New Era International

Date: October 15th – 17th, 2023
Location: Korbel School at University of Denver

Applications are now closed.

The New Era Workshop (NEW) is an annual three-day training program for PhD students around their transition to candidacy in international affairs and related disciplines, formerly known as the New Era Foreign Policy Conference. Participants engage in a structured comparative scenario analysis and research generation exercise facilitated by Bridging the Gap fellows. Through this innovative format, participants assess the medium-term challenges and opportunities currently facing the world, critically examine the macro-level goals that underpin American foreign policy, and problematize the strategies and policies meant to achieve these goals. On the basis of these discussions, participants are led through a process to help generate and shape policy-relevant research ideas. In the past, these ideas have contributed to participants’ dissertation projects and have also resulted in conference papers, published academic articles, and pieces in policy journals.

NEW also includes a professional development and networking component, with sessions built around the involvement of foreign policy experts. Previous such experts have come from the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, the RAND Corporation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Brookings Institution, NPR, the United States Mission to the United Nations, Foreign Policy magazine, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

The goals of NEW are three-fold:

To continue bringing together and building a network of Political Science PhD students who are policy-oriented and interested in international affairs
To invigorate the foreign policy community with fresh ideas and new avenues for future research
To equip a new generation of international affairs scholars with the tools for conducting and disseminating policy-relevant research

For questions about the New Era Workshop, please visit our Frequently Asked Questions page.

To learn more about the comparative scenario analysis used at NEW, please review an example scenario set from the 2007 New Era Foreign Policy Conference. For more information on the use of scenario analysis in political science, please see “Imagine a World in Which: Using Scenarios in Political Science” by Naazneen H. Barma, Brent Durbin, Eric Lorber and Rachel E. Whitlark. For an assessment of scenario analysis in the context of Covid-19, please see “Borders, Blinders, and Mental Maps” by Danielle Gilbert and Rachel E. Whitlark.

Current New Era Fellows:

Past New Era Fellows: