Imagining Islam in Kosovo - The social construction of the Kosovar Muslim subject among European political actors

ABSTRACT

Despite being a Muslim-majority society, Kosovo increasingly securitizes practising Muslims by politicizing the ostentatiously pious among them as a threat to Europe’s security and Kosovar identity. Given the EU’s significant discursive and political power in Kosovo, this article pursues the question of how European representatives conceive of pious Kosovar Muslims, and whether this image might explain their securitization. On the basis of 24 semi-structured interviews with various European officials conducted in 2018, I argue that they predominantly imagine pious Kosovar Muslims as influenced by foreign powers through indoctrination, material incentives or appeals to identity, which does condone their securitization. However, this image is in fact shaped by local Kosovar elites who instil such conceptions in European officials because such an image helps them in the pursuit of their own political agendas. The article exposes the intricate mechanism and power relations that underlie this process of policy-relevant knowledge production.