Published in Understanding the War in Kosovo (ed. by Florian Bieber and Zhidas Daskalovski, 2003), this chapter argues that the difficulties the international community was experiencing in formulating and implementing a consistent and effective policy approach towards the conflict in Kosovo were several and they had their sources within Kosovo, within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, within the wider region, and within the complex framework of relations between the main actors in the international arena. Together these factors have, from the outset, limited the range of possible policies, resulting in international governmental actors failing, individually and collectively, to prevent the conflict.