The Center encourages research, dialogue, and thought about issues of cooperation and conflict among students, faculty, experts with roles in policy making and policymakers themselves. These activities include: regular research presentations by faculty and graduate students, regularly-held discussion groups among faculty and advanced graduate students on selected topics, dissemination of information about research and scholarship in the cooperation and conflict field and about projects of individual faculty and students, exchanges and collaborations with faculty at other universities and policymakers, and when funding warrants, the sponsorship of research, of post-doctorates, invited speakers, conferences, graduate students, and research-related travel.

The program of the Center amasses expertise in specific regions where group conflict has recently been commonplace: the Balkans, the Middle East, Asia, Central America, and the former Soviet Union. It also encourages work on regions where cooperation is extremely noteworthy as in Western Europe. The Program will also have a major focus on non-governmental exchanges and cooperation involving the United States and China, an arena where the path to either conflict or cooperation is not clearly drawn and the ultimate choice could have dramatic consequences for global peace and prosperity. Finally, the Program draws on expertise about the biology and anthropology of cooperation and conflict to help describe the nature of the human material that shapes these circumstances.

Relationships with universities in other regions of the world have already been established. David Goetze, Co-Director of the Center sits on the Science Council of the University of Bihac, Bosnia-Herzegovina and collaborates on research projects with colleagues at the Multiethnic Conflict Prevention Centre at the University of Bihac. Jing Huang, also Co-Director of the Center, has developed solid connections with some top universities and research institutes in Beijing. He is now leading two major joint research projects, US-China Crisis Management and US-China Relations 1989-1993, with cooperation of Chinese scholars and experts with roles in policymaking. Huang also collaborates with scholars in South Korea and Taiwan on security issues in the Asian-Pacific region.