Centre for the Study of Global Power Competition (CGPC)

The world today is characterised by pervasive competition between states to shape the norms, rules, and practices of international order. In the domains of security, technology and innovation, energy, trade and investment, the environment, human rights and international law, major powers are increasingly staking divergent positions on key questions. Clear fault lines have emerged between the US and China and Russia, and between plural democracies and authoritarian regimes, on fundamental issues of how international order should be organised.  

These frictions have encouraged states of all sizes and capabilities to view the world as once more animated by great power competition, and to act accordingly, asserting increasingly transactional postures in the military, diplomatic, technology, legal, and economic spheres, and drawing back from cooperative arrangements. Intensifying competitive increasingly affects actors and sectors beyond traditional national security concerns, in supply chains, energy, raw materials, and intellectual property. 

The Centre for the Study of Global Power Competition (CGPC) studies this intensifying systemic competition by bringing together multiple disciplines to examine the different domains within which the competition manifests itself, and the strategies states adopt towards it. In doing so, CGPC seeks to understand how competition among powers may generate productive reforms of international order that respond to shifting power distributions and address global challenges.