Improving International Peacebuilding Efforts: The Example of Human Rights Culture in Kosovo

Abstract

Kosovo today is a house of cards. One false move and the house will fall down. Should the international troops--in particular the U.S. and British troops--pull out of Kosovo, it will collapse into communal violence. (1) The international security presence in Kosovo has generally succeeded in preventing the outbreak of another violent armed conflict but has accomplished little else beyond that. This is not surprising. Militaries can help prevent war, but they alone cannot build a sustainable peace. (2) The cessation of hostilities through the use of military force does not, in and of itself, resolve the strategic dilemmas, structural imbalances, and open wounds of unaddressed abuses and interpersonal hostilities. As David Lake and Donald Rothschild stress in their exhaustive study of ethnic conflict, a stable peace can arise only as effective institutions of government are reestablished, the state begins again to mediate between distrustful ethnic groups, and the parties slowly gain confidence in the safeguards contained in the new ethnic contracts. (3) Peacebuilding requires the efforts of a host of civilian actors focused on institution building, interpersonal reconciliation, and social transformation over the long term. More than 250 well-intentioned nongovernmental and governmental organizations have flooded into Kosovo offering a range of resources and promises. (4) Elections have been held, (5) homes have been rebuilt, schools have reopened, and roads have been repaved. Police and judges have been trained, and the Ad Hoc Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is well under way in its investigations into war crimes committed in Kosovo. Nonetheless, not one of the larger international goals that brought the international community to Kosovo in the first place has been reached. Kosovo is decidedly not a multiethnic and secure society, and equal access to basic human rights protections remains illusory. (6) Local police and administrative and judicial systems are still unable to operate independent of international oversight and, instead of joining government, many of the best and brightest in Kosovo have withdrawn from participation altogether. That the citizenry of Kosovo--Serb and Albanian alike--perceive no legitimate governance structure and process only magnifies pervasive feelings of insecurity and unfairness. As the international community looks toward new nation-building challenges in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the struggle for lessons learned from Kosovo is acute. The experience of Kosovo suggests that there must be more and better attempts to incorporate local actors and experiences and to draw on them in building human rights cultures. I divide my argument into four parts: (1) an explanation of the use of the term human rights culture and the introduction of a framework for understanding and analyzing the local impact of human rights norms in post-conflict societies; (2) a discussion of the nature of the human rights culture in Kosovar society prior to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) bombing in 1999; (3) an exploration of the impact of postagreement civil intervention on human rights culture; and (4) suggestions for improvement, with specific attention to human rights education. Toward a Framework for Analyzing Human Rights Culture The notion of human rights refers to two fundamental precepts. The first of these precepts is the principle, or the notion that each human being should be treated with dignity solely because he or she is human and not because he or she belongs to a certain group or has achieved a certain stature. (7) Full acceptance of the principle compels the embrace of the equality principle. This is the idea that all people have dignity. One cannot claim to believe in the idea of human rights and also believe that these rights apply to only some individuals, or that only some states have a responsibility to respect human rights. …