Harvard’s Student-led Global Affairs Program Launches International Relations and Development Journal

Nearly two years ago, two Harvard students set out to create a highly-needed space on campus for undergraduates interested in international relations and development to engage more deeply with the questions shaping our world. What began as a conversation between friends became the Global Affairs Program (GAP), a student-led organization at Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics built around two core commitments: intellectual inquiry and pre-professional development. Through student-led seminars, collaborative research, and discussions spanning regions and disciplines, GAP has sought to empower students not only to study global affairs, but to actively contribute to the conversations surrounding them.

That mission has been strengthened through GAP’s partnership with the Harvard Center for International Development (CID), whose support and mentorship have helped students connect academic research with real-world development challenges. CID fellows have worked closely with GAP members throughout the year, offering guidance that has shaped both the substance of their research and the broader vision for this publication.

As GAP approaches its two-year anniversary, we are thrilled to announce the launch of our journal, the Global Affairs Review, with its inaugural Spring 2026 issue titled Regional Matters. The journal represents an important next step in GAP’s founding vision: creating a platform for young people to engage rigorously with international politics and development while elevating student voices in those conversations. In making the journal, students collaborate to identify pressing global issues and spend a semester investigating their root causes, developing solutions, and deepening their understanding through dedicated research and collaborative events that culminate in a series of white papers. 

Regional Matters features six white papers authored by GAP’s regional teams, spanning Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South Asia, and East and Southeast Asia. GAP members across these teams have worked tirelessly to investigate dynamics shaping their regions of interest, producing white papers as diverse in topic as they are in regional focus. Yet, across this diversity, international development emerges as a unifying thread, with each team grappling, in its own way, with questions of who drives progress, who benefits from it, and what it demands of the governments and institutions tasked with delivering it.

The Sub-Saharan Africa team examines the region’s development prospects in an increasingly multipolar world, warning that “absent major changes, the region’s development and resources face considerable strain.” Their paper argues that Sub-Saharan Africa must take ownership of its next steps as it reconsiders its approach to tackling healthcare, food insecurity, and education––a call for agency at a moment when external pressures are mounting, and the stakes for getting it right have never been higher.

Turning to Central and South Asia, the team writes in the aftermath of a “four-year period in which three nations saw their governments overthrown through similar means,” using Nepal as a diagnostic case for broader regional trends. They identify youth mobilization against corruption and governmental unaccountability as a potent and unifying force across the region, and then offer policy recommendations to address the root causes of political instability and chart a more resilient path forward for countries throughout Central and South Asia.

The MENA team, meanwhile, focuses on Syria and the delicate moment it finds itself in, highlighting the central role international development will play in its post-conflict rehabilitation. Zeroing in on commerce, energy, and digital transformation, the team finds that carefully planned foreign direct investment could be instrumental in achieving both domestic stability through innovation and broader rapprochement between the West and the Middle East, offering a vision of development as diplomacy. 

The three remaining teams–Latin America, Europe, and East and Southeast Asia–round out the issue with their own explorations of how international integration and cooperation can serve as vehicles for domestic security, stability, and prosperity. Taken together, these six white papers demonstrate not only the breadth of GAP’s international focus but also the depth of engagement its members bring to some of the most consequential questions in global affairs today through their research and seminars. 

This combination of breadth and depth is ultimately what GAP as an organization and the Global Affairs Review as a journal is all about: creating a space where students don’t just study the world, but contribute meaningfully to the conversations shaping it. It is this mission that guides our work as members of GAP and that we hope to carry forward for the College community in the years to come.

Interested in learning more? Read the full journal and subscribe to our newsletter through the Global Affairs Program website.