Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies

The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (French: Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement, abbreviated IHEID), also known as the Geneva Graduate Institute, is a public-private graduate-level university located in Geneva, Switzerland.

The institution counts one UN secretary-general (Kofi Annan), seven Nobel Prize recipients, one Pulitzer Prize winner, and numerous ambassadors, foreign ministers, and heads of state among its alumni and faculty. Founded by two senior League of Nations officials, the Graduate Institute maintains strong links with that international organisation's successor, the United Nations, and many alumni have gone on to work at UN agencies.

Overview

Founded in 1927, the Graduate Institute is the world's first graduate institute dedicated solely to the study of international affairs. It offered one of the first doctoral programmes in international relations in the world.

Today the school enrolls close to a thousand postgraduate students from over 100 countries. Foreign students make up nearly 90% of the student body and the school is officially a bilingual English-French institution, although the majority of classes are in English.

With Maison de la Paix acting as its primary seat of learning, the Institute's campuses are 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.

The school runs joint degree programmes with universities such as Smith College and Yale University, and is Harvard Kennedy School's only partner institution to co-deliver double degrees.

The school is a member of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs, a group of schools that specialize in public policy, public administration, and international affairs.

History

Founding and 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 William Rappard, director of the Mandates Section, and the Frenchman Paul Mantoux, director of the Political Section. A bilingual institution like the League, it was to train personnel for the nascent international organisation.

Rappard served as director from 1928 to 1955. The 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 (guest lecturers, etc.) from the aforementioned organisations. According to its statutes, the 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."

In its early years, the Graduate Institute had developed a system whereby cours temporaires (temporary courses) were given by guest lecturers on a week, semester, or yearlong basis, attracting 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.

Later, in the late 1920s and 1930s, summer schools of international relations held at the Graduate Institute, which were known as the Geneva School of International Studies, and covered general introductions to international relations, international law, and economic relations, became a must-go for students of international relations worldwide, particularly American ones. Organized by Oxford University international relations professor Alfred Zimmern, they would be attended by hundreds of students each year. The initiative that begun in 1923 operated in parallel with the early planning for the launch of the Graduate Institute and the experience acquired by the former helped to shape the latter. The 'Geneva Schools' or 'Zimmern Schools', as they became known, were taught by 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 Graduate Institute, which had become known in the late 1920s and 1930s as a stronghold of neoliberal scholarship, managed to attract a number of faculty and lecturers, particularly from countries in Nazi regimes, e.g., Hans Wehberg 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 Graduate Institute. Other arrivals included Ludwig von Mises, and another economist, Wilhelm Ropke.

Expansion

For a period of almost thirty years (1927–1954) the school was funded predominantly through the support of the Rockefeller Foundation. Since then the Canton of Geneva and the Swiss Federal Council bear most of the costs associated with the institute. This transfer of financial responsibility coincided with the 1955 arrival of William Rappard's successor as director of the institute, Lausanne historian Jacques Freymond. Freymond inaugurated a period of great expansion, increasing the range of subjects taught and the number of both students and faculty, a process that continued well after his retirement in 1978. Under Freymond's tenure, the 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 famous early Club of Rome reports, and the Futuribles project led by Bertrand de Jouvenel), the causes and possible antidotes to terrorism, Pugwash Conference concerns and much more. Freymond's term also saw many landmark publications, including the Treatise on international law by Professor Paul Guggenheim and the six-volume compilation of historical documents relating to the Communist International.

The Institute had a small size - before the 1980s the faculty never exceeded 25 members, the Institute had four faculty members who have received Nobel Prizes for economics – Gunnar Myrdal, Friedrich von Hayek, Maurice Allais, and Robert Mundell. Three alumni have been Nobel laureates.

Merger and renaming

In 2008, the Graduate Institute of International Studies absorbed the Graduate Institute of Development Studies (abbreviated IUED), a smaller postgraduate institution also based in Geneva and founded in 1961. To reflect its new and broader mission, the school was renamed Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.

