How Mershon Engages Our World 

• Listening: Invites the perspectives of security and community actors around the world, especially primary problem-solvers, to inform academic inquiry
   
• Research: Offers academic perspectives and insights to public media and in extended consultation with international, national, and grassroots organizations  
   
• Programming: Creates and sponsors presentations, such as invited lectures, rapid-response panels, and exhibitions, on security issues of public concern 
   
• Learning: Provides students and community actors with interactive classroom, field, and virtual exercises; mentors students in research, practice, and pedagogy

Research

We support faculty and student research with individual and collaborative grants, working groups, and in-house resources. To Mershon's longstanding expertise in military and diplomatic history, foreign policy, and democratization we add more recent presence in international theory, peacebuilding, global governance, security professionalism, and the legacies of war and empire. Emerging conversations include extremism in democracies, environmental conflict, and the local impacts of global trade.

Signature Projects

Mershon honors its tradition with the Edgar S. Furniss Book Award, for the best first monograph in security studies, and the Joseph J. Kruzel Lecture, on international order after the Cold War.   

Mershon helps faculty develop ongoing multi-partner initiatives such as the biennial National Security Simulation, an immersive exercise focused on professionalism and cooperation under pressure, the Non-State Archive to preserve digital copies of movement records, and the new Mershon Search Lab, which integrates forensic and social research for the recovery of persons disappeared in conflict.