What causes war? How can wars be prevented? Scholars and policymakers have sought the answers to these questions for centuries. Although wars continue to occur, recent scholarship has made progress toward developing more sophisticated and perhaps more useful theories on the causes and prevention of war. This volume includes essays by leading scholars on contemporary approaches to understanding war and peace.

Almost a decade has passed since the end of the Cold War, but the United States has yet to reach a consensus on a coherent approach to the international use of American power. The essays in this volume present contending perspectives on the future of US strategy. Options for US policy include primacy, cooperative security, selective engagement, and retrenchment. The volume includes the Clinton administration's National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement so readers can compare proposed strategies with the official US government position.

The first part of Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict addresses the roots of nationalist and ethnic wars, focusing in particular on the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, and Kashmir. The second part of the book, which explores options for preventing and resolving such conflicts, develops proposals for international action ranging from military intervention to partition to a reconsideration of the idea of the state in Africa.

Book by Steven E. Miller, Ashton B. Carter, and Owen Cote

What if the bomb that exploded in Oklahoma City or New York's World Trade Center had used 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium? The destruction would have been far more vast. This danger is not so remote: the recipe for making such a bomb is simple, and soon the ingredients might be easily attained. Thousands of nuclear weapons and hundreds of tons of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium from the weapons complex of the former Soviet Union, poorly guarded and poorly accounted for, could soon leak on to a vast emerging nuclear black market.