This multi-year venture has involved a research team of some forty chapter authors and commentators. The research has been accompanied by three major workshops on project methodology, initial chapter reviews and final discussions. A point was made of including both scholars and practitioners involved in power-sharing settlements in the review process, in the hope that more would be learned about the actual implementation of the settlements under investigation. The project team was united in its wish to explore whether long-standing secessionist conflicts have been addressed effectively through the significant number of self-determination settlements that were generated in response to the wave of internal conflicts of the 1990s.