Lessons from supersymmetry: "Instead-of-confinement" mechanism

We review physical scenarios in different vacua of N = 2 supersymmetric QCD deformed by the mass term μ for the adjoint matter. This deformation breaks supersymmetry down to N = 1 and, at large μ, the theory flows to N = 1 QCD. We focus on dynamical scenarios which can serve as prototypes of what we observe in real-world QCD. The so-called r = N vacuum is especially promising in this perspective. In this vacuum an "instead-of-confinement" phase was identified previously, which is qualitatively close to the conventional QCD confinement: the quarks and gauge bosons screened at weak coupling, at strong coupling evolve into monopole-antimonopole pairs confined by non-Abelian strings. We review genesis of this picture.