Description
Preface
World Security: Trends and Challenges at Century's End is intended to provide college students and general readers with an introduction to the critical security threats facing the world community in the 1990s. Included in these threats are serious problems that remain from the Cold War era for example, the continued existence of large nuclear weapons stockpiles with hair-trigger launching systems as well as environmental and develop mental perils whose magnitude has only become apparent in the past few years. In all of these cases, we believe that new and innovative solutions must be sought to overcome the threats involved, and such solutions must address the problems on a global, rather than merely national or regional scale.
The original concept for this volume developed out of our work in editing the fifth edition of Peace and World Order Studies: A Curriculum Guide, the standard guide for curriculum development in the field of peace studies. In assembling the Guide, we inspected literally thousands of syllabi from undergraduate courses in peace studies, international relations, world order studies, and related fields. To our dismay, we discovered that most existing courses on contemporary world security issues lacked sections on such problems as regional conflict, hunger, chronic underdevelopment, and environmental degradation, or lacked up-to-date texts and reading materials on these topics. Because we believe that the study of world security should encompass all significant threats to global peace and well-being, and that students should be made aware of both the nature and the intercon nectedness of these threats, we set out to produce a text that would provide faculty and students with a comprehensive and rigorous introduction to the entire span of world security affairs. ISBN:9780312037475
