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and High Commissioner for Human Rights.
History
Early years
The Graduate Institute of International Studies was co-founded in 1927 by two scholar-diplomats working for the League of Nations Geneva secretariat: the Swiss-American William Rappard, director of the Mandates Section, and the Frenchman Paul Mantoux, director of the Political Section. Rappard, then rector of the University of Geneva, conceived the Graduate Institute as a way to draw on the deep pool of expertise in Geneva and to cement transatlantic ties. With the notion that it might be named the "Wilson Institute", after U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, Rappard saw it as a school for future American diplomats. The Institute was affiliated to the University of Geneva, though independent in its program of studies and personnel.Initial funding was provided by the U.S.-based Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund, which for its part conceived the Institute as playing the role of an "international economic observation post." The Swiss government and Canton of Geneva provided matching contributions. Funding from American philanthropic organizations, primarily the Rockefeller Foundation as part of its initiative to promote a scientific approach to international relations, continued until 1954.At the time, the Geneva Graduate Institute was "among the most important centres of scholarship" in international relations alongside other schools, mostly located in Europe, including the Institute of Higher International Studies in Paris, the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin, the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, and the Walsh School of Foreign Service in the United States. In the 1920s, London School of Economics director William Beveridge wrote that he regarded the Geneva Graduate Institute as a competing centre for the emerging study of international relations, arguing that LSE offered a superior setting for prolonged academic work in the field.
The Geneva Graduate Institute's original mandate was based on a close working relationship with both the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization. It was agreed that in exchange for training staff and delegates, the Institute would receive intellectual resources and diplomatic expertise from the aforementioned organisations. According to its statutes, the Geneva Graduate Institute was "an institution intended to provide students of all nations the means of undertaking and pursuing international studies, most notably of a historic, judicial, economic, political and social nature."
To fulfill its mission, the Geneva Graduate Institute developed starting in the mid-1920s a system of summer cours temporaires, known as the Geneva Institute of International Relations, with financial support by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The courses were given by guest lecturers on a weekly, semester, or yearly basis. They attracted scholars like Raymond Aron, René Cassin, Luigi Einaudi, John Kenneth Galbraith, G. P. Gooch, Gottfried Haberler, Friedrich von Hayek, Hersch Lauterpacht, Lord McNair, Gunnar Myrdal, Harold Nicolson, Philip Noel Baker, Pierre Renouvin, Lionel Robbins, Jean-Rodolphe de Salis, Harold Laski, Eric Voegelin, Carlo Sforza, Jacob Viner, Quincy Wright and Martin Wight.A different initiative, the Geneva School of International Studies, also offered summer programs at the Geneva Graduate Institute starting in 1923. These schools were created by both Lucie Barbier Zimmern and her husband Alfred Zimmern. They were funded by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and several other wealthy American donors. They attracted hundreds of students yearly and proved particularly popular with American students. They also attracted luminaries such as Jane Addams and John Maynard Keynes. The "Geneva Schools" or "Zimmern Schools," as they became known, were taught by leading scholars like Louis Eisenmann, Ernst Jäckh, Paul Mantoux, and Arnold J. Toynbee alongside a variety of "public men" such as Edvard Beneš, Lord David Cecil, Paul Hymans, Fridtjof Nansen, and Arthur Salter, 1st Baron Salter. The last Geneva School was held in 1939.
World War II
The Geneva Graduate Institute had become known in the 1930s as a rallying point for neoliberal scholars, with economist Lionel Robbins calling it an "oasis of sanity" amid the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. It attracted leading neoliberal economists including Ludwig Von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke and Michael A. Heilperin, who formed an intellectual community with employees of the nearby General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and League of Nations secretariats, such as Gottfried Haberler, and with academics who presented key research at the Geneva Graduate Institute, including Friedrich Hayek and Lionel Robbins. Historian Quinn Slobodian proposed in 2018 the existence of a so-called Geneva School of economics to describe this group of economists and political economists, whom he characterizes as "ordo-globalists" who promoted the creation of global institutions to safeguard the unimpeded movement of capital across borders. The Geneva School combined the "Austrian emphasis on the limits of knowledge and the global scale with the German ordoliberal emphasis on institutions and the moment of the political decision." Geneva School economists were instrumental in organizing the Mont Pelerin Society, a neoliberal academic society of economists and political philosophers that assembled in nearby Mont Pèlerin.Other faculty fleeing countries with Nazi regimes also included and Georges Scelle for law, Maurice Bourquin for diplomatic history, and Swiss jurist Paul Guggenheim. Subsequently, more scholars would join the Institute's faculty. Hans Kelsen, theorist and philosopher of law, Guglielmo Ferrero, Italian historian, and Carl Burckhardt, scholar and diplomat were employed at the Geneva Graduate Institute.
Expansion
With the Rockefeller Foundation ending its funding in 1954, the Canton of Geneva and the Swiss government began to bear most of the costs associated with the Institute. This transfer of financial responsibility coincided with the arrival of Rappard's successor as the Institute's director, historian Jacques Freymond in 1955. Freymond inaugurated a period of great expansion, increasing the range of subjects taught and the number of both students and faculty. Nevertheless, the school remained small during that period. Before the 1980s, the faculty never exceeded 25 members. Under Freymond's tenure, the Geneva Graduate Institute hosted many international colloquia that discussed preconditions for East–West negotiations, relations with China and its rising influence in world affairs, European integration, techniques and results of politico-socioeconomic forecasting, the causes and possible antidotes to terrorism, and Pugwash Conference concerns. Freymond's term also saw many landmark publications, including the Treatise on international law by Paul Guggenheim and the six-volume compilation of historical documents relating to the Communist International. In the 1980s, after the end of Freymond's tenure, Geneva Graduate Institute faculty members, including Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann and Jan Tumlir, played a significant role in reforming and transforming the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade into the World Trade Organization.Reorganization
In 2008, the Graduate Institute of International Studies absorbed the Graduate Institute of Development Studies, and was thereby renamed as the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. IUED was founded by historian Jacques Freymond in 1961 as the Centre genevois pour la formation des cadres africains, later renamed Institut Africain de Genève, or African Institute of Geneva. It was among the first institutions in Europe to develop the scholarly field of sustainable development. It was also known for the critical view of many of its professors on development aid, as well as for its journal, the Cahiers de l'IUED.In 2009, the Geneva Graduate Institute ended its previous affiliation with the University of Geneva when it became an independent, Swiss government-accredited university. Prior to this, its accreditation had depended on its partnership with the University of Geneva. The master's and doctoral degrees originally awarded by the Geneva Graduate Institute and the University of Geneva were transferred to the Geneva Graduate Institute, while the bachelor's degree in international relations, formerly awarded by the Graduate Institute of International Studies, was taken over by the University of Geneva. Since 2016, student registration has also been transferred from the University of Geneva to the Geneva Graduate Institute.
A loose partnership with the University of Geneva has remained in place including through joint schools and joint degrees.