After twenty years of negotiation within the framework of the Disarmament Conference, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction was signed in Paris between 13 and 15 January 1993. At the same time, the signatory States adopted a resolution instituting a Preparatory Commission, established in The Hague, with the aim of 'the prompt and effective establishment of the future Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons'. A variety of converging considerations led the Curatorium of the Academy of International Law to organize a workshop on this subject: first the very interesting nature of the highly sensitive problems raised by the destruction of chemical weapons, both on the strategic and political planes, as well as on technical, financial and ecological grounds; but also the originality and difficulty, from the legal standpoint, of the numerous questions which will inevitably arise in connection with the application of the Paris Convention. Finally, the Paris Convention, which is innovative in many respects, particularly in that it institutes international control over the whole of an industrial activity, may be used as a model in other areas of disarmament, in particular the area of nuclear weapons.

This important and insightful book provides, for the first time, a broad presentation of ongoing research into public participation in landscape conservation, management and planning, following the 2000 European Landscape Convention which came into force in 2004. The book examines both the theory of participation and what lessons can be learnt from specific European examples. It explores in what manner and to what extent the provisions for participation in the European Landscape Convention have been followed up and implemented. It also presents and compares different experiences of participation in selected countries from northern, southern, eastern and western Europe, and provides a critical examination of public participation in practice. However, while the book’s focus is necessarily on Europe, many of the conclusions drawn are of global relevance. The book provides a valuable reference for researchers and advanced students in landscape policies and management, as well as for professionals and others interested in land-use planning and environmental management.

Since the end of the Cold War, environmental matters -- especially the international implications of environmental degradation -- have figured prominently in debates about rethinking security. But do the assumptions underlying such discussions hold up under close scrutiny? In this first treatment of environmental security from a truly critical perspective, Simon Dalby shows how attempts to explain contemporary insecurity falter over unexamined notions of both environment and security. Adding environmental history, aboriginal perspectives, and geopolitics to the analysis explicitly suggests that the growing disruptions caused by a carbon-fueled and expanding modernity are at the root of contemporary difficulties. Environmental Security argues that rethinking security means revisiting the question of how we conceive identities as endangered and how we perceive threats to these identities. The book clearly demonstrates that the conceptual basis for critical security studies requires an extended engagement with political theory and with the assumptions of the modern subject as progressive political agent. Viewed thus on a global scale, the environmental security discourse raises profoundly troubling political questions as to who we are and what kind of world we are collectively making in our efforts to be secure.