Susan L. Woodward, an expert scholar and political adviser on Balkan, East European, and post-Soviet affairs, on intervention in civil wars, and on postconflict reconstruction, earned her B.A. from the University of Minnesota and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton. She taught at Yale, the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced Studies, Johns Hopkins, and Northwestern, among others. From 1999 to 2000 she was senior research fellow at the Centre for Defense Studies, King's College, London, and from 1990 to 1999, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her books include Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945-1990 and Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Her many articles cover such topics as peace-building and state-building, U.S. and international policy on the Bosnian war and Kosovo, the political economy of socialist Yugoslavia, and the security challenges of fragile and failing states. Professsor Woodward served as head of the analysis and assessment unit of the U.N. mission in former Yugoslavia and as consultant to U.N. agencies, the World Bank, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and U.S. and U.K. departments of development, foreign affairs, and defense.

The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991-92 brought about the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, atrocities on massive scale, and a new term, "ethnic cleansing", for the tactics of nationalist civil war. The failure of Western action to prevent the spread of violence or to negotiate peace disheartened Europeans in their drive to greater unity and turned the euphoria about the "new world order" into cynicism about US leadership. On their own, and as a warning of similar conflicts yet to come, the Yugoslav wars present the first major challenge to US foreign policy after the Cold War. Why did the Yugoslav state break up? And why did the break-up lead to war? In this book, Susan Woodward analyzes the causes of the Yugoslav wars and argues that focusing on ancient ethnic hatreds and military aggression misunderstands nationalism in post-communist states.