By Kathleen Egan and Joel Rosenthal November 2025 Nuclear weapons pose the threat of a mass casualty event, every day. What prevents catastrophes is the prudential judgment of leaders, based on a set of principles, including deterrence, non-proliferation, and just war. In recent years, nuclear capabilities have grown, while restraints are weakening, and principles are eroding. On April 15, 2025, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in partnership with The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation brought together a community of researchers, academics, practitioners, journalists, and religious leaders for a one-day convening to discuss, assess, and evaluate the current international strategic nuclear environment. This report highlights the findings of that convening and identifies a distinct normative shift of nuclear complacency, in which the robust scholarship, activism, and diplomacy of the past 80 years have been replaced by public indifference, political de-prioritization, and military buildup of these weapons. Read the report (PDF)
By Mariana Olaizola Rosenblat and Luke Barnes October 2025 Against a backdrop of escalating political violence and deepening polarization in theUnited States, a new HFG-supported report from the NYU Stern Center for Businessand Human Rights examines how extremist actors across the ideological spectrum areexploiting digital platforms to respond to, amplify, and glorify violence. Drawing on open-source intelligence collected between March and September 2025,the report Digital Aftershocks: Online Mobilization and Violence in the United Statestraces how far-right, far-left, violent Islamist, and nihilistic violent extremist communities use cross-platform strategies to recruit followers, justify violence, andsustain propaganda networks. “This cross-ideological scope hopefully allows us to break through the partisan framingthat tends to derail serious policy discussion, and to make principled, rights-respectingrecommendations grounded in observable behavior” said co-author Mariana OlaizolaRosenblat, Policy Advisor on Technology and Law at NYU Stern. The report is part of HFG’s Violence, Politics & Democracy initiative, a multi-year projectexamining how these phenomena interact in mature democracies to understand betterand counter political violence and other forces that damage democratic norms andinstitutions, imperiling the safety of citizens. Read or download the report (PDF)
By Salzburg Global April 2025 This report from Salzburg Global’s Polarization and Violent Threats to Democratic Systems program helps identify ways to reduce the threat of political violence and address the dangers that polarization and political violence present to democratic systems. The report suggests that the greatest dangers to democratic systems emerge when full democracies shift toward “hybrid democracies,” i.e., systems with democratic structures but marked by dysfunction, identity struggles, and intense forms of political competition that undermine democratic processes. Hybrid democracies are particularly susceptible to political violence because they often exhibit violence or the threat of retribution, recrimination, and violence as tools to manage deep-rooted conflicts over identity and governance and to dismantle the accountability mechanisms associated with thriving democratic societies. How these threats will evolve and what the repercussions for democracy may be are not yet clear. What is clear, however, is that understanding these threats and knowing how to address them is critical to the future of democratic societies today. Read or download the report (PDF)
By Vally Koubi March 2025 “[W]hile climate change is not the primary driver of conflict, it can exacerbate conflict risks, particularly in regions with weak governance, high inequality, and political instability,” Vally Koubi writes in her HFG Research and Policy in Brief The Impact of Climate Change on Conflict. “As extreme weather events become more frequent, the risk of conflict is likely to rise, driven by their effects on economic stability, agriculture, and migration. To mitigate these risks, strengthening political institutions, fostering social cohesion, and effectively managing migration will be crucial.” Koubi’s report analyzes the research so far on the relationship between climate and conflict and concludes with key takeaways, policy recommendations, and areas for future study. Read or download the report (PDF)
By Paul M. Barrett September 2024 Based on a review of more than 400 social science studies, a new HFG-funded report from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights details how social media use can enable or contribute to political strife. Amid a volatile election season, the report, ‘We Want You To Be A Proud Boy’: How Social Media Facilitates Political Intimidation and Violence, outlines the steps social media companies like Facebook, TikTok and Telegram can take to reduce their contribution to increasing levels of political intimidation and violence across the U.S. and around the world. “While social media platforms aren’t solely to blame for increasing political strife, they often contribute to the growing problem,” said Paul Barrett, the report’s primary author and deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. The report is part of HFG’s Violence, Politics & Democracy initiative, a multi-year project examining how these phenomena interact in mature democracies to understand better and counter political violence and other forces that damage democratic norms and institutions, imperiling the safety of citizens. Read or download the report (PDF)
