Our treatment is limited in this sense by the practical reason that we were restricted to those scholars who answered the various calls for papers in the usual scholarly sources. In the end, participants included individuals from seven countries in two continents. Most were historians, but many were political scientists, literary scholars, sociologists, and legal scholars. Presenters ranged from those still engaged in graduate study to scholars who have published many books in the field of European history, law, and politics. Among the presenters were four survivors of ethnic cleansing whom we asked to write explicitly about their own experiences. The articles investigate dozens of cases of ethnic cleansing in the twentieth century. A number of contributors deal with ethnic cleansing in the period of World War I, in particular those episodes arising from the clash between Greece and Turkey at the end of the war. The period of World War II gave full play to the deadly policies of Stalinist Russia in the East and Hitler's Third Reich, as well as many cases which clearly spun off of these policies of ferocious ethnic cleansing. Hence, contributors deal with ethnic cleansing of Poles by Ukrainians, Romanians by Russians, Germans by Titoist Yugoslavia, and others. The vast case of the ethnic cleansing of Germans, the "Expulsion," forms an important part of the book. Fifteen contributors deal with the expulsions of Germans from East Central Europe from one standpoint or another. This extensive share seems in no way out of place, since the expulsion of sixteen million ethnic Germans from half a dozen European countries, at a loss of over two million lives, constitutes an episode which surely merits attention but which has been neglected by all but a handful of historians.13 The contemporaneous ethnic cleansing of Hungarian populations, mentioned above, will be a familiar topic to even fewer readers. In dealing with the history of post-Cold War ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, contributors pay much attention to processes and patterns, but they also do much to explore concepts and definitions. Multiple approaches to the complexities of the Balkans and the violence which has marked the dissolution of Yugoslavia prove most useful in conceptualizing as well as recounting ethnic cleansing in the region that seems to have named it. The studies of ethnic cleansing which follow represent an earnest attempt to make sense of a terrible aspect of the twentieth century, a century whose reputation for barbarity, when viewed in total, goes beyond even the pessimistic vision of Ortega y Gasset. Recording the erosion of indvidual autonomy and dignity, the frequent lapse of the rule of law, and the blatant disregard of the ideals of justice long considered to be at the heart of the European tradition does not tell the whole story. That story must also include the rise of a new set of barbarous practices and behaviors that ignored the pleas of individuals for a homeland, rejected the rights of individuals to their own property and the fruits of their labor, and in many cases denied the right of the targeted peoples to live.