Constructing Regional Security: The Role of Arms Transfers, Arms Control, and Reassurance

In this book William Durch examines conventional weapons proliferation since World War II, the role of arms transfers in fueling regional conflict, and prospects for curbing the global arms trade. Noting that supply side arms control efforts, which seek to constrain the companies and countries that produce and distribute major conventional weapons, have a poor international track record, Durch argues for a broader approach that tries to get at the demand side of the equation. Addressing the political and regional dynamics that impel arms acquisitions, he looks at how arms control might be combined with confidence and security-building measures to contain demand, and how value-based arms trade control measures like 'codes of conduct' could be implemented in stepwise fashion consistent with US national interests in regional stability.

WILLIAM J. DURCH is a senior associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington D.C. He is the author of The Evolution of UN Peacekeeping (SMP, 1993) and UN Peacekeeping, American Policy and the Uncivil Wars of the 1990s (SMP, 1996).