Ending the impasse in Kosovo: partition,decentralization, or consociationalism?

This paper argues that current Western-backed approaches to conflict resolution in Kosovo have failed to alter Serbia's policy toward the region and have contributed to the exacerbation of political tensions between Belgrade and Brussels, while deepening ethnic cleavages between Serb and Albanian communities. While there is no possibility of Kosovo returning to Serbia's control, there is an equal unlikelihood that Serbian-populated regions of Kosovo, especially the north, will submit to Pristina's authority. Most importantly, there is little hope that Kosovo can gain full international recognition and membership in international organizations without a compromise settlement with Serbia. While territorial partition has long been a suggested option, I conclude that the best possible solution for Kosovo, given the positions of all parties involved, is a process of significant decentralization beyond the internationally supported measures in the Ahtisaari Plan. A model of consociational power sharing is one in which Serbian and Albanian municipalities are granted high levels of autonomy similar to arrangements made for Bosnia. While this solution may not be ideal and further weakens central authority, I argue that consociationalism reduces the problems of ethnic conflict, encourages local self-government, and preserves the overall territorial integrity of Kosovo.     

The Perils of Weak Organization: Explaining Loyalty and Defection of Militant Organizations Toward Pakistan

Why do some militant groups defect against their sponsors, while others remain loyal? Pakistan's sponsorship of Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba offers a controlled case comparison as the former turned its guns against Islamabad, while the latter remained obedient despite a similar strength, ethnic ties to the regime, and the presence of alternative supporters. What explains Jaish's defection and Lashkar's loyalty? Drawing on organizational and principal-agent theory, I argue that militant organizations that are more decentralized and factionalized are more likely to turn on their sponsors, because their weak command and control as well as dispersed decision making limit the militant leaders' ability to follow through on their commitments to the sponsors and makes it more difficult for the sponsors to discipline the militant organization. When a sponsor attempts to coerce such organizations into submission by detaining militant leaders, freezing or confiscating their material assets the rank-and-file is likely to turn guns against the sponsor.     

Disputes over the 15-point agreement on normalization of relations between Kosovo and Serbia

This paper examines the 15-point agreement on normalization of relations between Kosovo and Serbia. Two mainstream discourses have prevailed since the agreement was ratified by both countries: on one hand, the Government of Kosovo has branded this agreement as historic, given the fact that in the last century no agreement has ever been reached between Kosovo and Serbia. On the other hand, Kosovo's political opposition has critiqued this agreement stressing that the 15-point agreement devastates Kosovo's statehood. Beyond both extreme stances, we argue that an enhanced autonomy for four northern Serb municipalities ought to be seen as a tool for integration, rather than disintegration of Kosovo statehood. This paper concludes that the dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia as a top-down arrangement lacks transparency, and this might jeopardize the achievements reached through this process. Moreover, the EU position should be clearly articulated that redrawing and rearranging the borders of Kosovo and Serbia might overturn the EU's and USA's immense investments in stability, peace, and prosperity in the Western Balkans.     

Contested war remembrance and ethnopolitical identities in Kosovo

This paper examines the relationship between political power and war remembrance by considering the way war remembrance occurs in a divided society. The purpose of this paper is to explore memory of the violent past and its uses as an ongoing arena of disputes between former adversaries and within ethnopolitical groups pushing their distinct versions of memory. Moreover, this paper examines three key aspects of the politics of remembrance: prevalent narratives, arenas of commemoration, and agencies of war remembrance, based on the case study of Kosovo. The postwar narrative and commemoration in Kosovo have evolved along ethnic lines, perpetuating antagonism and conflicting identities. Memorialization in Kosovo raises serious challenges for comprehensive transitional justice and reconciliation between these ethnic groups. The paper concludes that through appropriate civic education, critical inquiry of commemoration practices, and especially through evidence-based adaptation of the history curriculum, there is a chance to promote a culture of shared memory and to establish inclusive politics of remembrance in Kosovo, as crucial components of reconciliation and peace-building.     

The quest for legitimacy in independent Kosovo: the unfulfilled promise of diversity and minority rights

When Kosovo declared its independence in 2008, it did so not as a nation-state, but as a “state of communities,” self-defining as multiethnic, diverse, and committed to extensive rights for minorities. In this paper, this choice is understood as a response to a dual legitimation problem. Kosovo experienced both an external legitimation challenge, regarding its contested statehood internationally, and an internal one, vis-à-vis its Serb minority. The focus on diversity and minority rights was expected to confer legitimacy on the state both externally and internally. International state-builders and the domestic political elite in post-conflict Kosovo both pursued this strategy. However, it inadvertently created an additional internal legitimation challenge, this time from within Kosovo’s majority Albanian population. This dynamic is illustrated by the opposition movement “Lëvizja Vetëvendosje” (Self-Determination Movement), which rejects the framing of Kosovo as first and foremost a multiethnic state. The movement’s counter-narrative represents an additional internal legitimation challenge to the new state. This paper thus finds that internationally endorsed “diversity management” through minority rights did not deliver as a panacea for the legitimacy dilemmas of the post-conflict polity. On the contrary, the “state of communities” continues to be contested by both majority and minority groups in Kosovo.     

