Militias have proven to be a consistent and enduring challenge to achieving peace in war zones around the world. Bringing together the lessons learned from four intensively-researched case studies -- the Democratic Republic of Congo, Timor-Leste, Afghanistan and Sudan -- the book argues that the overly rigid "cookie-cutter" approach to demilitarization, developed and commonly implemented presently by the international community, is ineffective at meeting the myriad of challenges involving militias. In doing so, the authors propose a radical new framework for demilitarization that questions conventional models and takes into account on-the-ground realities.