The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) is a nonpartisan international affairs think tank headquartered in Washington D.C., with operations in Europe, South and East Asia, and the Middle East as well as the United States. Founded in 1910 by Andrew Carnegie, the organization describes itself as being dedicated to advancing cooperation between countries, reducing global conflict, and promoting active international engagement between the United States and countries around the world. It engages leaders from multiple sectors and across the political spectrum.
In the University of Pennsylvania's "2019 Global Go To Think Tanks Report", Carnegie was ranked the number 1 top think tank in the world. In the 2015 Global Go To Think Tanks Report, Carnegie was ranked the third most influential think tank in the world, after the Brookings Institution and Chatham House. It was ranked as the top Independent Think Tank in 2018.
Its headquarters building, prominently located on the Embassy Row section of Massachusetts Avenue, was completed in 1989 on a design by architecture firm Smith, Hinchman & Grylls.
The chairperson of Carnegie's board of trustees is former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, and the organization's president is former California Supreme Court justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, who replaced CIA Director William J. Burns in 2021.
Organizational history
Establishment
Andrew Carnegie, like other leading internationalists of his day, believed that war could be eliminated by stronger international laws and organizations. "I am drawn more to this cause than to any," he wrote in 1907. Carnegie's single largest commitment in this field was his creation of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
On his seventy-fifth birthday, November 25, 1910, Andrew Carnegie announced the establishment of the Endowment with a gift of $10 million worth of first mortgage bonds, paying a 5% rate of interest. The interest income generated from these bonds was to be used to fund a new think tank dedicated to advancing the cause of world peace. In his deed of gift, presented in Washington on December 14, 1910, Carnegie charged trustees to use the fund to "hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot upon our civilization", and he gave his trustees "the widest discretion as to the measures and policy they shall from time to time adopt" in carrying out the purpose of the fund.
Carnegie chose longtime adviser Elihu Root, senator from New York and former Secretary of War and of State, to be the Endowment's first president. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912, Root served until 1925. Founder trustees included Harvard University president Charles William Eliot, philanthropist Robert S. Brookings, former U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain Joseph Hodges Choate, former secretary of state John W. Foster, and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching president Henry Smith Pritchett.
The first fifty years: 1910–1960
At the outset of America's involvement in World War I in 1917, the Carnegie Endowment trustees unanimously declared, "the most effective means of promoting durable international peace is to prosecute the war against the Imperial Government of Germany to final victory for democracy." In December 1918, Carnegie Endowment Secretary James Brown Scott and four other Endowment personnel, including James T. Shotwell, sailed with President Woodrow Wilson on the USS George Washington to join the peace talks in France.
Carnegie is often remembered for having built Carnegie libraries. They were funded by other Carnegie trusts. However, the Endowment built libraries in Belgium, France, and Serbia in three cities which had been badly damaged in the war. In addition, in 1918, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) began to support library special collections on international issues through its International Mind Alcove program, which aimed to foster a more global perspective among the public in the United States and other countries. The Endowment concluded its support for this program in 1958.
On July 14, 1923, the Hague Academy of International Law, an initiative of the Endowment, was formally opened in the Peace Palace at The Hague. The Peace Palace had been built by the Carnegie Foundation (Netherlands) in 1913 to house the Permanent Court of Arbitration and a library of international law.