Soft multiparticle production is a dominant feature of most events in
high energy hadronic collisions. Since soft processes have no large mo
mentum transfer, perturbative QCD expansions in the strong coupling co
nstant are not applicable. However, suitable large N expansions of QCD
provide a topological classification of diagrams and a potentially us
eful non-perturbative approach. This topological expansion, when suppl
emented with generally accepted theoretical principles like duality, u
nitarity, Regge behavior and the parton structure of hadrons, provides
the basis underlying the dual parton model (DPM). This model has been
extensively studied and gradually extended over the past twelve years
. It has been shown that DPM provides a complete, phenomenological des
cription of all facets of soft processes. This is a non-trivial achiev
ement in view of the large amount of soft multiparticle data available
from both hadronic as well as nuclear beams and targets. Here, we des
cribe the basic ideas of the model and review the main results coming
from DPM.