All of us at UC Irvine are leveraging our greatest strengths to shape the future in areas of national and global importance to benefit our community, our nation and the world. UC Irvine’s Center for Unconventional Security Affairs is fundamentally changing the world for the better.
CUSA brings to bear the power of a major research university and a worldwide network of experts to solve global challenges such as terrorism, pandemic diseases and disasters.
While many of the world’s challenges can seem hopeless, CUSA's research and outreach is already making a difference in saving lives and reducing human suffering.
In a world full of people in great need… those who want to help must take great risks to achieve the greatest good.
At the University of California, Irvine, a unique project is taking those risks and fundamentally changing the world for the better.
The Center for Unconventional Security Affairs focuses the power of our major research university to solve worldwide challenges. Solutions are found by faculty who can study problems from all aspects – political, economic, cultural, environmental, biological and medical.
CUSA was created in 2003 as the hub of a global research network to study today’s unconventional security challenges. It develops solutions to international terrorism, environmental change, global crime, and pandemic diseases. The complexity multiplies as leaders struggle to cope with economic and cultural changes, such as the spread of democracy, economic globalization and new trade relationships, and competing energy demands.
CUSA has grown quite substantially in the past year. Among other things, CUSA has become one of a small group of centers around the world advising the United Nations on the environmental dimensions of conflict and peace. As part of this initiative CUSA director, Richard Matthew, has spoken to the UN GA in New York, and also joined four UN missions to war-torn parts of Africa, including one to Sierra Leone that he was asked to lead. This was in part due to a
high level UN report he helped to develop in early 2009 that has received enormous international attention.
Through collaboration with scholars from Europe, Australia and several developing countries, fall 2009 marks the publishing of the book
Global Environmental Change and Human Security.
 Director for the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs, Richard Matthew |
Join us as we provide answers…and hope…to the most vulnerable people in the world.