Kosovo Crisis Research Articles

The Presence of Populism in the Two Decades After the War in Kosovo

The rise of an extreme movement, which has consistently produced violence and hatred in Kosovar society for more than fifteen years, undoubtedly increases the curiosity of any researcher of social problems to deal with the study of this issue. Of course, the study of social problems is extremely complex, especially in this time of globalization and extraordinary social mobility, therefore, each time, the opportunities for debate remained open. The paper addresses a very problematic topic, but that belongs to the social topicality, and not only in Kosovar society as one of the societies in transition, but also quite prominent in the most developed countries, and with a long democratic tradition. It should be noted that Kosovo is not only going through an economic transition, but more than that, the political and cultural transition has taken a special place. It should be noted that society's approach to the state and politics is crucial and has a tremendous impact on the process of economic transition. The paper deals precisely with the tools and methods that Kosovar political parties have used and are using to seize power, where the focus is on populism and the spirit of hatred created during the two decades after the war in Kosovo.

Humanitarian intervention (HI) and the responsibility to protect (R2P): The United Nations and international security

ABSTRACT Humanitarian intervention has undergone several changes since the Second World War and the justifications behind it are continually expanding and being reshaped as a result of the interventions performed to resolve the conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan and Kosovo, as well as a result of the emerging post-9/11 paradigm. Humanitarian intervention, while open to many different definitions, is generally understood as the use of both hard and soft power across state borders by external forces with the goal of preventing or obstructing gross human rights violations without the permission of the state within whose territory force is utilised. Overall, this paper is an investigation into the topic of humanitarian intervention. However, it is primarily an investigation into the most recent manifestation of humanitarian intervention, the responsibility to protect and its failures, in sovereignty, morality, and legality in the context of the United Nations as the ‘Guardian Angel of Global Security’.

Empirical Research on Constitutional Drafting Processes Following War or Internal Disturbances in Iraq, Tunisia, Kosovo and Sudan

Constitutional drafting is a complex procedure. Every year, nonetheless, the world witnesses the birth of several constitutions. The drafting of constitutions, however, differs greatly from one to the other; this depends mainly on the state of affairs in each State and the causes behind the need for a new constitution. In post-conflict States, the success of the constitutional drafting process depends on various factors including, inter alia, the inclusiveness of the process; transparency; equal representation in the bodies involved in the drafting; public participation; as well as the role the international community plays. All of these factors have great implications on the success, or failure, of not only the constitutional drafting process, but also on the whole peace-building process in post-conflict societies. In other words, a successful constitutional drafting process must be nationally-led and owned while targeting the root causes of the conflict. While it may be aided by international components, the process must reflect the geo-ideological differences within a State, whether cultural, tribal, ethnic or religious. This article gives an empirical account of the constitutional drafting processes adopted as a consequence of internal conflict in Iraq, Tunisia, Kosovo, and Sudan. The paper discusses the general drafting process; the bodies involved; procedural shortcomings; and any international influence.

Abjection, materiality and ontological security: A study of the unfinished Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina

Ontological security scholarship in International Relations (IR) has predominantly focused on the importance of social environments for the healthy sense of self. However, material environments can also provide an important source of ontological security. In my previous work I have argued that to assume this role of ‘ontic spaces’ material environments need to be discursively linked to states’ self-identity either through projection or introjection. In this article, I draw on the work of Julia Kristeva to argue that ontic spaces can also come about through abjection or the rejection of a material environment from the narrative of the self. I illustrate this theoretical point in the case study of the Serbian Orthodox Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina. Its construction began in 1992 during the rule of Slobodan Milošević but was never finished due to the Kosovo war in 1998/9. Over the years, as all proposed changes are considered to be a threat to a healthy sense of self of either Serbs or Albanians, the building has been turned into an abjected ontic space, an ambiguous symbol undermining the self/other and victim/oppressor boundaries and as such both repels and attracts, threatens and protects.

Геополитическая конкуренция акторов мировой политики за влияние на современную Сербию

The author of the paper finds out the manifestations of the geopolitical competition of world political actors (the United States, NATO, the European Un-ion) for influence on Serbia in 2008–2020. The study focuses on the political interests of these actors and strategies for their implementation. Serbia is strate-gically important for Western countries as the miss-ing link for full control over the Balkans and isola-tion of Russia. Turkey, which is pursuing a neo-Ottoman course, is interested in restoring its control over the Balkans, which is being hindered by Serbia. Ethnopolitical and confessional conflicts in Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina are used by the United States, NATO, and the European Union to increase pressure on the Serbian leadership. Serbia’s geopo-litical orientations remain inconsistent, reflecting attempts to maneuver between competing world players. The possibilities for such a policy are steadily shrinking, leaving Serbia with a geopolitical choice to make.

