Activities
Presenting the 20th Policy
Recommendations on
"Towards Collective
Human Security:A New
Internationalism and
Japan" to Prime Minister
KOIZUMI in July 2001
The fundamental purpose of JFIR is to promote policy-oriented research. Therefore, all the activities of JFIR are directed towards that purpose. Two Councils were set up specifically for this. One is for the policy recommendations in the long-term perspective and the other is for those in the short-term and immediate perspective. The former is the Policy Council and the latter is the Emergency Policy Council. In the case of the Policy Council, a Task Force headed by a member of the Policy Council and staffed by research fellows of JFIR serves the Plenary Council as assistants for making an intensive in-depth analysis of the issue and working out a draft of the policy recommendations.
When more than two thirds of the full members of the Policy Council endorse the draft or its revision, it is approved and becomes the recommendations of those members of the Policy Council who sign it. Please note that in this and other cases, the Forum takes no institutional position on issues of foreign policy, though its members are encouraged not only to analyze but to propose alternatives on matters of foreign policy. Though the Forum helps its members to formulate policy recommendations, the responsibility for the contents is that of those members of the Forum who sign them alone.
Since 1988 the Policy Council has publicly announced 33 policy recommendations and presented them to the Prime Minister of Japan. Recent Policy Recommendations have covered themes such as "Japan's Strategy for its Agriculture in the Globalized World," "Nature of Russian State and Japan's Strategy towards Russia," "India's Leap Forward and Japan," "Japan and China in the Changing Asia," and "The Establishment of an International Energy Security System."