WHO WE ARE
The GIE Foundation was founded in 2024 to examine some of the most pressing geopolitical issues of our time, through rigorous, evidence-driven research and impactful, effective advocacy.
We believe the world today is less stable, coherent and resilient than it used to be, and that this makes addressing our common challenges much harder.
We try to address the drivers of instability at their most leverageable points. We research important problems; we create policy recommendations; and we advocate for those policies to policymakers and the public, to strengthen stability and resilience in our democracies. We call this idea “democratic stability”.
Democratic stability is both the central problem of our time and the enabling condition for addressing every other problem. There is a generalized crisis of democracy - not happening in one country, or one culture, or one broken institution, but everywhere at once. We set out to answer the question of why, and what we can do about it.
We believe there are three broad drivers of increasing instability and volatility in the world today, which have combined to produce a global systemic environment that is fundamentally different from the previous paradigm.
(1) Technological acceleration, from AI to social media to emergent technology, has transformed the information environment and frontier technological capabilities faster than any democratic institution has adapted to it.
(2) Systemic stress from climate change, resource scarcity, food systems, habitat loss and population shifts, imposing a permanent, cumulative load on governance capacity that democratic institutions were not built to absorb.
(3) Geopolitical fragmentation, from wars, turmoil and internal conflicts to the breakdown of the stabilized international order that once allowed democracies to treat sovereignty as secure and alliances as stable.
These forces interact and compound. Because they are global in scale, no single national political project can address them alone. Together, they produce a meta-instability:
(4) Institutional degradation in our democracies and the inability to confront challenges coherently
In our view, “democratic stability” is thus both the central problem and the enabling condition for modern governance. When stability erodes, the research–policy–action pipeline collapses, and we cannot address challenges in our world. Our work is therefore aimed at the pressure points where practical policy interventions can create outsized improvements in stability.
OUR WORK
We are committed to impact in a real sense - ensuring our efforts create more counterfactual difference than we could achieve by directing the same time and resources elsewhere. Thus, we think seriously about opportunity cost in choosing our topics: Which problems matter most, which angles are genuinely neglected, and where there are leverage points where targeted intervention could actually shift outcomes.
This thinking, alongside the expertise of our network and our own judgement, guides us toward the gaps and misalignments - in rules, institutions, and policy - where credible, independent analysis is most needed and where change is tractable.
With this in mind, we identify research and policy topics where a feasible intervention could create outsized improvement: Problems or angles of real importance that are underexplored by others, where there is a specific bottleneck that targeted work could help unblock. We do not claim to solve everything. We look for the pressure points where rigorous, independent research and effective policy advocacy can make a difference. Every report ends in actionable policy recommendations.
Our strategy is built around a simple research-policy-advocacy loop:
Identify pressure point topics where we can bring credible expertise and insight
Provide strong evidential research
Create concrete policy recommendations
Advocate for adoption to policymakers and influencers
We have a commitment to independent, rigorous research and policy work, and to impact in our advocacy.
GIE Foundation’s goal is to tangibly improve stability in our democracies. Our research, our policy recommendations and our advocacy are all aimed at finding these impactful issues where a feasible change to policy can have a real impact on the resilience, stability, and capacity of our institutions and our societies.
By doing this, we’re trying to create more stable, coherent and resilient democratic systems, that can improve and self-correct, and ultimately, address the challenges of the 21st century.
Radar Image of Amazonian Flooding | NASA
RESEARCH PRINCIPLES
We provide in-depth research reports and actionable, impactful commentaries on issues that drive instability. We believe that a research-to-policy pipeline that addresses the issues that have the greatest impact, not the greatest public awareness, is of crucial importance to delivering the best policy outcomes for our society.
We produce rigorous, thought-provoking, policy-relevant research. Our approach is data-driven and nonpartisan – we follow where the evidence leads. Every output is grounded in analytical clarity, methodological seriousness, and relevance to real-world challenges. And every output ends with conceptual policy recommendations supported by our findings. We are fully independent - not funded by, or beholden to, any government or political party or interest.
We have two core output types:
Research Reports – Long-form, in-depth studies that provide original research and analysis, and long-horizon insight. Useful for experts and institutional referencing. We use these as the anchor points of our major advocacy campaigns. See our 2026 campaign - Responsible AI in Science.
Commentaries – Conceptual, accessible policy-focused pieces offering timely framing and strategic perspective. Useful for public, media and policy advocacy.
These publications are designed to inform policy and the public, shape debate, and support better decision-making by governments, institutions, and organizations, where better understanding can lead to better outcomes.
Commentaries seek to find leverage points where policy change can make an impact.
Blast From the Past: Vredefort Crater | NASA