Just before winter break, news broke that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill plans to close its centers for African, Asian, European, Middle Eastern, Latin American and Slavic, Eurasian and East European studies. Though UNC administrators said in a statement that decisions on closures are not finalized, they confirmed they are evaluating centers and institutes as part of a budget-cutting effort in response to state and federal funding changes. A spokesman told Raleigh’s The News & Observer last week that closing the six area studies centers will save $7 million.

UNC boasts one of the most robust and comprehensive constellations of area studies programs in the country. Closing these centers could jeopardize several long-standing degree programs as well as a new Persian concentration, not to mention ongoing research and programming that has made UNC into a global affairs powerhouse.

Of course, area studies—the interdisciplinary programs that build expertise and understanding of countries, cultures, languages, institutions and peoples around the world—are in peril far beyond Chapel Hill. Federal funding for area studies had already been declining, but a more pointed threat emerged with Project 2025, President Trump’s blueprint to reshape the federal government, which claimed that area studies programs were inimical to American interests. In September, the U.S. Department of Education canceled funding for area studies programs across the board.

Duke University, UNC’s in-state rival and collaborator, has already cut specialized librarian positions supporting the university’s area study programs. Other universities, facing pressure from the administration and its allies, have replaced leadership and made drastic changes in the direction of research, disregarding faculty input.

This diminution of area studies unfolds at exactly the moment when America needs the most help in understanding a turbulent world. Area studies programs in the U.S. have been tied to the nation’s economic and security agenda from their inception. Entering the Cold War, American leaders realized they barely understood the world in which they were about to become a superpower. Only a handful of Americans, for instance, were studying Hindi when India emerged as the world’s largest democracy and standard bearer of the Non-Aligned Movement. Through the National Defense Education Act (1958) and Higher Education Act (1965), the U.S. government partnered with universities and philanthropies to launch programming, research and training in less commonly taught languages and cultures.

In 1983, the Soviet-Eastern European Training Act introduced Title VIII funding to expand language training and research on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Thanks to federally funded National Resource Centers, the prestigious Foreign Language and Area Studies grants and Fulbright-Hays grants, generations of students and scholars emerged who could inform policymakers, business leaders and cultural leaders about a rapidly globalizing world.

The position of area studies within American academia was never stable, however. Interdisciplinary area studies centers have always sat uncomfortably within discipline-dominated universities. Over the past quarter century, many economists, sociologists and political scientists have come to view quantitative methods as the basis for generalized models of individual behavior and social change—in contrast to the in-depth study of particular histories and cultures within separate area studies silos. Meanwhile, post-structuralism and other critical perspectives gained a foothold in anthropology and the humanities, with some coming to view area studies as imperialism’s handmaiden. Facing such pressures, area studies centers have long had to cook “stone soup”—supporting research and producing programming from morsels of funding and time donated by other units.

Area studies programs’ biggest threats, though, were always their external foes outside of the academy. Even during the Cold War, area studies became an easy target for xenophobes, isolationists and those who distrust the kinds of intellectual freedom that enable scholars to engage the world. Before Trump, demagogues like Joseph McCarthy pilloried scholars studying foreign cultures, especially Sinologists, accusing them of succumbing to foreign influence and undermining America’s national interests.

In the 21st century, techno-futurists further question the need for area studies, believing that big data and large language models make fieldwork dispensable. Why focus on knowledge about just one country or region when we have ever-increasing volumes of data to feed into our computers? Why grind through language classes when AI translations suffice? Besides, everyone speaks English now, right?

Yet, in the past area studies had backers within the power elite. During the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military tried to enlist support from area studies specialists. When conservatives tried to abolish the Department of Education in the 1980s, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger helped save it “by underlining the strategic importance of international and area studies,” as David Ludden writes.

General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, opined that after Sept. 11, the U.S. should have “sent 10,000 young Americans—military, civilians, diplomats—to language school.” In the early 2000s, the Pentagon stepped in to supplement Department of Education dollars by funding university training programs in Arabic, Persian and other “critical” languages.

Area studies in the U.S. today has reached a nadir. This is evident in the dearth of language training in Chinese, Russian and other key languages and regions. It is also evident in the downplaying of regional expertise in hiring in social science departments. Meanwhile, over the last decade or so, there has been a steady increase in investment and innovation in area studies abroad. China, in particular, is rapidly building area studies centers and expanding its capacity for research across world regions. Other universities and research centers in different parts of the world have been investing in more focused ways on developing greater expertise in their own regions.

Of course, elsewhere, the U.S. and North America are no less an area than any other country or region. Yet, American studies—a field that some American conservatives see as an antidote to area studies in the U.S.—is meaningless without global context. America is exceptional, but no more so than any other place. The rise of populism, the emergence of new conflicts and the challenges of diversity, immigration and demographic transitions all underscore the importance of global-level comparisons between the U.S., Europe, Asia and elsewhere. This underscores not only the ongoing need for area studies, but also for greater collaboration between area studies scholars and comparison across areas. For more than a decade, we have collaborated with colleagues at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies to develop Comparative Area Studies, which emphasizes comparisons that leverage deep area knowledge across multiple communities of area specialists.

Even as area studies is reimagined globally, the fight to save it, let alone revitalize it, is faltering in the United States. Area studies has a broad but disjointed constituency that hampers a collective defense. Regional studies associations like the Middle East Studies Association and the Latin American Studies Association and disciplinary associations like the American Political Science Association and Modern Languages Association, all key stakeholders in area studies, seldom coordinate to advocate for area studies writ large.

Similar collective action problems are evident at the university level. In fiscal year 2024, the Department of Education awarded funding to 113 National Resource Centers across dozens of public and private universities. Each of these universities has its own institutional priorities, regulatory, fiscal and political constraints. In April 2025, when a statement signed by more than 600 university presidents presented a common front to protect higher education, leaders of a number of major universities that hosted multiple federally funded area studies centers were notably missing from the list of signatories, including UNC Chapel Hill chancellor Lee Roberts, as well as presidents of the Universities of Arizona, Florida, Texas at Austin and Utah, as well as Ohio State University.

Scholars themselves must step up and be more proactive in the fight for area studies, moving away from the parochialism of both their respective disciplinary affiliations and their regional specializations. They must instead build a strong, unified coalition prepared to make a compelling case for area studies writ large.

Recent statements from the Association for Asian Studies and Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies are exemplary in this regard. This effort also requires more energetic efforts to seek out private funding from foundations and donors, which, in turn, requires a joint effort by area studies centers and programs to make visible their collective contributions—both in the past and the present. Scholarly efforts to integrate and compare findings from different areas—along the lines of Comparative Area Studies—dovetail with initiatives to pool resources and strengthen institutional support for area studies. This does not imply a monolithic view of the world; rather, it opens possibilities for more channels of communication and sophisticated debates that benefit America and the world.

Young Americans today can play video games and trade crypto with counterparts in Beijing or Brasilia. “But consuming the world is not the same as understanding it,” as Georgetown University professor Charles King has noted. Understanding the world means understanding its many countries, regions and communities. The world continues to turn even when American eyes are shut. Tariffs can be hiked, but global trade will continue, increasingly transacted in euros, rubles or yuan instead of dollars. Wars still erupt and peace will occasionally prevail, but with less deference to American policy preferences. If the U.S. intends to remain a global leader—politically, economically and culturally—it must commit to deepening its engagement with societies that are each unique but intimately interconnected. A new, revitalized area studies is essential for the task.