The history of the Graduate Institute of Development Studies also involves Jacques Freymond, who founded the institution in 1961 as the Institut Africain de Genève, or African Institute of Geneva. It was among the pioneer institutions in Europe to develop the scholarly field of sustainable development. The school 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.

Academics

Admission to the Graduate Institute's study programmes is highly competitive, with only 14% of applicants attending the Graduate Institute in 2014. The Institute awards its own degrees. The Geneva Graduate Institute is home to eleven research centers.

The Graduate Institute does not award undergraduate degrees. As a small institution offering exclusively master's and PhD programmes, the Institute does not participate in university rankings that rank large universities. However, It has been ranked by a handful of rankings for specialized universities. In Foreign Policy's 2014 Inside the Ivory Tower ranking of best international relations schools in the world, the Graduate Institute's master's program was ranked 24th among Master's Programs for Policy Career in International Relations. It ranked 29th in 2018. Inside the Ivory Tower ranked its PhD program in international relations 47th worldwide in its 2018 ranking of top PhD programnes for academic career in international relations. In 2012, The Graduate Institute was listed among the Foreign Policy Association's "Top 50 International Affairs Graduate Programs."

The LL.M. in international dispute settlement, offered jointly with the University of Geneva by the Geneva Center for International Dispute Settlement, was ranked 2nd worldwide according to a 2012 survey of law firms conducted by the Global Arbitration Review. This same LL.M. also consistently featured in the top 10 LL.M. for alternative dispute resolution by the specialised website LL.M.-guide. The Graduate Institute's LL.M. in international law also featured in the top 10 LL.M. for public international law compiled by LLM-guide. The Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights' LL.M. in international humanitarian law and human rights—a joint programme between the Graduate Institute and the University of Geneva—also featured in LLM-guide's top 10 LL.M. programmes for human rights law.

Campus

The Campus de la paix is a network of buildings extending from Place des Nations (the United Nations Headquarters in Geneva) to the shores of Lake Geneva, spanning two public parks – Parc Barton and Parc Moynier.

Maison de la paix

The Graduate Institute's main campus is the Maison de la paix (literally "House of Peace"), which opened in 2013. The Maison de la Paix is a 38,000 meter-square glass building distributed into six connected sections. It contains the Davis Library, which holds 350,000 books about social sciences, journals and annual publications, making it one of Europe's richest libraries in the fields of development and international relations. It is named after two Institute alumni—Ambassador Shelby Cullom Davis and his wife Kathryn Davis, following the Davis' $10 million donation to the institute.

The neighboring The Edgar and Danièle de Picciotto Student Residence was completed in 2012 and provides 135 apartments for students and visiting professors. Another, larger student residence, the Grand Morillon Student Residence, opened in 2021. Japanese architect Kengo Kuma designed the 680-bed student housing building.

In addition to serving as the institute's main campus, the Maison de la paix also houses policy centres and advocacy groups with close ties to the Institute such as the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP) the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining, Interpeace, the International Institute of Humanitarian Law and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Historic villas

Another section of the campus are two historic villas situated by Lake Geneva, Villa Barton and Villa Moynier. Villa Barton served as the institute's main campus for most of the school's history. It now mostly houses administrative staff. Villa Moynier, created in 2001 and which opened in October 2009, houses the Institute-based Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights and Geneva Center for International Dispute Settlement. The building holds a symbolic significance as it was originally owned by Gustave Moynier, co-founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and subsequently used by the League of Nations and as the headquarters of the ICRC between 1933 and 1946.

Publications

• Journal of International Dispute Settlement – Established by the Graduate Institute and the University of Geneva in 2010, the JIDS is dedicated to international law with commercial, economic and financial implications. It is published by Oxford University Press.
• International Development Policy – A peer-reviewed e-journal that promotes cutting-edge research and policy debates on global development.
• European Journal of Development Research – A co-publication of the Graduate Institute and the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes with a multi-disciplinary focus.
• Medicine Anthropology Theory – An open-access journal that publishes scholarly articles, essays, reviews, and reports related to medical anthropology and science and technology studies.
• Relations internationales (fr) – Relations Internationales publishes research on international relations history ranging from the end of the 19th century to recent history.

