1st Edition
International-Led Statebuilding and Local Resistance Hybrid Institutional Reforms in Post-Conflict Kosovo
International-Led Statebuilding and Local Resistance contributes theoretical and empirical insights to the existing knowledge on the scope, challenges and results of post-conflict international state- and institution-building project focusing on post-war Kosovo.
Post-war Kosovo is one of the high-profile cases of international intervention, hosting a series of international missions besides a massive inflow of international aid, technical assistance and foreign experts. Theoretically, the book goes beyond the standard narrative of international top-down institution building by exploring how international and local factors interact, bringing in the mediating role of local resistance and highlighting the hybridity of institutional change. Empirically, the book tests those alternative explanations in key areas of institutional reform – municipal governance, public administration, normalization of relations with Serbia, high education, creation of armed forces, the security sector and the hold of Salafi ideologies. The findings speak to timely and pertinent issues regarding the limits of international promotion of effective institutions; the mediating role of local agents; and the hybrid forms of institution-building taking shape in post-conflict Kosovo and similar post-war contexts more broadly.
Addressing challenges of state-building at the intersection of international interventions, local strategies of resistance, and the hybridity of institution-building experience with institutional reforms in Kosovo and in post-conflict contexts more broadly, International-Led Statebuilding and Local Resistance will be of great interest to scholars of international relations, state building and post-conflict societies. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.
1. State-building or state-capture? Institutional exports, local reception and hybridity of reforms in post-war Kosovo
Arolda Elbasani
2. Explaining municipal governance in Kosovo: local agency, credibility and party patronage
David Jackson
3. State-building and patronage networks: how political parties embezzled the bureaucracy in post-war Kosovo
Katarina Tadic and Arolda Elbasani
4. Implementing Brussels Agreements: the EU’s facilitating strategy and contrasting local perceptions of peace in Kosovo
Cemaliye Beysoylu
5. ‘The association that dissociates’ – narratives of local political resistance in Kosovo and the delayed implementation of the Brussels Agreement
Miruna Troncota
6. Education for whom? Engineering multiculturalism and liberal peace in post-conflict Kosovo
Ervjola Selenica
7. Statehood without an army: the question of the Kosovo Armed Force
Giorgos Triantafyllou
8. The role of epistemic communities: local think tanks, international practitioners and security sector reform in Kosovo
Jacob Phillipps
9. Salafi pluralism in national contexts: the secular state, nation and militant Islamism in Kosovo, Albania, and Macedonia
Shpend Kursani
Biography
Arolda Elbasani is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU, USA, and Academic Supervisor for a project on new statehood, Kosovo Foundation for Open Society. Her research interests and publications lie at the intersection of Foreign Policy, Promotion of Rule of Law, Post-Conflict Statebuilding and Islam and Religious Pluralism with a focus on Southeast Europe and Turkey.
