The Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) is an American think tank based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is "devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance U.S. national interests."

The Institute conducts research on geopolitics, international relations, and international security in the various regions of the world as well as on ethnic conflict, U.S. national security, terrorism, and on think tanks themselves. It publishes a quarterly journal, Orbis, as well as a series of monographs and books. It publishes bulletins distributed electronically about 50 times a year.

FPRI was founded by Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupé. A native of Vienna, Strausz-Hupé immigrated to the United States in 1923 to work as an investment banker. Alarmed by the 1938 Anschluss, he began to lecture on the dangers posed by Nazi Germany, which in turn led to a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania in 1940, where he also earned his masters and doctoral degrees.

A research institute is an establishment endowed for doing research. Research institutes may specialize in basic research or may be oriented to applied research. Although the term often implies scientific research, there are also many research institutes in the social sciences as well, especially for sociological and historical research purposes such as the Institute of Historical Research. Some research institutes are associated with public education museums such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

In the early medieval period, several astronomical observatories were built in the Islamic world. The first of these was the 9th-century Baghdad observatory built during the time of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun, though the most famous were the 13th-century Maragheh observatory, 15th-century Ulugh Beg Observatory.

The earliest research institute in Europe was Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg complex on the island of Hven, a 16th-century astronomical laboratory set up to make highly-accurate measurements of the stars. In the United States there are numerous notable research institutes including Bell Labs, The Scripps Research Institute and SRI International. Hughes Aircraft used a research institute structure for its organizational model which makes sense given its heavy emphasis on creativity and innovation.

A country's foreign policy, also called the foreign relations policy, consists of self-interest strategies chosen by the state to safeguard its national interests and to achieve its goals within international relations milieu.^{[citation needed]} The approaches are strategically employed to interact with other countries. In recent times, due to the deepening level of globalization and transnational activities, the states will also have to interact with non-state actors. The aforementioned interaction is evaluated and monitored in attempts to maximize benefits of multilateral international cooperation. Since the national interests are paramount, foreign policies are designed by the government through high-level decision making processes. National interests accomplishment can occur as a result of peaceful cooperation with other nations, or through exploitation. Usually, creating foreign policy is the job of the head of government and the foreign minister (or equivalent). In some countries the legislature also has considerable oversight.

Daniel Pipes (born September 9, 1949) is an American historian, writer, and political commentator. He is the founder and director of the Middle East Forum and its Campus Watch project, and editor of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on the American foreign policy, the Middle East, Islam and Islamism. He is also an Expert at Wikistrat.

After graduating with a PhD from Harvard and studying abroad, Pipes taught at a number of universities. He then served as director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, before founding the Middle East Forum. His 2003 nomination by U.S. President George W. Bush to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace was protested by Democratic leaders, Arab-American groups, and civil rights activists, who cited his allegedly rightist views and oft-stated belief that force was the most effective remedy to conflict. The Bush administration sidestepped the opposition with a recess appointment.

Pipes has written or co-written more than a dozen books, and has written columns or opinion pieces for many newspapers. He frequently participates in discussion panels on television, and has lectured prolifically in the U.S. and abroad. He served as an adviser to Rudolph Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign. According to The New York Times: "Among his supporters, Mr. Pipes enjoys a heroic status; among his detractors, he is reviled." He is currently the Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

David Satter (born in 1947 in Chicago, USA) is a former Moscow correspondent and expert on Russia and the Soviet Union who wrote books about the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of post-Soviet Russia.

David Satter graduated from the University of Chicago and from Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar. From 1976 to 1982, he was the Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times of London. He then became a special correspondent on Soviet affairs of The Wall Street Journal. He is currently a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a fellow of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He has been a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In the 1990s, David Satter wrote extensively about post-Soviet Russia. In an article in The Wall Street Journal Europe, April 2, 1997, he wrote: “When the Soviet Union fell… the moral impulse motivating the democratic movement had to become the basis of Russia’s political practices. The tragedy of the present situation is that Russian gangsters are cutting off this development before it has a chance to take root.”