This article: • Problematizes the concept of 'home' and 'hospitality' in the case of unfinished states in terms of sovereignty; • Argues that the concept of home is always preconditioned by the differences of host and guest; in cases where these two are intermingled/confused/unclear, the concept of home changes too; • Looks at local and international narratives on Kosovo as a struggle of conceptual ownerships; • Asserts that international and local narratives are always already both subject and object, yet fully neither at the same time, they exist and are destroyed by their own, and their subjectivity therefore lies in their autoimmunity, which makes them intrinsically undecidable; • States that the Serbs and the Albanians have reached a historical point on their claim on Kosovo, where they share Kosovo as a state beyond 'home' (beyond sovereignty); for the Serbs, Kosovo as their previous 'home' is beyond remedy, for the Albanians Kosovo as their new/legitimate 'home' is beyond reach. This article examines local narratives on Kosovo and their role in crafting and articulating interpretations of Kosovo and international missions. Using the concept of 'home', as used and conceptualised by Jacques Derrida, the article reverses the order of who is 'guest' and 'host' in Kosovo and how that defines the local narratives on the subject. In the first part, attention is paid solely to letting local narratives deconstruct themselves, while in the second part we let them deconstruct the international narrative on Kosovo. The aim of the article is to present Kosovo as a battleground of division and commonality among the narratives and at the same time as an 'impossible' 'home' of all its narratives. In conclusion, some thoughts pave the way for the idea of 'renegotiating' the concept of 'home' with particular focus on 'home' in interventions and missions and its ultimate influence on the ethics of intervention.

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This article examines how the Maidan protests of 2013–2014 were a space for the collision of conflicting narratives on what Ukraine is and what it should be, and how past, present, and future were used to imagine contemporary Ukraine. Making use of speech acts by local and international actors and politicians on the Ukraine crisis, historical narratives on Ukraine, Maidan protest slogans, and field work data gathered throughout 2013–2016 in Ukraine, we identify four meta-narratives that enable us to unravel such an imagining: (1) Ukraine as a liminal category between East and West; (2) Ukraine as Russia, Ukraine as non-Russia; (3) Ukraine as Europe, Ukraine as non-Europe; and (4) Ukraine as Ukraine. We trace and contextualize these narratives in four separate sections. Positing all narratives in a discursive battleground and problematizing them as a struggle between stories, the article demonstrates that the imagining of contemporary Ukraine is deeply conditioned by the conflict between all four narratives. Ukraine is simultaneously all and none of them.

This article problematizes the concept of 'mission' in international interventions, who is entitled to missionize and how the missionized subject is conceptualized. By looking at the international missions in Kosovo (those of the UN and particularly the EU), we problematize how the EU mission in Kosovo is entrenched in a trajectory of 'missionizing' that makes it bear the stigma of a structure non-responsive and non-sensitive to the local. Employing Derrida's deconstruction, we explain that the criticism (academic, dogmatic, ideological and empirical) of international missions relates not so much to how they operate in their host countries, or to the policy choices they make. Rather, looking at the path dependency of missions in the Western historical and civilizational trajectory, we maintain that the problem derives from the idea and very concept of 'mission' as intervention in itself.

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