Processes of arms control and disarmament remain relevant in a world where armed conflict between states is still highly visible in international politics, and where civil wars and domestic conflicts claim hundreds of thousands of lives every year. Much attention is focused on the need to control and eliminate weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), especially nuclear weapons, given the hugely destructive nature of these armaments, but controlling so-called ‘conventional weapons’ – those not classed as WMDs – is also important. Conventional weapons, especially small arms and light weapons, are responsible for most of the casualties we see today, even as arms control efforts have only recently begun to focus on these.

The Introduction poses the question of how we should best understand the military conflict that began in 2014, showing why the prevailing explanations are insufficient. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many analysts believed that the problems of security in central Europe had disappeared. Security challenges did not disappear in 1991 and resurface later, but rather persisted. This chapter uses three concepts in international relations theory – the security dilemma, loss aversion, and the democratic peace – that will be used throughout the book to show why the new conflicts could not easily be managed.

What are the essential features of the post-Cold War world order and how is it likely to evolve? In this chapter, Nuno P. Monteiro analyzes the magnitude of the power shifts that took place around the 1989/91 watershed – between the United States and both Russia and China – and examines the ways in which the post-Cold War order relates to earlier times. Much has changed on the surface, above all the emergence of a preponderant global power, the United States. At the same time, much has also remained the same: the centrality of states, their goals and strategies, the role of material capabilities and ideology in furthering state goals, the effects of the nuclear revolution, and so on. Combining these continuities and changes, Monteiro distills the central features of world order in the post-Cold War era. He then concludes by looking at current transformations in world politics – such as the emergence of a viable alternative to the Western way of life backed by the massive capabilities of the Chinese state – and highlighting the major issues on which the future of world order hangs.

It really seems time to take into account the consequences of the fact that countries, particularly leading or developed ones, reversing the course of several millennia, no longer envision international war as a sensible method for resolving their disputes. Indeed, the aversion to international war or the rise of something of a culture or society of international peace that has substantially enveloped the world should be seen as a causative or facilitating independent variable. International war seems to be in pronounced decline because of the way attitudes toward it have changed, roughly following the pattern by which the institution of formal slavery became discredited and then obsolete. Under the circumstances, there is potential virtue in the traditionally maligned diplomatic techniques of complacency and appeasement for dealing with international problems. The phenomenon asuggests that there is little justification for the continuing and popular tendency to inflate threats and dangers in the international arena—even to the point of deeming some of them to be “existential.” In addition, although problems certainly continue to exist, none of these are substantial enough to require the United States (or pretty much anybody) to maintain a large standing military force for dealing with them.

The introduction poses the question of how we should best understand the military conflict that began in 2014, showing why the prevailing explanations are insufficient. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many analysts believed that the problems of security in central Europe had disappeared. Security challenges did not disappear in 1991 and resurface later, but rather persisted. This chapter uses three concepts in international relations theory – the security dilemma, loss aversion, and the democratic peace – that will be used throughout the book to show why the new conflicts could not easily be managed.