Literature that has come to the attention of ECSP in the past year on population, environmental change, and security issues. more

March 1998 - The new millennium will begin without a consensus among world leaders on the direction or importance of arms control. This being the case, two scenarios exsist that US policy makers must take into account. The first is tha the quantitative dimension of arms control will disappear. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the superpower-driven urgency of arms control (which made for high politics at U.S.-Soviet summits) will be replaced by efforts to implement and verify exsisting treaties: START I and II, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and perhaps a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (if the Senate ratifies it in 1998 or 1999). "Free market arms control" will become the norm; additional reductions or impose tighter verification regimes will be regarded as too expensive to implement. Quantitative arms control may not be an issues in any case, since rising social and financial costs dictate downsizing forces and discarding weapons. more

Leaf through expert reviews of 20 recent books and reports at the nexus of population, environment, and security, including The Greening of the U.S. Military, Return of the Population Growth Factor, and Peace Parks: Conservation and Conflict Resolution. more

At its root, the importance of the link between demography and war is the relative capacity of a given political unit’s population to aid in its defense or to threaten other political units, writes Monica Duffy Toft. more