Translate 
Abstract
Eighteen years after the end of 2001 conflict between ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians, North Macedonia remains a country deeply polarized along ethno-national lines with implications for the maintenance of peace. The peace-building policies introduced by the Ohrid Framework Agreement (OFA) based on a consociational model of power-sharing have accommodated the demands of ethnic Albanians, including the right of access to higher education (HE) in the mother-tongue which represented one of the root-causes in the escalation of the 2001 conflict. The OFA’s exclusive focus on access and availability through state funding for higher education in the Albanian language has however favored a process of ethnicization of the tertiary sector. This paper seeks to investigate the unintended consequences of the OFA-induced ethnic self-ghettoisation within the public higher education system and, by the same token, it critiques the OFA’s lack of mechanisms to reach across the ethnic divide through the lenses of a rights-based approach to education. It ultimately argues that without a strong governmental commitment to deethnicize education by transcending the OFA’s intrinsic limits, power-sharing remains permeable to political manipulation which critically hampers social transformation and increases the probability of inter-ethnic tension, further weakening the peace process.
Highlights
For many decades a low priority sector in the context of post-conflict humanitarian relief and development, higher education is gradually drawing attention from policy-makers, practitioners and researchers as a catalyst for economic and social recovery (World Bank, 2000; Milton & Barakat, 2016; Millican 2018; Milton 2018)
While it prevented an escalation of the conflict into a full scale civil war, it has been argued that the Ohrid Framework Agreement (OFA) had failed to introduce mechanisms geared towards building social cohesion but it had rather contributed to reinforcing ethno-cultural divisions along territorial and linguistic lines, resulting in the deepening of stereotypes, intolerance and lack of trust between the two dominant nations (Fontana, 2017; OFA Review on Social Cohesion, 2015; European Commission, 2018)
Higher Education in Emergencies research question seeks to explore whether access to higher education in the mother-tongue has effectively functioned as a conduit for peace-building and/or whether a univocal focus on access and availability has perhaps served as a tool to cement divisions and reproduce ethnic nationalism along the Yugoslav “separate but equal” policies
Summary
Article Info Received: January 29, 2020 Revised: March 8, 2020 Accepted: June 21, 2020. Note: This is the forthcoming version of the article.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
