CGPACS was founded in 1983 by a diverse group of faculty who came together out of concern about the nuclear weapons stand-off between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Although the Soviet Union no longer exists and the Cold War of the 1980s is a thing of the past, the core vision of the founders of CGPACS—the imperative that as citizens and as scholars we pursue the goal of global peace and ward off the dangers of global conflict—continues to animate our work today.
Throughout our 40 years of work, we have fostered diverse and outstanding contributions
from the UCI community as scholars, students, and citizens, to the promotion of global
peace and to innovative and rigorous analysis of the factors shaping global conflict.
Director's Message
To say that the world is changing rapidly is an understatement. Fundamental shifts
are occurring in geopolitics: Europe is engaged in a brutal war of attrition reigniting
threats of nuclear war just as China’s economic and technological rise is challenging
the global world order. The US is pivoting to Asia with closer ties to regional giants
in South and East Asia. Democratic backsliding and nuclear proliferation are on the
rise even as global arms control is in decline. A mass migration of people continues
unabated. Refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and internally displaced populations
are challenging states in new ways. The looming specter of the climate crisis threatens
to intensify inequality and conflict further driving emigration and threatening agricultural
and natural resources in unforeseen ways. Both state and human security are being
challenged across multiple fronts and on various scales leading to complex entanglements
that often result in simple brutalities.
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