Michael Ignatieff's study of the war in Kosovo is an indispensable history of the present and a book of compelling contemporary interest as we stand on the brink of a new era of war-making.

In real wars, whole nations are mobilized, soldiers fight and die, victories are won. In virtual war, hostilities may not even be declared, the only combatants may be strike pilots and computer programmers, the watching nation is mobilized only as a television audience, and instead of victory there is only an uncertain endgame. Kosovo was a virtual war: fought by pilots at 15,000 feet, commanded by generals whose only view of the battle was through their pilots' bombing sights, and reported by opposing media with competing versions of collateral damage stories: a war which American and other NATO forces did the fighting but only Kosovars and Serbs did the dying.

Virtual War examines this strange type of warfare through the eyes of the key players - Richard Holbrooke, General Wesley Clarke and Canadian Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor of the war crimes tribunal - and combines reportage, theory and analysis to produce a definitive collection of essays on contemporary warfare.