All of the chapters included here were commissioned specifically for this book, except for chapter 12 on Croatia, which was added to the collection when the original contributor contracted to write this chapter dropped out of the project at the last minute. That chapter was originally published, in a somewhat different form, in Sabrina P. Ramet, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia at Peace and at War: Selected Writings, 1983–2007 (Lit Verlag, 2008) and Sabrina P. Ramet, Konrad Clewing, and Renéo Lukic (eds.), Croatia since Independence: War, Politics, Society, Foreign Relations (R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2008). It is reprinted here, in updated form, by kind permission of these publishers.

Until 1989, it was common to use the term “Eastern Europe” to refer to the communist states of Europe outside the Soviet Union. Today, the European Union officially classifies not only the northern-tier countries (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia) but also the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) as belonging to “Central Europe.” In a post-1989 context, the term “Eastern Europe” may be taken to include Belarus, Ukraine, and the European portion of Russia, which are not covered in this volume.

I am grateful to the contributors whose work is included in this volume for their excellent work, their attentiveness to the guidelines, their perseverance, and their faith. I am also grateful to the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO) in Oslo for providing a subsidy to support the production of this volume.