page_title: Brown University
section_title: The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
hierarchical_section_title: Brown University / Academics / The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
caption_attribution_description: English: Stephen Robert Hall, rear view from Starr Plaza.
context_page_description: Brown University is a private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, it is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution.
  At its foundation, Brown was the first college in the U.S. to accept students regardless of their religious affiliation. Its engineering program was established in 1847. It was one of the early doctoral-granting U.S. institutions in the late 19th century, adding masters and doctoral studies in 1887. In 1969, Brown adopted a New Curriculum sometimes referred to as the Brown Curriculum after a period of student lobbying. The New Curriculum eliminated mandatory "general education" distribution requirements, made students "the architects of their own syllabus" and allowed them to take any course for a grade of satisfactory or no-credit which is unrecorded on external transcripts.
context_section_description: The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs is a center for the study of global issues and public affairs and is one of the leading institutes of its type in the country. It occupies an architecturally distinctive building designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly. The institute was initially endowed by Thomas Watson, Jr., Brown class of 1937, former Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and longtime president of IBM. Institute faculty includes, or formerly included, Italian prime minister and European Commission president Romano Prodi, Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Chilean president Ricardo Lagos Escobar, Mexican novelist and statesman Carlos Fuentes, Brazilian statesman and United Nations commission head Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, Indian foreign minister and ambassador to the United States Nirupama Rao, American diplomat and Dayton Peace Accords author Richard Holbrooke (Brown '62), and Sergei Khrushchev, editor of the papers of his father Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union.
  The institute's curricular interest is organized into the principal themes of development, security, and governance—with further focuses on globalization, economic uncertainty, security threats, environmental degradation, and poverty. Three Brown undergraduate concentrations (majors) are hosted by the Watson Institute—Development Studies, International Relations, and Public Policy. Graduate programs offered at the Watson Institute include the Graduate Program in Development (Ph.D.) and the Public Policy Program (M.P.A). The institute also offers Post Doctoral, professional development and global outreach programming. In support of these programs, the Institute houses various centers, including the Brazil Initiative, Brown-India Initiative, China Initiative, Middle East Studies center, The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) and the Taubman Center for Public Policy. In recent years, the most internationally cited product of the Watson Institute has been its Costs of War Project, first released in 2011 and continuously updated. The Project comprises a team of economists, anthropologists, political scientists, legal experts, and physicians, and seeks to calculate the economic costs, human casualties, and impact on civil liberties of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since 2001.
caption: Stephen Robert Hall of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, opened 2018, was designed by Toshiko Mori
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