  In this talk I give a preliminary account of original results, obtained in
collaboration with John Ellis. Details and further elaboration will be
presented in a forthcoming publication. We present a proposal for a
non-critical (Liouville) string approach to confinement of four-dimensional
(non-abelian) gauge theories, based on recent developments on the subject by
Witten and Maldacena. We discuss the effects of vortices and monopoles on the
open world-sheets whose boundaries are Wilson loops of the target-space (non
Abelian) Gauge theory. By appropriately employing `D-particles', associated
with the target-space embedding of such defects, we argue that the apprearance
of five-dimensional Anti-De-Sitter (AdS) space times is quite natural, as a
result of Liouville dressing.We isolate the world-sheet defect contributions to
the Wilson loop by constructing an appropriate observable, which is the same as
the second observable in the supersymmetric U(1) theory of Awada and Mansouri,
but in our approach supersymmetry is not necessary.When vortex condensation
occurs, we argue in favour of a (low-temperature) confining phase, in the sense
of an area law, for a large-$N_c$ (conformal) gauge theory at finite
temperatures. A connection of the Berezinski-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT)
transitions on the world-sheet with the critical temperatures in the
thermodynamics of Black Holes in the five-dimensional AdS space is made.
