This book was published in 2003. How has NATO managed to survive and transform itself into a peace-enforcement organization? Challenging the dominant assumption that NATO intervened in the Balkans because of the threat that conflicts in the region posed to European security, this book develops a new set of research questions based on the hypothesis of the existence of "policy communities". The author demonstrates that there were shifting policy communities in operations that shaped the Alliance's transformation process, arguing that NATO would not have succeeded in assuming peace-enforcement tasks without other factors - ranging from organisational dynamics, domestic politics and the impact of ad hoc reactions to external events - coming into play. Highlighting the role of NATO as an actor in international security, this volume is aimed at academics and practitioners in the field of international relations