Randolph Bourne (portrait by Sésame Buckner)

Randolph Bourne, a notable American journalist, social critic, and political activist of the early 20th century, courageously opposed U.S. intervention in World War I. Read Jeff Riggenbach's biography of Bourne.

The Randolph Bourne Institute (RBI) seeks to honor Bourne's memory by promoting a noninterventionist foreign policy for the United States as the best way of fostering a peaceful, more prosperous world.

A nonprofit, tax-exempt, educational organization founded in 2001, the RBI centers its efforts around four major projects: a Web site, Antiwar.com; a fellows program for writers and researchers; a speakers program; and a student intern and campus outreach program. Every RBI project is designed for maximum inclusiveness, in the hope of enabling people from all points on the political spectrum – libertarian, left, right, and center – to join together on the vital issue of opposing war.

The Antiwar.com Web site, launched in December 1995, is the Institute's main project and the preeminent noninterventionist site on the Internet. It provides hourly coverage of breaking news, along with informed analysis of major world conflicts (with particular attention to the U.S. role in those conflicts) – something the establishment media utterly fails to offer. Toward this end, Antiwar.com relies on existing news sources as well as on its own columnists and reporters, many of whom file from within the various conflict areas covered on the site. Antiwar.com's target audience includes members of the media, college students, and other concerned individuals and organizations. Antiwar.com has been a project of the RBI for eight years and has grown steadily in that time, as has its following – whether measured by numbers of readers or by the site's demonstrated ability to affect the type and tenor of public debate about noninterventionism. Antiwar.com's growing influence has been analyzed and discussed on such national TV news programs as the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, in such magazines as Mother Jones, The Atlantic, The Nation, and in such popular alternative weeklies as the New York Press and the SF (San Francisco) Bay Guardian.

The RBI fellows program provides support for authors and researchers interested in the topic of nonintervention. Currently, the RBI boasts two particularly distinguished fellows. The editorial director of Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo, is also a senior fellow of the Randolph Bourne Institute. Raimondo's writings include Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (1993, reprinted 2008); Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996); An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (2000); The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection (2003); and numerous articles for newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, The American Conservative, and Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Another RBI senior fellow is prominent journalist Jeff Riggenbach, author of In Praise of Decadence (1998), Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism (2009), and hundreds of articles in publications as diverse as USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, Reason, and Inquiry.

The RBI speakers program has arranged for our fellows, our columnists, our staff members, and others to make informative and insightful presentations, primarily on U.S. interventionism, on college campuses and in other venues. We are actively seeking to expand in this area and to schedule more events in the future. If our readers have suggestions, we welcome them.

A student intern/campus outreach program was initiated in the summer of 2002, when the RBI's first two student interns worked on setting up the RBI campus outreach program and fielding assignments related to Antiwar.com, the RBI library project, and a series of face-to-face meetings between students and local experts on U.S. foreign policy (e.g., Hoover Institution scholars and Stanford and UC Berkeley students). We hope to expand the intern program to year-round in the near future.

Thanks to Jeff Riggenbach for updating this page.