Political crisis and the Corona\u2014\u2018State of Emergency\u2019 in Kosovo

Amidst the arrival of the Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in Kosovo, the new coalition government of Vetevendosje and the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) under the leadership of Prime Minister Kurti (Vetevendosje) collapsed after a vote of no confidence on 25 March 2020. On the surface, the vote, initiated by LDK, was the consequence of a conflict over the appropriate Corona strategy. A two-month power struggle under the extraordinary circumstances of Corona-related restriction followed, resulting in a new LDK-led government in early June. The political crisis in Kosovo in the early-phase of Corona has to be analyzed against the background of a political crisis with legacies in the post-conflict period, the polarization between Vetevendosje and other parties, and the strong influence of external actors in Kosovo. In this forum article, I ask how the discourse on the “state of emergency” and the pandemic has influenced power struggles in Kosovo and how the conflicts have challenged the democratic competition and institutions. My main argument is that the pandemic indeed did not lead to any form of cooperation, but the political competitors used the pandemic for an intensification of their power struggle, which—for now—led to the restoration of a government of established elites, supported by diplomatic interventions from external actors.

Prisoners of Geography: Ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics

Tim Marshall is an esteemed authority on foreign affairs, with more than thirty years’ experience in broadcasting, reporting, analysis and writing about past, present and future geopolitical affairs – most of the time reporting from the front line on major world events and conflict zones that had significant geopolitical effects on global politics, such as the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the Kosovo crisis of 1999, the first Gulf War (1991), the US war in Afghanistan (2001). He also covered three US presidential elections (The What and The Why, 2016). Prisoners of geography: Ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics is arguably the most successful of his books, and makes for an intriguing read by an author with such an impressive resume.

REMEMBER TO NOT FORGET

In 2019, Serbia marked the 20th anniversary of the end of the Kosovo War through numerous commemorations that received significant media coverage. Through qualitative, ideographical research, this article explores how the Serbian media constructs the collective memory of the 1999 NATO intervention. By using thematic analysis and coding, the article analyses a total of ten newspaper articles from two newspaper outlets. Three themes emerged from the analysis: 1. “Unjustified and premeditated bombing campaign”; 2. “Do not forget Milica!”; and 3. “No justice?”. The thread that unites all three themes is the element of victimhood that the media frames and positions at the centre of collective memory. The article concludes that this view of victimhood is not an anomaly in history, but is aligned with the existing collective memory through the continuous emphasis on the suffering of Serbs.

The Search for World Order and the Wars in Kosovo and Iraq

In the search of world order after the Cold War, two conflicts were of particular significance. The first, in Kosovo in 1999, was fought to end the Serbian genocide of Kosovar Albanians. The second, in Iraq in 2003, was a war of choice ostensibly to remove the threat of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime and the weapons of mass destruction it supposedly held. Although distinct, these wars were joined as attempts by the United States governments of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, either side of the 9/11 attacks, to answer the questions of how, and for what purposes, the US should use its power, and what form of international order it should seek. One foreign leader, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, sought to influence the Americans in answering these questions. As a result, the Anglo-American relationship was once again important in shaping the course of global affairs. Why and how the wars produced cooperation between two US presidents and Blair, and how ideas about international order featured, are the subjects of this article.

Desecuritising cybersecurity: towards a societal approach

ABSTRACT Cybersecurity is often treated as a national security issue with responses to attacks implemented by military and intelligence agencies. This has created path dependencies in which tensions between the private sector and government have continued, where over-classification of cyberthreats has occurred, and where the broader societal impacts of malicious use of the internet have been underestimated. Drawing on the societal security concept established by the Copenhagen School of International Relations, we seek to reframe cybersecurity theory and policy. In the first section of the article we establish a theoretical approach to cybersecurity that emphasises the impact of cyberattacks on society, including on the health, energy and transport sectors. The second section draws on the history of cyberconflict to assess the ways the internet has been used to exacerbate societal tensions between identity groups and to create incohesion and societal security dilemmas. This section reinterprets the way the Kosovo War, Millennium (Y2 K) Bug, 9/11 and the WannaCry incident shaped and reflected cyber policy. The final section explores how a process of cyber desecuritisation might be achieved, including through discursive change and an enhanced role for the societal sector in the event of major cyberattacks.

