Throughout the 1990s, a devastating series of separate but connected wars were waged across the territory of the Western Balkans as the former state of Yugoslavia collapsed. The subsequent wars that were fought in the chaos of Yugoslavia's collapse were waged across Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Kosovo. More than 140,000 people were killed throughout these wars and millions more were forcibly displaced by the violence, which made them the most violent conflict fought in Europe since World War II at the time. This is the story of how Yugoslavia was created, why Yugoslavia collapsed in the early 1990s, and why the wars that followed were so monstrously catastrophic.