"With the end of the Cold War the major powers turned increasingly to the United Nations to help them resolve the many civil wars then afflicting the international community. This led not only to an unprecedented expansion in the number and size of the UN's peacekeeping operations, but also to a change in the nature of its goals. No longer constrained to operating between antagonostic states, the UN was how being asked to restore and even build peace within them. Central to this goal was deemed to be the disarmament of the former warring parties. This book therefore seeks to identify the most important lessons taught by the UN's previous attempts at disarmament. As well as providing an analysis of seven of the UN's major disarmament processes, it also constructs an original analytical framework in order to explain the variation in the UN's success. On this basis it proffers suggestions for present and future UN disarmament operations."--Jacket.