Liberal peacebuilding and State weakness in Kosovo

What is it about?

In this chapter I will be drawing from the hypothesis that peacebuilding/statebuilding in practice has mainly been focusing only on the incipient part of the missions, how to stop a conflict and establish peace and it has ignored or poorly managed the long-term objective of maintaining peace. If to maintain peace equals to build a state with all the necessary elements and capacity to avoid falling into conflict again, then the aim of this chapter is to look at the reasons why Kosovo represents a weak state in the context of the post-conflict statebuilding mission which includes the UNMIK and EU stages. The starting point will be to identify disadvantages in both the local context and the role of external administrators. First stage solutions are prioritised and can potentially harm the liberal project of statebuilding from the start. If this is the case, then perhaps when analysing interventionism fails, the criteria used is not compatible with the nature of the local elements of discussion. In the context of Kosovo, evaluating the progress of statebuilding through liberal lenses is not valid because the local elements are not truly liberal. The ‘standards before status’ that we evaluate have never been liberal per se, so the failure of statebuilding is not a liberal failure.

Featured Image

Photo by Natalya Letunova on Unsplash

Photo by Natalya Letunova on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This volume allows a new generation of scholars, from the Balkans and beyond, to shed light on some of the struggles the region faces. The combination of post-communist and post-conflict transition, together with the current economic and financial crisis, pose difficult challenges for the Western Balkans. What is the state of democracy in the region? Are the countries of the Western Balkans stuck somewhere between authoritarianism and genuine democracy? What are the remaining obstacles to state building? What effect has the crisis had on young people in the Western Balkans? These are some of the questions the authors of this volume seek to answer. The studies look at different countries and combine methods from various disciplines ranging from political science, history, economics and law to sociology, anthropology and cultural studies.