The arms race has become a global phenomenon. Each year the world spends a staggering sum on armaments: total military expenditure is almost equal to the entire national income of the poorer half of mankind; aid given underdeveloped countries is a mere 5 percent of money spent for military purposes; resources devoted to medical research are less than a quarter of those devoted to military research and development. How have military expenditures increased to their present high levels? On what kinds of weapons of destruction is this huge amount of money spent? How successful have plans been to stop escalation?

Informed judicious answers to these questions can be found in Arms Uncontrolled. The authors examine where military money goes, the trade in arms, technology on today's battlefield, antisubmarine warfare, chemical and biological weapons, the birth and growth of strategic nuclear forces, the nuclear deterrence debate, nuclear weapon proliferation, as well as the efforts made so far toward arms control and disarmament. Will the onward rush of military technology end in disaster? Should individuals act to bring pressure on political leaders to change policy? This book informs the general reader without polemics or bias. It is an admirable review, written by two experts, of the recent arms race and the attempts to curb it, from World War II to the recent Vladivostok talks.

Ciudad Juárez has recently become infamous for its murder rate, which topped 3,000 in 2010 as competing drug cartels grew increasingly violent and the military responded with violence as well. Despite the atmosphere of intimidation by troops, police, and organized criminals, women have led the way in civil society activism, spurring the Juárez Resistance and forging powerful alliances with anti-militarization activists.

An in-depth examination of la Resistencia Juarense, Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez draws on ethnographic research to analyze the resistance’s focus on violence against women, as well as its clash with the war against drugs championed by Mexican President Felipe Calderón with the support of the United States. Through grounded insights, the authors trace the transformation of hidden discourses into public discourses that openly challenge the militarized border regimes. The authors also explore the advocacy carried on by social media, faith-based organizations, and peace-and-justice activist Javier Sicilia while Calderón faced U.S. political schisms over the role of border trade in this global manufacturing site.

Bringing to light on-the-ground strategies as well as current theories from the fields of sociology, political anthropology, and human rights, this illuminating study is particularly significant because of its emphasis on the role of women in local and transnational attempts to extinguish a hot zone. As they overcome intimidation to become game-changing activists, the figures featured in Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez offer the possibility of peace and justice in the wake of seemingly irreconcilable conflict.

In nine insightful chapters, this volume's contributors outline each nation's demilitarization choices and how they were made. They investigate factors such as military defeat, border security risks, economic pressures, and the development of strong peace cultures among citizenry. Also at center stage is the influence of the United States, which fills a paradoxical role as both an enabler of demilitarization and a leader in steadily accelerating militarization.

Bookended by Peter N. Stearns' thought-provoking historical introduction and forward-looking conclusion, the chapters in this volume explore what true demilitarization means and how it impacts a society at all levels, military and civilian, political and private. The examples chosen reveal that successful demilitarization must go beyond mere troop demobilization or arms reduction to generate significant political and even psychological shifts in the culture at large. Exemplifying the political difficulties of demilitarization in both its failures and successes, Demilitarization in the Contemporary World provides a possible roadmap for future policies and practices.

Until 1930, Argentina was one of the great hopes for stable democracy in Latin America. Argentines themselves believed in the destiny of their nation to become the leading Latin American country in wealth, power, and culture. But the revolution of 1930 unleashed the scourges of modern militarism and chronic instability in the land. Between 1930 and 1966, the Argentine armed forces, or factions of the armed forces, overthrew the government five times.

For several decades, militarism was the central problem in Argentine political life. In this study, Marvin Goldwert interprets the rise, growth, and development of militarism in Argentina from 1930 to 1966. The tortuous course of Argentine militarism is explained through an integrating hypothesis. The army is viewed as a “power factor,” torn by a permanent dichotomy of values, which rendered it incapable of bringing modernization to Argentina. Caught between conflicting drives for social order and modernization, the army was an ambivalent force for change. First frustrated by incompetent politicians (1916–1943), the army was later driven by Colonel Juan D. Perón into an uneasy alliance with labor (1943–1955). Peronism initially represented the means by which army officers could have their cake—nationalistic modernization—and still eat it in peace, with the masses organized in captive unions tied to an authoritarian state.

After 1955, when Perón was overthrown, a deeply divided army struggled to contain the remnants of its own dictatorial creation. In 1966, the army, dedicated to staunch anti-Peronism, again seized the state and revived the dream of reconciling social order and modernization through military rule.

Although militarism has been a central problem in Argentine political life, it is also the fever that suggests deeper maladies in the body politic. Marvin Goldwert seeks to relate developments in the military to the larger political, social, and economic developments in Argentine history. The army and its factions are viewed as integral parts of the whole political spectrum during the period under study.