Collective psychological ownership and reconciliation in territorial conflicts

Collective psychological ownership refers to people’s perception that an object, place, or idea belongs to their own group. We considered this concept in the context of territorial conflicts and proposed that (1) collective psychological ownership is distinct from place attachment, (2) higher ingroup identifiers are more likely to claim collective ownership and feel attached to the territory, yet (3) only ownership claims are related to lower support for reconciliation. These hypotheses were tested in two studies using structural equation modelling. Study 1 addressed the Kosovo conflict, based on Serbian participants living in Serbia (N = 264). We found that collective psychological ownership and place attachment were distinct. Moreover, higher Serbian identifiers had a stronger sense of collective ownership of Kosovo and were more attached to it. Those with stronger feelings of collective ownership supported reconciliation with Albanians less, while place attachment did not hinder reconciliation. Study 2 replicated these findings among a new sample of Serbs in Serbia (N = 173), among Serbs in Kosovo (N = 129), and in two other conflict settings: among Greek Cypriots in Cyprus (N = 135) and Jews in Israel (N = 109). Altogether, we provide evidence that collective psychological ownership can represent an obstacle to reconciliation in conflict regions.

How do Crises Fuel European Defence Policy?

This article analyses how crises may open policy windows which, when properly seized by policy entrepreneurs, made European defence policy a priority on the EU’s agenda. The article compares two periods which can be considered as critical junctures for European defence: the periods of its birth in 1998–1999, and its relaunch in 2016–2019. The analysis is based on the Multiple Stream Framework (msf) and considers European defence as a public policy shaped by policy actors. More precisely, the main hypothesis is that in both contexts policy actors from France and Germany took advantage of focusing events – the Kosovo War in 1998–1999, and Brexit extended by the election of Trump introducing turmoil within the transatlantic partnership in 2016–2019 – to advocate a policy solution to answer security challenges faced by the EU. The article also assesses how British policy actors played decisive yet inverse roles in both contexts. The first part of the article explains how the msf is used and why it is a stimulating agenda to study European defence policy. The second part of the article analyses the policy entrepreneurs taking advantage of the policy windows opened in both cases, and how they coupled the three streams underlying European defence by exploiting the British variable. The last part of the article focuses on the means used by the policy entrepreneurs to make it a policy priority on the European policy agenda in both the late 1990s and 2016–2019.

Sexual violence in the Kosovo conflict: a lesson for Myanmar and other ethnic cleansing campaigns

In this article, we analyze the patterns of sexual violence against Albanian women during the Kosovo conflict (1998–1999) as a weapon of the Milosevic regime’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. We used a broad combination of sources: a secondary literature of history and social science, human rights reports, trial records, our oral history of survivors, interviews with advocates and psychologists handling hundreds of survivors, and a subset of survey data of reported discrete incidents of sexual violence. Our focus on Kosovo as a single-case study rich in data allowed us to discern patterns that offer important insights for understanding how women’s bodies come to be sites of militarized violence in the context of ethnic exclusion and destruction. This carries policy implications for preventing the use of sexual violence in other conflicts, or, in the case of Myanmar military’s sexual violence against Rohingya women, to offer a roadmap for the prosecution of perpetrators.

Complicating Digital Nationalism in China

SCHNEIDER, Florian. 2018. China’s Digital Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. HAN, Rongbin. 2018. Contesting Cyberspace in China. New York: Columbia University Press. At the end of April 1999, Chinese hackers hijacked several US government websites. They replaced home pages with messages such as “Protest USA’s Nazi action! Protest NATO’s brutal action!” In the midst of the war in Kosovo, this was retaliation for the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by NATO force...

U.S.-RUSSIAN RELATIONS IN THE SHADOW OF THE 1999 KOSOVO WAR

The paper examines the changing relations between the U.S. and Russia since the end of the twentieth century, shaped by the experience of NATO’s war with Federal Republic of Yugoslavia over Kosovo. The first decade after the termination of the Cold War brought about the American ‘unipolar moment’, and with it the attempt of Russian political elites to approach the unipole and find a sustainable modus vivendi with it: the relationship between Yeltsin and Clinton administrations is a vivid example of such endeavors. At the same time, policies such as NATO expansion induced suspicion on the Russian side with regard to the possibilities of achieving an understanding and allowing Russia to become a legitimate part of European security architecture. When, in March of 1999, NATO began with the attacks against FRY (a country perceived as traditionally friendly towards Russia) without the consent of the United Nations Security Council, a long shadow was cast over the prospects of a Russian – American rapprochement. All subsequent episodes of cooperation and competition between Russia and the U.S. have been observed through the lens shaped by the Kosovo war. Drawing from contemporary Russian and western academic literature and memoir materials (Primakov, Guskova, Narochnitska, Baranovsky, Tsygankov, Sushenkov; Wohlforth, Walt, Clarke, Hill, Galen Carpenter et al.) and building upon the traditional realist concepts of great power competition and balancing, the author assesses the development of U.S.-Russian security relations in the context the Kosovo war experience. It is argued that, in addition to being an attack against a country perceived as a traditional Russian friend or protégé, NATO bombing of FRY in 1999 posed a major concern to Russia because it was a signal that the alliance was ready to change its strategic posture and engage in out-of-area operations.