The Rise of Militant Islam and the Security State in the Era of the ‘Long War’

This paper distinguishes between political and militant Islam and analyses the latter's current ability to confront empire and to become a social force in Muslim-majority states. This analysis is within the dialectic of collaboration and resistance, starting with client postcolonial states' pivotal role in bringing to fruition the collaboration between political Islam and US imperialism during the cold war era. The post-cold war period signals the imperialist putsch to confront militant Islam in the ‘Long War’ by employing the cold war strategy of ‘permanent war’ and universalising the idea of the security state. Militant Islam's resistance to the Long War and the security state makes this two-pronged imperial strategy a losing proposition for the USA. Paradoxically this strategy has also become the prime mover for militant Islam's ascendancy. The paper addresses the paradox of the USA's continuation with its losing Long War strategy and securitisation agenda which, although providing succour to militant Islam, is also achieving its larger objectives to buttress capitalist globalism; fuel the military–industrial and security–industrial complexes; and support ‘big oil’.     

Is Turkey coming to terms with its past? Politics of memory and majoritarian conservatism

There is unprecedented domestic and international interest in Turkey's political past, accompanied by a societal demand for truth and justice in addressing past human rights violations. This article poses the question: Is Turkey coming to terms with its past? Drawing upon the literature on nationalism, identity, and collective memory, I argue that the Turkish state has recently taken steps to acknowledge and redress some of the past human rights violations. However, these limited and strategic acts of acknowledgment fall short of initiating a more comprehensive process of addressing past wrongs. The emergence of the Justice and Development Party as a dominant political force brings along the possibility that the discarded Kemalist memory framework will be replaced by what I call majoritarian conservatism, a new government-sanctioned shared memory that promotes uncritical and conservative-nationalist interpretations of the past that have popular appeal, while enforcing silence on critical historiographies that challenge this hegemonic memory and identity project. Nonetheless, majoritarian conservatism will probably fail to assert state control over memory and history, even under a dominant government, as unofficial memory initiatives unsettle the hegemonic appropriation of the past.     

From the Cradle of the Nation to the Most Expensive Serbian Word: Changes in Serbian Public Language in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century

Russian National Unity (Russkoe Natsionalnoe Edinstvo—RNE) is the largest militant fascist group in Russia today. The founder and leader of the RNE, Aleksandr P. Barkashov, speaks of himself as a national‐socialist, and praises Hitler's deeds for Germany. The RNE has pledged to establish a system of ethnic segregation in Russia were it to come to power.     

A tale of two independence movements: how do citizens encounter issues of international law and democratic theory?

Foreign policy events, including secessionism and independence movements, become objectified for most citizens through media coverage. Accordingly, I look at the coverage of Kosovo’s and Scotland’s bids for independence in the two top national newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Scholarship in international law, democratic theory, and comparative politics might have valuable insights on independence processes, but it is the media frames inspired by these strands of theoretical literature that shape public opinion and/or reflect policy-makers’ preferences (and biases) in the foreign policy arena. I find that print media can engage in theoretically sophisticated coverage of secessionist movements, which often echoes scholarly insights derived from the relevant academic literature. The two European case studies show consistent application of tropes and frames that one would find in the academic publications on the subject. Yet these cases also illustrate profound differences in media framing not reducible to objective legal and political differences between the two events. US foreign policy considerations also appear to play a role in explaining variance in media frames.     

Crimea: Competing Self-Determination Movements and the Politics at the Centre

While the breakup of Yugoslavia produced divided loyalties and competing claims, leading to the establishment of seven separate states ending with the de facto independence of Kosovo, Crimea was a source of geopolitical instability that threatened to engulf the region in ethnic and geopolitical conflict. As a result of the negotiations during the 1990s and a de facto settlement between Slavs and the Ukrainian state, between Slavs and returning Crimean Tatars, and between Ukraine and the Russian Federation, Crimea has remained a peaceful and even increasingly wealthy area of Ukraine. Reflecting on the case of Kosovo, this paper looks at the prospect for a similar conflict in and over Crimea. Our primary question concerns the degree to which the Kosovo case sheds light on a somewhat similar case of co-ethnics, religious differences and a weakened state. We argue that the greatest source of instability lies not with ethnic claims or geopolitics, but with Ukrainian political and commercial interests that threaten the de facto settlement between the region and the centre.     