Germany fought three major colonial wars from 1900 to 1908: the Boxer War in China, the Herero and Nama War in Southwest Africa, and the Maji Maji War in East Africa. Recently, historians have emphasized the role of German military culture in shaping the horrific violence of these conflicts, tracing a line from German atrocities in the colonial sphere to those committed by the Nazis during World War II. Susanne Kuss dismantles such claims in a close examination of Germany’s early twentieth-century colonial experience. Despite acts of unquestionable brutality committed by the Kaiser’s soldiers, she finds no direct path from Windhoek, site of the infamous massacre of the Herero people, to Auschwitz.

In German Colonial Wars and the Context of Military Violence Kuss rejects the notion that a distinctive military culture or ethos determined how German forces acted overseas. Unlike rival powers France and Great Britain, Germany did not possess a professional colonial army. The forces it deployed in Africa and China were a motley mix of volunteers, sailors, mercenaries, and native recruits—all accorded different training and motivated by different factors. Germany’s colonial troops embodied no esprit de corps that the Nazis could subsequently adopt.

Belying its reputation for Teutonic efficiency, the German military’s conduct of operations in Africa and China was improvisational and often haphazard. Local conditions—geography, climate, the size and capabilities of opposing native populations—determined the nature and extent of the violence German soldiers employed. A deliberate policy of genocide did not guide their actions.

For South Koreans, the twenty years from the early 1960s to late 1970s were the best and worst of times—a period of unprecedented economic growth and of political oppression that deepened as prosperity spread. In this masterly account, Carter J. Eckert finds the roots of South Korea’s dramatic socioeconomic transformation in the country’s long history of militarization—a history personified in South Korea’s paramount leader, Park Chung Hee.

The first volume of a comprehensive two-part history, Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866–1945 reveals how the foundations of the dynamic but strongly authoritarian Korean state that emerged under Park were laid during the period of Japanese occupation. As a cadet in the Manchurian Military Academy, Park and his fellow officers absorbed the Imperial Japanese Army’s ethos of victory at all costs and absolute obedience to authority. Japanese military culture decisively shaped Korea’s postwar generation of military leaders. When Park seized power in an army coup in 1961, he brought this training and mentality to bear on the project of Korean modernization.

Korean society under Park exuded a distinctively martial character, Eckert shows. Its hallmarks included the belief that the army should intervene in politics in times of crisis; that a central authority should plan and monitor the country’s economic system; that the Korean people’s “can do” spirit would allow them to overcome any challenge; and that the state should maintain a strong disciplinary presence in society, reserving the right to use violence to maintain order.

With the collapse of the Cold War following the Eastern European revolutions and the ongoing democratization of the Soviet republics, optimism about peace has transformed the international political climate. Incidents such as the Gulf War, however, have tempered this optimism and cast doubts on the prospects for demilitarization. In this book, Martin Shaw examines some of the developments that lie behind the recent momentous changes and argues that, despite the Gulf War and other regional wars, militarism is in decisive retreat.

Writing from a broadly sociological perspective, Shaw examines the roles of war and military institutions in human society and the ways in which preoccupation with war has affected domestic, regional, and international politics in the twentieth century. In doing so, he asks: When does the post-war era end? How have nuclear weapons altered the perception of war by society? What is the relationship between industrialism and militarism?

The author contends that, despite the militarism of some Third World countries, societies in the advanced industrial world (especially in Europe) have been undergoing a profound demilitarization. These societies have become politically insulated from war preparation, have recognized the effect of social movements on inter-state relations, and are experiencing a "revolution of rising expectations."

Offering evidence of "post-military citizenship," Shaw describes the increasing resistance to military conscription throughout the Western world, the replacement of blind obedience with demand for accountability in Eastern bloc countries, and the simultaneous rise of nationalism and communitarianism among common market members. And, in light of the collapse of Stalinist militarism in Europe and the USSR, Shaw suggests some of the changes that face Soviet society.

The literary career of Uchida Hyakken (1889–1971) encompassed a wide variety of styles and genres, including fiction, ­zuihitsu (essays), war diaries, poetry, travelogues, and children’s stories. In discussing his oeuvre, critics have circumscribed Hyakken to a private literary realm detached from the era in which he wrote.

Rachel DiNitto provides a critical corrective by locating in Hyakken’s simple yet powerful literary language a new way to appreciate the various literary reactions to the modernization of the early decades of the twentieth century and a means to open up a literary space of protest, an alternate intellectual response to the era of militarism.

This book takes up Hyakken’s fiction and essays written during Japan’s prewar years to investigate the intersection of his literature with the material and discursive surroundings of the time: a consumer-oriented print culture; the popular entertainment of film; the capitalist and cultural force of an emergent middle class; a planned, yet sprawling metropolis; and the war machine of an expanding Japanese ­empire. Emerging from this analysis is a writer who relied on the quotidian language of the everyday and the symbols of cultural modernism to counter the harsh realities of modernization and imperialism and to express sentiments contrary to the mainstream ideological rhetoric of the time.