Thanks are due to my editors, John Haslam, Michael Holdsworth and Steve Smith, for their considerable patience, and to Marcia Carlson for the index. For their help in various incarnations of arguments over the years, I am also grateful to Richard K. Ashley, William Connolly, James Der Derian, Mick Dillon, Jean Elshtain, Jim George, Stephen Gill, Marvin Koff, Allan Krass, Ekkehart Krippendorff, Chris Kruegler, Jane Nadel-Klein, H.L. Nieburg, Stephen J. Rosow, Ahmed Samatar, Michael Shapiro, Christine Sylvester, Frank Unger, R.B.J. Walker, Alex Wendt and Michael Williams. David Campbell's extensive commentary on what I thought was a completed draft proved indispensable.

Institutional support was provided by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Peace Research Centre and the Department of International Relations of the Australian National University, and the Program on Nonviolent Sanctions at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs. Trinity College, Hartford, facilitated my getting the manuscript ready for publication.

A section of Chapter 2 was first published in Millennium. Chapter 4 incorporates material that first appeared in an article co-authored with Frank Unger in Militiirregime und Entwicklungspolitik, edited by Reiner Steinweg and published by Suhrkamp, Germany. Chapter 5 combines and elaborates various texts first published in International Studies Quarterly, Alternatives, and in an occasional paper by the Center on Violence and Human Survival at New York City's John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

A disclaimer is in order. To the extent that the following chapters appear unduly centered on the Western (or Atlantic) community, this is a deliberate analytical tactic rather than the product of some misguided ethnocentrism or Occidentalism.