The theory and practice of arms control seemed to have its heyday during the height of the Cold War, with its focus on the East-West conflict and nuclear arms. In the past twenty years, both arms technologies and various practices aimed at their control have continued to develop, but scholarly thinking has not kept up. This volume seeks to redress this scholarly neglect of the range of issues associated with the control of the means of violence, by asking the question: what does arms control mean in the 21st Century? In asking this question, the volume examines issues surrounding sovereignty, geopolitics, nuclear disarmament, securitization of space, technological developments, human rights, the clearance of landmines, the regulation of small arms and the control of the black market for arms and nuclear secrets. The book discusses terrorism with reference to the case of the suicide attacks in Beirut in 1983 and how the Obama administration is orientating its posture on nuclear arms. This book was published as a special issue of Contemporary Security Policy.

This encyclopedia provides an authoritative guide intended for students of all levels of studies, offering multidisciplinary insight and analysis of over 500 headwords covering the main concepts of Security and Non-traditional Security, and their relation to other scholarly fields and aspects of real-world issues in the contemporary geopolitical world.

This book analyses the structure and motive forces that shape the global arms transfer and production system.

This book examines the linkage between deviance and norm change in international politics. It draws on an original theoretical perspective grounded in the sociology of deviance to study the violations of norms and rules in the global nuclear non-proliferation regime. As such, this project provides a unique conceptual framework and applies it to highly salient issues in the contemporary international security environment. The theoretical/conceptual chapters are accompanied by three extensive case studies: Iran, North Korea, and India.

This book examines the issue of nuclear disarmament in different strategic, political, and regional contexts. This volume seeks to provide a rich theoretical and practical insight to one of the major topics in the field of international security: global abolishment of nuclear weapons. Renewed calls for a nuclear weapons-free world have sparked a wide academic debate on both the attainability of such goal and the steps that should be taken. Comparably less attention, however, has been paid to theoretically informed considerations of the consequences of nuclear abolition. Comprising essays from leading scholars and experts within the field, this collection discusses the fundamental theoretical and conceptual foundations of nuclear disarmament and subsequently tries to assess its hypothetical impact in global and regional contexts. The varied methodological approach of the contributors aims to advance a multi-theoretical and multi-perspectival view of the issue. The book is organized in three main sections: ‘Strategic Perspectives’, dealing with the specific constraints and facilitators for the states to achieve their core objectives; ‘Political Perspectives’, with the focus on the power of norms, belief-systems and ideas; and ‘Regional Perspectives’, with the analyses of seven regional and/or state-specific nuclear contexts. As a whole, the volume provides a detailed, complex overview of the risks and opportunities that are embedded in the vision of a nuclear weapon-free world. This book will be of great interest to students of nuclear proliferation, arms control, war and conflict studies, international relations and security studies.

Each year, governments spend billions of dollars on peacekeeping efforts around the world, and much more is spent on humanitarian aid to refugees and other victims of armed struggle. Yet, research shows that nearly one-half of all countries experiencing civil war have renewed violent conflict within five years of a peace agreement. How do we account for such a poor track record? The authors in this volume consider how global capitalism affects fragile peace processes, arguing that the international economic system itself is a major contributor to violent conflict. By including the work of anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and political scientists, this book presents a broad yet thorough exploration of the complexities of peacebuilding in a global market economy. Included in the volume are specific studies of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, as well as considerations of conflicts on a global scale.

China has become an enthusiastic supporter of and contributor to UN peacekeeping. Is China’s participation in peacekeeping likely to strengthen the current international peacekeeping regime by China’s adopting of the international norms of peacekeeping? Or, on the contrary, is it likely to alter the peacekeeping norms in a way that aligns with its own worldview? And, as China’s international confidence grows, will it begin to consider peacekeeping a smaller and lesser part of its international security activity, and thus not care so much about it? This book aims to address these questions by examining how the PRC has developed its peacekeeping policy and practices in relation to its international status. It does so by bringing in both historical and conceptual analyses and specific case-oriented discussions of China’s peacekeeping over the past twenty years. The book identifies the various challenges that China has faced at political, conceptual and operational levels and the ways in which the country has dealt with those challenges, and considers the implication of such challenges with regards to the future of international peacekeeping. This book was originally published as a special issue of International Peacekeeping.