The Center for the Study of Cooperation and Conflict was established at Utah State University to improve understanding of the causes of human conflict and the potential for human cooperation. Many, if not most, of the positive accomplishments of humans come about through group cooperation while destructive activities tend to be manifest in group conflict. Learning about the causes of cooperation can encourage these positive accomplishments while learning about the causes of group conflict gives us some basis for avoiding its seemingly endless recurrence or at least avoiding the severity of past conflicts.

Social science programs at other universities share these crucial research and teaching concerns. The program of the Center is distinct from many of these programs in at least two ways:

1. it attempts to develop and utilize accurate models of human nature that are relevant to understanding conflict and cooperation; and
   
   
2. it focuses on the whole range of actors involved in cooperation and conflict situations, especially, the individuals, groups and non-governmental organizations that are often ignored in state-oriented analyses.

Drawing on developments in cognitive science, social psychology, ecology, neurology, biology, and anthropology; participants in the program contribute to our understanding of how humans, in fact, function in cooperation and conflict situations. We want to develop models of humans that help us understand how conflict behaviors are triggered and how humans react in situations that offer the potential of both conflict and cooperation. Knowledge about preventing and resolving violent conflicts and wars and knowledge about fostering cooperation will likely be accelerated by taking into account the theory and knowledge already accumulated in these various disciplines, especially knowledge about how human dispositions to cooperate and engage in conflict have evolved and how social and physical conditions in the environment elicit these dispositions and shape the social phenomena of cooperation and conflict. The program of the Center attempts to exploit recently developed understandings on these matters and exploit new understandings as they emerge.

Most programs that study conflict and cooperation place interstate interactions at the forefront of their concerns-the current program places the complex of actors operating at all the other levels of interaction in the forefront and inquires about how novel and durable resolutions of conflict might emerge from this focus. How can individuals, groups, and organizations interact to produce cooperation and avoid or constrain conflict? Even among states, conflict and cooperation emerge ultimately from the activity of individuals, groups, and a multitude of non-governmental, sub-state actors. Throughout much of history, diverse groups have cooperated together and lived in relative harmony. What can we learn about the contribution of spontaneous and structured interactions among individuals, groups, and organizations to these often long-lived episodes? How do rules, norms, and institutions constrain and shape the types of interactions that take place and the outcomes that result? How are regions like Western Europe able to develop ever tighter economic and political bonds while regions of the world like the former Soviet Union disintegrate into scores of separate, often warring political units?

Importantly, the program of the Center applies refined models of the causes of cooperation and conflict to the policy arena so as to encourage cooperation at the individual and group levels and indirectly at the interstate level by fostering cooperation among relevant non-governmental actors. Through its research and scholarly activities, through collaborations and exchanges with faculty world-wide, through training of graduate students within the Political Science Graduate Program on "cooperation and conflict," and through the development and dissemination of formal policy recommendations, the Center plays an active role in encouraging cooperative relations, discouraging violent and destructive interactions among individuals, groups, organizations, and states, and contributing to the resolution of existing conflicts.