Centers Overview

The Independent Institute’s research program is organized into seven specialized centers, each dedicated to advancing our scholarly and educational mission. These centers maintain the highest standards of peer review and are committed to impactful publishing and effective media communication.

About the Independent Institute Centers

Each center is tasked with assessing, refining, and proposing innovative solutions to pressing social and economic challenges. Our programs focus on three core components: rigorous scholarly research, insightful publications, and the strategic dissemination of findings to opinion leaders and the public through conferences and media initiatives.

By fostering evidence-based solutions, our centers encourage informed discussions that can be scrutinized not just by experts, but also by media influencers, business leaders, religious organizations, engaged citizens, and policymakers. Our goal is to promote rational, objective dialogue that sheds light on key issues and shifts public discourse away from interest-group politics.

Centers

Peace & LibertyLaw & JusticeHealth & EnvironmentGlobal ProsperityEntrepreneurial InnovationEducational ExcellenceCulture & Civil Society

Peace & Liberty

National security is a major challenge for any modern state aiming to provide for its own defense. The challenge is immensely greater, however, for a society that cherishes its freedoms. The reason, as James Madison explained in 1795, is that issues of war and peace have major implications for liberty on the home front.

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Law & Justice

The United States was founded on the principles of individual liberty, representative and limited government, and the rule of law. Unfortunately, although many people today share the ideals of justice and fairness, public confidence in the nation’s justice system has fallen. This decline is an indication of deeper problems afflicting America’s legal institutions.

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Health & Environment

Since the waning years of the twentieth century, politics has increasingly intruded on science. Scientific insights achieved through systematic, objective collection of data and empirical testing have been subjected to political screening. Pioneering research findings that do not conform to political orthodoxy have too often been considered “politically incorrect” and even attacked and censored.

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Global Prosperity

Nearly two hundred years after the Industrial Revolution, fifty years after the Green Revolution, and a decade and a half after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, it is a tragic fact that half of the world’s population is living in abject poverty and misery.

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Entrepreneurial Innovation

The Independent Institute’s Center on Entrepreneurial Innovation pursues research into entrepreneurship, the dynamic process of markets and technological innovation without regard to prevailing popular or political biases, trends or phobias.

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Educational Excellence

Every individual should fulfill his or her potential. A good education unlocks doors to upward mobility, constructive engagement with the world, and a greater sense of contribution and well-being. In order to have a society of abundance and excellence, students from all walks of life should have a better chance to become creative, independent, efficacious adults who can chart their own course for a life of achievement, fulfillment, and meaning.

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Culture & Civil Society

The Center for Culture and Civil Society has been established to reaffirm the interdisciplinary roots of the natural and social sciences, as well as their primal concern for the moral nature of humanity. It seeks to foster a cultural renaissance through a bold redefinition and reorientation of public debate toward a new integration of knowledge that supports the foundations of free, moral and peaceful societies.

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The Lighthouse is the weekly email newsletter of the Independent Institute and provides updates on Independent’s latest articles, research, publications, events, and media programs. Learn More.

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