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shift of nuclear complacency, in which the robust scholarship, activism, and diplomacy of the past 80 years have been replaced by public indifference, political de-prioritization, and military buildup of these weapons.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 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)
