Peacebuilding or ‘Peacedelaying’: Social Exclusion of Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons in Post-war Serbia

Abstract

Since the end of Kosovo war (1999), peacebuilding efforts of local and international actors in Serbia have been mainly focused on improving the socioeconomic situation. The liberal peace administrated in Serbia implied, among other things, the country transformation towards a more open and deregulated model of economy, and inevitably led to the ‘commodification of welfare’ [Pugh, M. (2009). Towards life welfare. In E. Newman, R. Paris, & O. Richmond (Eds.), New perspectives on liberal peacebuilding (pp. 78–97). New York, NY: United Nations University Press] through market-oriented policies and tools. The transition also created deep social cleavages between the winners and the losers of war-to-peace transition, and further marginalized the most vulnerable groups in the society. This applies in particular to forced migrants, refugees from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and internally displaced persons from Kosovo. By employing the concept of social exclusion the paper investigates to which extent the marginalization of these groups is the result of liberal peacebuilding, and if such effects are causing ‘peacedelaying’ in post-war Serbia.