By Randolph Roth May 2024 The recent rise in American homicide rates did not start in 2020 with a spike during COVID. Homicide actually began to increase in 2015, reversing more than 20 years of declining or stable rates. In this report, Randolph Roth, professor of history and sociology at The Ohio State University, examines this trend in the context of homicide patterns throughout the history of the United States. The factors that correlate most consistently with national and regional homicide rates, he finds, are aspects of nation building, arguing that shifts in citizens’ beliefs about the legitimacy of their government, character of leadership, feelings of affinity for or alienation from fellow citizens, and acceptance or resentment of the social hierarchy affect the frequency with which Americans kill each other. This report is the first offering in HFG’s Violence, Politics & Democracy initiative, a multi-year project examining how these phenomena interact in mature democracies to better understand and counter political violence and other forces that damage democratic norms and institutions, imperiling the safety of citizens.Read or download the report (PDF)
By James Austin and Richard Rosenfeld September 2023 In the latest of a series of HFG reports forecasting crime trends at the US national level and for selective states and (forthcoming) cities, James Austin and Richard Rosenfeld again created statistical models that retroactively “predicted” property and violent crime rates for past years with great accuracy and then used these models to forecast crime trends in the near future. This report concerns national trends, updating the authors’ national-level HFG report released in 2020, before the social and economic disruptions of the pandemic and civil unrest over police violence interrupted a 25-year declining or flat trend in violent crime. Austin and Rosenfeld forecast very modest increases in violent crime and then a flattening trend by 2025 as well as a continuation of the longstanding decline in property crime. They also use their forecasting models to project the effect of decreasing the nation’s declining rate of imprisonment by an additional 20%. Such a policy decision, they conclude, would not lead to significantly higher crime rates. Read the full report [PDF].
By Richard Rosenfeld, James Austin November 2023 This report examines the effects of a small set of factors on violent and property crime rates in Chicago. The authors find that a statistical model based on the Illinois imprisonment rate and a measure of the cost of living explained past variation in crime rates with minimal error. The authors then used the model to forecast crime rates through 2025. Both violent and property crime are forecast to drop through 2025. In addition, the report finds that were Illinois to reduce its imprisonment rate by 25%, the effect on Chicago’s rate of violent crime would be negligible. No association was found between imprisonment rates and property crime. Read the full report [PDF] here.
By Richard Rosenfeld, James Austin November 2023 Employing a small number of predictive variables, the authors of this report created statistical models to forecast violent and property crime rates in New York City. The models estimated yearly changes in New York City’s crime rates from the early 1960s through 2021, estimates that corresponded very closely to the actual rates. The authors then used these models to forecast annual changes in crime rates through 2026. The forecast for violent crime is a slight decrease each year through 2026, while the forecast for property crime shows slight yearly increases. Finally, the projected impact on New York City’s violent crime rate of reducing the state imprisonment rate by 25% would be minimal. No association was found between imprisonment rates and property crime. Read the full report [PDF] here.
By Richard Rosenfeld, James Austin November 2023 In this report, the authors devised statistical models to “predict” past yearly changes in Los Angeles’s rates of violent and property crime from the early 1960s through 2021, employing a very small set of predictive variables known to be associated with levels of crime. The yearly changes projected for those years corresponded quite closely to the actual changes. The authors then used the models to forecast crime trends through 2026. Violent crime is forecast to decline through 2026, while property crime is expected to rise modestly in the same period. The analysis also finds that if California imprisonment rates were reduced by 20%, the effect on crime in Los Angeles would be minimal. Read the full report [PDF] here.
