By systematically addressing these policy gaps, our Consilium Institute working together with experts from various disciplines can deliver timely, actionable insights for national renewal and strategic resilience.
Geopolitics
Policy research in the Geopolitics pillar incorporates Geopolitical Strategy Analysis to understand rapidly shifting power dynamics driven by China’s evolving domestic politics and global ambitions. As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) confronts leadership challenges, economic slowdown, demographic pressures, and governance strains, its approach to Indo-Pacific security and global influence shifts. Insight into China’s posture, gray zone coercion, Belt and Road strategy, and possible post-Xi or post-CCP scenarios enables policymakers to anticipate inflection points and safeguard democratic interests. Key gaps include limited scenario-based analysis of leadership transitions, insufficient integration of social and economic tensions into geopolitical forecasting, and weak transparency on elite power dynamics and succession planning within the CCP.
National Security
This pillar focuses on the urgent need to recognize and counter CCP unrestricted warfare—including cyber aggression, biothreats, transnational repression, and malign influence operations against the U.S. and its allies. Research here illuminates how the CCP blurs conventional boundaries between peace and conflict, leveraging espionage, technology theft, diaspora coercion, elite capture, and alliances with regimes such as Iran to compromise American security from within. Gaps in current research involve fragmented assessments of cross-domain threats (such as integrated cyber-biological attacks), limited public policy frameworks for whole-of-society resilience, and insufficient exploration of the CCP’s coordination with other authoritarian regimes in transnational operations and intelligence sharing.
Public Health & Environment
Policy innovation in this pillar is central to meeting global challenges such as pandemic preparedness, water pollution, and the intersection of climate, environment, and health. With the rise in infectious diseases and rapid environmental change, examining how AI can anticipate health threats while influencing public health administration is increasingly important. The value of traditional medicine, especially in contexts ignored by Western medical paradigms, is another area requiring deeper exploration. Key research gaps include the underestimation of environmental health risks linked to global industrial supply chains (often tied to China’s manufacturing base), the ethical and policy challenges of AI-driven health decisions, and a lack of integrated frameworks incorporating traditional and modern medical approaches for resilient, sustainable public health.
Education
Education policy research is vital for addressing ideological and pedagogical deficiencies in contemporary systems. This includes exposing the realities of communist ideology, often sanitized or distorted in U.S. K-12 and collegiate curricula, and integrating critical programs on creationism, intelligent design, and moral reasoning. Policy innovation is needed to counter subversive foreign influences on academic freedom and to recalibrate curricula that have drifted from classical, civics-centered learning. Existing gaps involve minimal systematic study of communist and authoritarian influence in U.S. educational materials, insufficient teacher training on ideological literacy, and limited curriculum development for philosophical and scientific alternatives to strict materialism and evolutionary theory.
AI & Technology
Research under this pillar is essential to navigate the dual-use risks and transformative potential of artificial intelligence. Policy must grapple with the ethical, social, and civilizational impacts of AI integration, especially in education, surveillance, and critical infrastructure. The CCP’s aggressive AI acceleration—married with ambitions in semiconductor and energy technology—creates vulnerabilities for Western democracies in supply chain security, data privacy, and technological competitiveness. Major gaps include a lack of actionable ethical frameworks for AI adoption in schools and public life, underdeveloped guidelines for global AI governance, and insufficient transparency around the CCP’s strategic pursuits for technological dominance—particularly in military and energy sectors.
Economics and Society
Policy research in this pillar shines a light on the true state of the Chinese economy—its debt crises, demographic implosion, distortions from state intervention, and global spillovers through trade and digital finance. It is vital to develop an accurate picture of U.S.-China economic decoupling, digital currency races, and the downstream effects of fintech innovation. Research must clarify what economic decoupling means for democratic societies and their partners, and how digital currency and AI-driven fintech present new opportunities and risks for both economic stability and freedom. Gaps here often stem from opaque Chinese economic data, the lack of independent verification of demographic and financial statistics, underestimation of the social costs of digital currency adoption, and insufficient focus on how economic tools are weaponized by authoritarian regimes to shape global political outcomes.
