The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace established its European Center after World War II with the aim of studying specific local and regional conflicts in Europe. Among these studies is a research project on the conflict in Cyprus and its multiple facets and manifestations during the years 1946-1959.

This is the first Cypriot conflict, which pitted Great Britain against the Greek Cypriots, who sought the union of the island with Greece, from the onset of the anti-colonial movement at the end of World War II until the Zurich and London agreements in 1959, which were believed to have resolved the Cyprus issue.

The work was entrusted to the French scholar François Crouzet, who was absolutely competent and additionally "neutral," meaning a citizen of a state not directly involved in the conflict. Crouzet is not interested in writing a study of the Cyprus issue as exclusively an international political problem involving and conflicting the power policies of various powers, both major and minor. He attempts something radically different.

He seeks to ground his analysis of the Cyprus issue in the social and historical reality of the island and to examine the post-war political problem in connection with the overall assessment of both the British administration and its handling and the ethnic pluralism that characterizes the island's society and complicates the solution. He also attempts to identify the "roots of the dispute," placing this analysis before his detailed historical overview.

He incorporates into his work a vast body of documentary material, drawn from printed sources that have only become accessible in recent years, from the press (British, Greek, Greek Cypriot, and Turkish) and from interviews (which the author accords fundamental importance).

The titanic task of guiding the multinational team that assisted in the research, mastering the rich but heterogeneous and uneven material, and ultimately composing his impressive study while attempting to understand the positions of all parties, the author accomplished with merit. It is worth noting that the translator of the book, Aristotle Frydas (former ambassador, 1922-2010), had served in Cyprus as a young consul of Greece during the years of the Cypriot liberation struggle.