Various research projects are underway or envisioned under the Center's auspices that address crucial questions of cooperation and conflict. Many of the projects address questions of how to resolve human conflict especially in areas like Africa and the Balkans where conflict has become so evident and the consequences for human life so disastrous:

1. a collaborative project that attempts to identify the common but most immediate causes of conflict in regions that include the Balkans and Central and East Africa. Preliminary work on this project suggests surprisingly widespread attempts by political elites to spread false reports through the mass media that one ethnic group has assaulted another and that fatal casualties have resulted. These events often lead directly to the outbreak of inter-group hostilities. How can these manipulative attempts be avoided or negated? Why would such efforts lack credibility in one society but not in others?
   
   
2. the impact of group differences (racial, ethnic, religious, and other cultural differences) on the severity and duration of group conflict as well as on the ease with which conflicts can be resolved. Historic incidences of conflict are examined to determine whether group differences shaped the actual severity of those conflicts.
   
   
3. The Center participates in a third project initiated and organized by the Multiethnic/Religious Conflict Prevention Center at the University of Bihac in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In this project, diverse solutions to the political and institutional problems that beset Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo are plugged into a computer program that analyzes the consequences, some foreseen and some unforeseen, that attach to each of the proposed solutions.
   
   
4. Focusing more squarely on the potential for human cooperation, a computer simulation is being developed that is designed to enhance understanding of how human social and ethnic groups have formed throughout history. It identifies different types of tasks and different types of resources environments that may have confronted early humans and observes how diverse groups may have fared over evolutionary time in coping with these circumstances. Some groups gain advantage and flourish while others decline and disappear. Parallel projects are imagined that will attempt to document the actual evolution of social groups (their emergence, diffusion, integration, and duration) in particular regions of the world from the earliest times to the present. The environments that gave rise to these groups and sustained them will also be categorized to learn more about the real factors responsible for group formation and to refine the relationships that constitute inputs into the computer simulation. The Balkans is targeted as the first region of study with other regions of the world to follow.
   
   Other ongoing projects focus on the critical Asian arena:
   
   
5. China-Taiwan relations in the post-Cold War period, with a focus on how non-governmental exchanges and interactions have helped to improve and stabilize the cross strait relations despite constant tension and hostility between the two governments.
   
   
6. Collaborating with Korean scholars and experts on the development of North-South relations and the role of non-governmental exchanges and cooperation in confidence building between the two Koreas.