The Role of International Clientelism in the National Factionalism of Palestine

In this article I investigate the role of the international community's policy in the national factionalism in Palestine. I attempt to illuminate how international policy has contributed to the sustaining of internecine Palestinian violence as Fatah, which lost the elections in 2005 and 2006, has been motivated not to hand over power. In the process of selecting allies in the fight against Islamist terrorism, the epitomic undemocratic feature of Arab political culture, clientelism, has been promoted over democracy. Hamas seizing power in Gaza in 2007 probably resulted from the need to tame unruly militant groups which were sponsored by leaders of the Palestinian Fatah party, which again were supported by Western powers. To understand the national splitting in Palestine there is a need to analyse the interconnection between warlords, local clientelism and international clientelism.     

Making post-Soviet counterpublics: the aesthetics of Limonka and the National-Bolshevik Party

This article focuses on the shaping of the aesthetics and ideology of Eduard Limonov’s National-Bolshevik Party (NBP) through the pages of the radical newspaper Limonka. In order to study the making of the NBP as a political and intellectual community, the piece discusses Limonka’s editorial line, its graphic style, and the alternative cultural canon that this radical publication promoted, as well as several interviews with National-Bolshevik activists involved in this process. During its first years of existence, Limonka proposed a selection of controversial artistic, literary, and political role models, and the creation of an alternative fashion and lifestyle. The article argues that by provocatively combining totalitarian symbols, the aesthetics and posture of the historical avant-gardes, and Western counterculture, Limonka produced a collective narrative that contributed to the shaping of a new language of political protest in post-Soviet Russia. This resulted in a complex combination of stiob, a form of parody that involves an over-identification with its own object, and a neo-romantic impulse. This new discursive mode, which the article defines as “post-Soviet militant stiob,” should be seen as part of a series of tactics of radical resistance to what the National-Bolsheviks saw as the dominant neoliberal discourse of the mid-1990s.     

Discourse in Bosnia and Macedonia on the Independence of Kosovo: When and What is a Precedent?

Bosnia and Macedonia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and 1992, and subsequent referenda legitimised these declarations, but unitary state actors did not emerge. Rather, Bosnia and Macedonia each contain groups with divisive views regarding the nature of the state in which they live. Kosovo is regularly invoked as an example in their contentious discussions. In this essay, I present a framework for understanding this discursive contention in which Kosovo provides the focus for disputes between extremists and moderates of different groups. Within the two states, groups differ over the recognition of Kosovo's declaration of independence and the question of whether this might constitute a precedent. A political, rather than simply a legal, view on these discussions helps us to better understand not only these dynamics, but similar contestations unfolding elsewhere.     

The Terror Speaks: Inside Pakistan's Terrorism Discourse and National Action Plan

This article, employing a poststructuralist Critical Discourse Analysis, reveals cracks, discrepancies, and inconsistencies in Pakistan's discourse on terrorism and practice. I argue that Pakistan continuously constructs a “monstrous enemy” and magnifies it in a way that conceals alternative representations of reality that could show that the state, by presenting itself as a victim of terrorism, is using phenomena of political violence to serve its political objectives inside and outside the boundaries of the state. The article argues that after a militant attack on a school in northwest Pakistan, critical, liberal, and dissenting narratives mingled with the dominant state discourse in a fashion that strengthen illiberal practices in the country, thus undermining the ideals of democracy.     

Kosovo: Where It All Began

Kosovo, a largely ethnically Albanian province of the Serbian republic, played an important role in Yugoslavia's troubles in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Shortly after Tito's death in 1980, disturbances in Kosovo set the Albanians and the Serbs on a collision course and also polarized the country politically. Ironically, when Yugoslavia began to disintegrate in 1991, and as it fell into four years of warfare, Kosovo remained relatively calm. Only after the Dayton peace, in late 1995, did Kosovo's Albanians opt for a militant policy toward the Serbs. Meanwhile Serbs escalated their oppression of the local population. International diplomatic intervention failed to defuse tensions, and ultimately, NATO initiated military action to stop Serbia. NATO prevailed in the seventy-eight day engagement in 1999, while Kosovo acquired greater autonomy and was put under UN protection.     