Human Rights & Religious Freedom
The Human Rights and Religious Freedom pillar is essential for advancing accountability and moral clarity in global policy by exposing and countering systematic atrocities orchestrated by authoritarian regimes such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and North Korea. In China, the CCP perpetrates widespread abuses against ethnic and religious minorities—including Uyghurs, Tibetans, Christians, and Falun Gong practitioners—through mass arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances, cultural and religious persecution, and family separations. These violations also include documented cases of forced labor and repression of house churches that defy CCP control. Perhaps most shocking is the persistent and credible evidence of state-sponsored organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience: UN experts, congressional findings, and independent investigations have highlighted that innocent Chinese citizens are systematically subjected to blood and organ screenings, with many forcibly losing vital organs for transplants while they were alive.
Current research and global advocacy face several urgent gaps. Despite mounting evidence and ongoing reports, CCP and other dictatorship governments maintain tight information control and deny independent investigations, making it difficult to hold perpetrators accountable and allowing impunity to persist. International responses, while including some sanctions and diplomatic condemnation, often lack coordinated enforcement or follow-through. There is no comprehensive international mechanism capable of forcibly preventing atrocities like forced organ harvesting or fully protecting religious communities under threat; collaboration remains fragmented among governments, NGOs, and multilateral institutions. Policy research should therefore focus on strengthening global legislative frameworks, documenting abuses in greater detail, increasing support for survivors and whistleblowers, facilitating independent investigations, and laying the groundwork for concerted multilateral action—including trade, visa, and healthcare sanctions—to disrupt profits and impunity for human rights abuses. Without such measures, the moral and legal gaps left by current approaches will only embolden authoritarian regimes to escalate their repression, further endangering fundamental freedoms worldwide
Human Rights & Religious Freedom
The Human Rights and Religious Freedom pillar is essential for advancing accountability and moral clarity in global policy by exposing and countering systematic atrocities orchestrated by authoritarian regimes such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and North Korea. In China, the CCP perpetrates widespread abuses against ethnic and religious minorities—including Uyghurs, Tibetans, Christians, and Falun Gong practitioners—through mass arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances, cultural and religious persecution, and family separations. These violations also include documented cases of forced labor and repression of house churches that defy CCP control. Perhaps most shocking is the persistent and credible evidence of state-sponsored organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience: UN experts, congressional findings, and independent investigations have highlighted that innocent Chinese citizens are systematically subjected to blood and organ screenings, with many forcibly losing vital organs for transplants while they were alive. Current research and global advocacy face several urgent gaps. Despite mounting evidence and ongoing reports, CCP and other dictatorship governments maintain tight information control and deny independent investigations, making it difficult to hold perpetrators accountable and allowing impunity to persist. International responses, while including some sanctions and diplomatic condemnation, often lack coordinated enforcement or follow-through. There is no comprehensive international mechanism capable of forcibly preventing atrocities like forced organ harvesting or fully protecting religious communities under threat; collaboration remains fragmented among governments, NGOs, and multilateral institutions. Policy research should therefore focus on strengthening global legislative frameworks, documenting abuses in greater detail, increasing support for survivors and whistleblowers, facilitating independent investigations, and laying the groundwork for concerted multilateral action—including trade, visa, and healthcare sanctions—to disrupt profits and impunity for human rights abuses. Without such measures, the moral and legal gaps left by current approaches will only embolden authoritarian regimes to escalate their repression, further endangering fundamental freedoms worldwide
Policy research in the Geopolitics pillar is crucial for understanding the rapidly shifting power dynamics driven by China’s evolving domestic politics and global ambitions. As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) faces internal leadership challenges, a slowing economy, demographic constraints, and mounting governance crises, its approach to both Indo-Pacific security and worldwide influence is changing. Strategic insight into China’s current posture, its “gray zone” coercion in the region, long-term Belt and Road strategies, and potential scenarios in a post-Xi or even post-CCP era will enable policymakers to anticipate inflection points and protect democratic interests. Current gaps include a lack of in-depth, scenario-based analysis of possible leadership transitions or “post-CCP” evolutions; insufficient integration of ground-level social, economic, and ethnic tensions into broader geopolitical forecasting; and limited open-source transparency regarding elite power struggles and succession planning within the CCP.