Organisation

Leadership

The founding directors of the Graduate Institute of International Studies were Paul Mantoux (1927-1951) and William Rappard (1928-1955). The school was then headed by Jacques Freymond (1955-1978), Christian Dominicé (1978-1984), Lucius Caflisch (1984-1990), Alexandre Swoboda (1990-1998), Peter Tschopp (de) (1998-2002), Jean-Michel Jacquet (2002-2004) and Philippe Burrin (2004-2020). Its current director is Marie-Laure Salles.

Legal status

The Graduate Institute is constituted as a Swiss private law foundation, Fondation pour les hautes études internationales et du développement, sharing a convention with the University of Geneva. This is a particular organisational form, because the Graduate Institute is constituted as a foundation of private law fulfilling a public purpose. In addition, the political responsibility for the Institute shared between the Swiss Confederation and the canton of Geneva. Usually in Switzerland, it is the responsibility of the cantons to run public universities, except for the Federal Institutes of Technology (ETHZ and EPFL). The Graduate Institute is therefore something like a hybrid institution, in-between the two standard categories.

Foundation Board

The Foundation Board is the administrative body of the Institute. It assembles academics, politicians, people of public life and practitioners. Its members have included Carlos Lopes (ex-U.N. under secretary general), Julia Marton-Lefèvre (former director general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature) and Jacques Marcovitch.

International relations

Partnerships

The Graduate Institute has exchange partnerships with the following institutions internationally:

Networks

The Graduate Institute is an active member of the following associations and academic networks:

• APSIA – Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs: academic institutions specialising in international relations and international public policy are represented among APSIA's thirty-odd members.
• European University Association: Represents and supports more than 850 institutions of higher education in 46 countries, providing them with a forum for cooperation and exchange of information on higher education and research policies.
• Europaeum: Created at the initiative of the University of Oxford, the Europaeum is composed of ten leading European institutions of higher education and research.
• European Consortium for Political Research: The ECPR is an independent scholarly association that supports the training, research and cross-national cooperation of many thousands of academics and graduate students specialising in political science and all its sub-disciplines.
• European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes: The EADI is the largest existing network of research and training institutes active in the field of development studies.
• Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie: The AUF supports the build-up a French-language research area between French-speaking universities. The institute is one of 536 members belonging to the AUF and takes part in its exchange programmes in the fields of teaching and research.
• Swiss University Conference: The SUC is a governmental organisation tasked with accrediting officially recognized Swiss universities.

Academic awards and prizes conferred

The Paul Guggenheim Prize in International Law was created in 1981 and is awarded to young practitioners of international law on a biannual basis. The Edgar de Picciotto International Prize is awarded every two years and worth 100,000 Swiss Francs. It rewards an internationally renowned academic whose research has contributed to enhancing the understanding of global challenges and whose work has influenced policy-makers.

People

Alumni

The Graduate Institute has more than 24,000 alumni working around the world. Notable alumni and faculty include one UN secretary-general (Kofi Annan), seven Nobel Prize recipients, one Pulitzer Prize winner, and numerous ambassadors, foreign ministers, and heads of state.

• Kofi Annan – former secretary-general of the United Nations and 2001 Nobel Peace Prize recipient
• Rafael Grossi – Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency
• Mohamed ElBaradei – Egyptian jurist and diplomat, former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and 2005 Nobel Peace Prize recipient
• Leonid Hurwicz – Polish-American economist and mathematician, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2007
• Micheline Calmy-Rey – former president of Switzerland
• Kurt Furgler – former president of Switzerland
• Michel Kafando – interim president of Burkina Faso
• Alpha Oumar Konaré – ex-president of Mali
• Henri, Grand Duke of Luxembourg
• Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete – fourth president of Tanzania
• Nazim al-Qudsi - former President of Syria (1961-1963)

Faculty

Former faculty

Current faculty

References

Bibliography

• The Graduate Institute of International Studies Geneva: 75 years of service towards peace through learning and research in the field of international relations, The Graduate Institute, 2002.

External links

• Official website