Russia and the Secession of Kosovo: Power,Norms and the Failure of Multilateralism

Theoretical debates about multilateralism positively juxtapose it to unilateralism or bilateralism, because it is seen as a natural ideational fit with the growth of global governance. The major schism on the concept is between normativists who emphasise shared values and the realists' concerns with strategic interactions and power asymmetries. The Kosovo crisis beginning in 1999 could be seen as the first major crisis of multilateralism in the international system after the end of the Cold War. It was a crisis about the role and interests of a hegemonic USA and a weakened Russia. As a case, Kosovo demonstrates the paradoxes and limitations of multilateralism in the field of international security, when there are different types and levels of multilateralism interacting. The US and EU leaderships saw Kosovo as essentially a regional problem which could be manipulated to rejuvenate and enhance Western multilateral cooperation in NATO. This view found support among an upper echelon of officials in the UN, surrounding Secretary-General Kofi Annan, which favoured a multilateral intervention in Kosovo as proof of commitment to the developing norm of ‘right to protect’. Russia, however, saw its multilateral engagement over Kosovo as a strategic interaction to counterbalance and compensate for its weakness vis-à-vis NATO. The multilateral interactions by these three parties appear to have deepened mistrust as the process failed to resolve the final status of Kosovo, leading to its unilateral declaration of independence in 2008. The case demonstrates the importance of shared interests for successful multilateral interactions.     

“From Terrorists to Peacekeepers”: The IRA's Disengagement and the Role of Community Networks

Utilizing interviews with former Irish Republican Army (IRA) members, Loyalists, and community workers, the article looks at how militants in Northern Ireland have helped to prevent terrorism and political violence (TPV) by adopting roles in the community. By using mobile phones, a network of former combatants emerged around interface areas in the late 1990s to contain trigger causes of terrorism, providing a unique role that the state could not. The structure of the network encouraged militant groups to follow the IRA's example to disengage—thus creating a domino effect—and the co-operation between senior militants has limited the opportunities for other groups to mobilize a campaign of terrorism.     

The Strategy of Exclusion in American Counterterrorism

ABSTRACT

While garnering heightened attention following the Trump administration's travel restrictions, exclusionary tactics in counterterrorism have a much lengthier history. Given that some terrorism studies scholars identify social and political exclusion as an explanation for the resort to terrorist violence, the selection of a strategy of exclusion is significant. In this article, I identify the elements of a strategy of exclusion and the logic behind this strategy. In particular, I examine the origins and persistence of this strategy in the U.S. context. Rather than a contemporary anomaly, exclusion was among the first strategies the United States added to its counterterrorist tool-kit, and has remained among the most consistent strategies relied on. I trace the history of this strategy from its origins in immigration restrictions passed following the assassination of President McKinley by an anarchist through the contemporary War on Terror. Controversy surrounding this strategy, its negative effects on nonviolent immigrant populations, and its failure to prevent further acts of terrorism suggest it was historically ineffective and may also be so today.     

Book reviews

Paulin Kola, The Search for Greater Albania (London: Hurst, 2003), xiv, 416 pp. + maps. Few are the monographs available in English and written by Albanian scholars that deal with the contemporary history of the Balkans. The Search for Greater Albania is therefore a welcome contribution to the study of Albanian nationalism. The author endorses a definition of nationalism as an ideology “whose proponents advocate the indispensable congruence of the political and the national unit, i.e. the state and the nation” (p. xii) and endeavors to demonstrate that no one among Albanian leaders from King Zog to the present, including Hoxha, ever worked to achieve a “Greater Albania.” The intent of the book is then to explain why state-builders in Tirana from the very beginning disregarded their irredenta despite the fact that a substantial part of the ethnic population had remained outside the borders because of international treaties. After a summary of the historical developments in the first part of the twentieth century, Kola pays particular attention to the space for ethnopolitics among Albanian communist and post-communist elites in Albania proper, in Kosovo and marginally in Macedonia. The author is keen to question the nationalist credentials attributed to Enver Hoxha by most scholars of Albania. Kola describes the key historical events in the region after the Second World War by looking for references to Kosovo and the preservation of national independence and shows that these references were all just instrumental to elites' power politics. What the communist regime instead managed to do, observes Kola, is to impoverish its own citizens and to alienate Albanian communities from one another. Kola concludes that political leaders in Tirana have all been prone to “a comfortable parochialism vis-à-vis the national question“ (p. 233). Exceptions to the rule are considered, such as the attempt to internationalize the Kosovo crisis by the first post-communist governments. However, the 1997 descent into anarchy of Albania proper compromised the cause of nationalism in the “motherland.” The idea of “Greater Albania,” according to Kola, never existed in Albania proper but was rather rooted outside the nation-state borders. In Kosovo, where “real Albanian nationalism” instead resided, the discovery of the poverty of the “motherland” in the 1990s toned ambitions down (p. 394). The same Macedonian Albanians did not expect help from Tirana when they initiated the armed confrontation in 2000 and did not show any intention to seek national unification with Tirana. Therefore, Kola observes, foreign observers should be reassured that national unification is not the ambition of Albanian politics today and no one will press for it in the foreseeable future.