The conservative U.S. journalist George F. Will once remarked that American football “combines the two worst things about America: it is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” Readers familiar with this adage may initially sigh when confronted with Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies, a mammoth scholarly effort to punctuate Yugoslavia's violent dissolution through history writing by committee. The result, however, is pleasantly surprising: the chapters in this book are of consistently high quality, with the best of them recommendable for usage in the classroom.

The Scholars' Initiative to some extent emulates earlier multinational attempts to confront historical controversies, such as the German-Czech and German-Slovak Historians' Commissions. In the former Yugoslavia, the Initiative was preceded by the conferences called Povjesničari-Istoričari (the Croatian and Serbian words for “historians,” respectively). The controversies tackled by the Scholars' Initiative include the dissolution of Yugoslavia; ethnic cleansing and war crimes; the wars in Croatia, Bosnia- Herzegovina, and Kosovo; the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY); and more. Previous findings by Scholars' Initiative members have been published in separate volumes.

One must acknowledge the enormous organizational acumen of Charles Ingrao, Thomas A. Emmert, and their team leaders, who managed an international cast of hundreds. Reviewing the blueprint of this project, there is every reason to believe that the methodology would result in either bland and inconclusive history based on the lowest common denominator of the team, or in an unreadable medley of facts and controversies. Instead, this volume provides the reader with succinct summaries of the “Yugoslav controversies” that are both understandable to the layperson and very acceptable to the expert. At its best, this results in some real gems. Gale Stokes's exquisite mini-biography of Alija Izetbegović alone is almost worth the price of the publication. Momčilo Pavlović shrewdly navigates the maelstrom that is the Kosovo issue from 1974 to 1990. Ozren Žunec, a Croat sociologist and former officer in the Croatian Army's Counterintelligence Service, and Mile Bjelajac, a noted Serb military historian, show that it is possible—and productive—to produce a coauthored narrative of the war in Croatia from 1991 to 1995 and its many attendant controversies. The chapter on the dissolution of Yugoslavia, co-authored by Andrew Wachtel and Christopher Bennett and based on the work of a team headed by Wachtel and Latinka Perović, is perhaps the most comprehensive and readable contribution of its size. It deserves a place on all syllabi dealing with Yugoslavia's collapse.

One remarkable and notable feature of the volume is the extent to which the teams have drawn on the documentation of the ICTY. Trial transcripts, indictment judgments, and evidence adduced at trial are all cited in order to resolve important disputed points. This confirms a trend elsewhere in recent scholarly production on the former Yugoslavia, namely, that the ICTY has made a major contribution to the historical record, both through its trials and as a unique repository of documentation. As the ICTY finishes its trials, and with the recent unveiling of the online ICTY Court Records site, scholars will have much improved access to these sources. It would have been useful, however, if some of the authors had distinguished more clearly between those facts alleged by the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), and which are yet to be proved, and those legally binding facts found in the ICTY's judgments. The otherwise very good chapter on the ICTY would also have been strengthened by a more extensive treatment of the extremely critical (and polemical) writings of Serb and Croat legal scholars.

It should be noted that the chapters of necessity overlap to a significant degree. This occasionally results in some disagreements between one chapter and another. For example, the controversy surrounding Germany's allegedly premature recognition of Slovenia and Croatia receives subtly different conclusions in separate chapters.

The editors do not pretend that their contribution will resolve these discussions, and they highlight those instances in which agreement could not be reached and more research is warranted. Only time will tell how many of the project participants will venture to distance themselves from the project or disown some of its findings. In the meantime, however, the project supervisors have shown that it is possible for scholars of diverse and often competing backgrounds to reach a meaningful and intellectually stimulating consensus on the greatest of controversies in recent Balkan history.