This book is based on my PhD thesis from the University of Sheffield, which I successfully defended in May. As I have been employed by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs since October 1998, it was arranged that I should offer a copy of the thesis to two separate official investigations that were being conducted in the Netherlands. One of them was the Commissie Bakker, or the Tijdelijke Commissie Besluitvorming Uitzendingen TCBU, a Parliamentary investigation committee set up to assess the domestic decision-making process regarding the deployment of Dutch forces in a number of peacekeeping operations in e.g. former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Angola and Cyprus (on May 19, 2000). The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), charged with an independent analysis of the events surrounding the fall of Srebrenica, received a copy on May 29, 2000 as well.

The theoretical component of the thesis is represented in the introduction to this book. It covers three sets of literature. The first one deals with the international handling of the Yugoslav crisis. The second represents the contrasting views on the nature of the international system and the role of small states within it, while the third focuses on the foreign policy of the Netherlands. In assembling the empirical component of this book, I used various methodological approaches, including the study of unpublished and public documents, memoirs, interviews, secondary literature and press articles. I would be reluctant to claim that participant observation played an important role, although my perspective on the events covered in this book was inevitably coloured by my time spent as a research assistant for David Lord Owen and my work in the European Affairs Department of the Netherlands Foreign Ministry.

The core of the primary source material consists of official documents from the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The references to the Foreign Ministry's documents have been deleted, given that they only mentioned the files in which they had been found. A full list of the files that were studied is provided in the bibliography. In addition, I was granted access to former Minister of Defence Relus ter Beek's personal papers. While Ter Beek did make use of these papers for his own memoirs, the Foreign Ministry's documents referred to in this thesis are not in most cases available in the public domain.