Challenging humanitarian intervention in the twenty-first century: British domestic actors and horizontal foreign policy contestation during the Syrian crisis

AbstractTwenty years after the NATO intervention in Kosovo, domestic Western societies seem to have become more distrustful of the possibility of invoking and implementing humanitarian intervention (HI). This paper focuses on the 2011–2015 British domestic debate on the possibility of using force against the Syrian Government of Bashar al-Assad and against the Islamic State in Syrian territory. The goal is to understand how relevant domestic actors, namely the Government and the political parties, debated the concept of HI and engaged in several discursive strategies with the goal of influencing the decision on whether or not to intervene. The perception of the Members of Parliament about the failure of previous British governments of different ideological affiliations to carry out successful and useful interventions, especially in Iraq and Libya, favoured the development of an ‘intersubjective understanding’ that reflects a more precarious consensus on HI. The paper explains how the historical analogies of operationsIraqi Freedomagainst Saddam Hussein andUnified Protectoragainst Muammar Gaddafi shaped the perceptions of political parties by pushing them to claim a larger say in disputes related to the legitimacy and feasibility of these operations.

Incidence of haematological malignancies in Kosovo-A post "uranium war" concern.

BackgroundDuring the Kosovo War (1998–99) approximately 31,000 rounds with Depleted Uranium (DU) were fired on 85 targets in Kosovo. The number of haematological malignancies (HM) increased after the war and the concern was the use of DU during the war. The aim of this study was to analyse the incidence rates of HM in Kosovo throughout a 20-year that includes pre- and post- war period (1995–2015); and to examine if there is any association between the use of DU rounds and incidence rates of HM in different regions of Kosovo.MethodsIn this retrospective register-based study, 1,798 new patients diagnosed with leukaemia, Hodgkin lymphoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and Multiple myeloma were analysed over a 20 year period. Incidence rates were calculated focusing on specific time periods, regions and age-groups. In addition, the correlation between the use of DU in different regions and their incidence of HM was analysed.ResultsThe average annual crude rate of all HM in Kosovo was 5.02 cases per 100,000 persons. Incidence rates of HM in first post-war period (2000–2003) increased by 0.37 cases/100,000 persons (9.51%) compared to the pre-war period (1995–1998) whereas in the last post-war period (2012–2015), incidence of HM increased by 3.19/100,000 persons (82%). Gjakova and Peja, the first and third most exposed regions to DU ordnance ranked first and second in difference in HM. Prishtina, Gjilan and Ferizaj, regions with the least number of rounds/km2, were characterized by a decline of incidence rates.ConclusionsAfter the war, the increase in incidence rate of HM was higher in two regions with most DU rounds/km2 expended Despite these findings, this study warrants further investigation and does not lead us to a conclusive finding on the existence of a causal relationship between the use of DU during the war and the rise in incidence of HM in Kosovo.

Проблема сохранения историко-культурного наследия в Косове: международно-политический аспект

The purpose of this work is to identify the relation-ship between world politics and culture in the con-text of the concept of sustainable development. As an example, the author analyzes the situation in Kosovo, where cultural and historical objects have become hostages of the ethno-confessional conflict and the subject of bargaining by actors in the inter-national arena. The relevance of the paper is deter-mined by the presence of ongoing terrorist attacks against cultural heritage sites in the region and the world. During the conflict in Kosovo, there was a mutual cultural and ethnic genocide, which the con-flict parties are not willing to admit. Moreover, given the primary responsibility of the state for the preser-vation of historical and religious sites, the question arises about the future of heritage sites in Kosovo with an unrecognized status. In this regard, the in-ternational community needs to be more actively involved in the situation in Kosovo.

The Kosovo Conflict and the Changing Migration Patterns of the Gorani Community: Continuities and Shifts

The Kosovo Conflict and the Changing Migration Patterns of the Gorani Community: Continuities and Shifts

International(ized) Constitutional Court: Kosovo’s Transfer of Judicial Sovereignty

Abstract This paper discusses the transfer of judicial sovereignty in Kosovo from a comparative perspective. In particular, it addresses the transfer of constitutional jurisdiction to the Special Court of Kosovo. This court was formed as a result of Kosovo’s commitment to address allegations made by the Council of Europe in a document known as the Dick Marty report. The report alleges that war crimes and crimes against humanity and international law were committed during and in the aftermath of the Kosovo war (1998–1999). It took several years for the Court to be formed as constitutional amendments, legal infrastructure, and other practical steps were needed to make the Court operational. These preparatory measures have been taken, but practical results are missing, and there is fear that the Court might end up like previous UN- and EU-led justice systems, which did too little and were too late to address the culture of impunity in Kosovo.