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I spend a lot of time advising grad students, former students, and early-career folks with ambitions of being involved in some way with foreign policy.
A recent former student reached out asking about internships after their master’s degree, and had already been in touch with a few think tanks in Washington. This person was progressive in every identifiable way, but at least one of the places they applied to—innocently—was a center-right, militarist institution that relies almost entirely on funding from the defense industry and foreign governments. Seemed like a grand mismatch.
So I wrote back, sketching out which think tanks were pathways to the dark side, which were rebel-institutions, and which were in between. I’ve anonymized the letter, and taken out the social niceties, but otherwise this is as-written.
I don’t presume to know your politics or what your career hopes are, but you’re at a crucial point and it’s important to go in eyes-open for internships and new grad positions in DC…path dependence will quickly set in and you’ll find it harder every year to leave one type of institution to go to another type.
When I arrived in DC, I was as idealistic as I was naive. Any institutions that had positive-sounding words in the name and an office in Northwest DC seemed attractive—surely they're doing work on behalf of the public good, right? Wrong. The crucial thing to know is that all institutions and programs are not created equal. Some are more competitive than others, of course, but some are a pathway to the dark side while others are a place to do genuinely good work; still others might allow you to keep your soul but only if you remain attentive to moral questions and retain a critical eye.
So this is my rough sketch of the landscape—the political map of think tanks and policy organizations. I’m sure you have a sense of my politics, so if that doesn’t align with you then you can ignore this. But since you’re asking, I feel obliged to give you a sense of the DC landscape—the sense I didn’t have when I started out.
This is not a comprehensive list—I’m sure I'm forgetting a couple places.
Not listed are the geopolitical risk consulting firms. Eurasia Group is probably the best/cleanest of the bunch, but in general they’re quite swampy: https://www.undiplomaticpodcast.com/episodes/180.
You might wonder what separates one category from the other. My main concern is whether their policy advice reflects their reliance on defense-industry or Big Tech (or foreign) funding. When the policy advice is just outright militarism and the funders are war profiteers or agents of surveillance capitalism, the institutions are sites of soft (legal) corruption. And if they’re connected in any way to the Republican Party (which has gone full MAGA now), they're potentially dangerous.
The trouble is that the money (and therefore the opportunities) is mostly at dark-side institutions. Places that actually do analysis that is recognizably on behalf of peace, democracy, or equality have fewer resources, so opportunities to land there are tougher to find. But they exist (when I was starting they pretty much didn’t).
I should also mention that one way of thinking about all this is analogous to the saying that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. Some might say that there’s no ethical job that serves the ruling class. And yet, since we have to pay our bills and make a living anyway, we do what we gotta do. Most of the rebel institutions do not serve the ruling class, but a couple arguably do, depending on what you mean by “ruling class.” From this perspective, one place of work is not morally superior to any of the others. This is not my view, but it’s just worth considering because while you should want to retain your soul, you should also want to not be homeless or live off of Ramen noodle packs forever.
Good luck with your search. Happy to help if I can.
I should tell you that my name doesn’t go very far at dark-side institutions—associating with me might be a way to get yourself blacklisted at those places, tbh. But at the rebel institutions, I think name-dropping me might help, and/or I usually know people there, which might come in handy.