After Liberal Peace? From Failed State-Building to an Emancipatory Peace in Kosovo

Abstract

Attempts to build a liberal peace and a concurrent neoliberal state in Kosovo have not managed to produce a sustainable and emancipatory peace. Instead, they have produced a local and negative hybrid peace that has been co-opted by the dynamics of local state formation and state contestation. These dynamics have overshadowed a meaningful transition from ethnic hostility to sustainable peace, which in Kosovo's context encompasses pluralism, security, law, rights, and liberal institutions, as well as the recognition of contextual identity and historical political struggles for justice. This article examines the emergence of a negative hybrid peace and explores the prospects for a more emancipatory form of peace based on local pro-peace infrastructure which avoids the pitfalls of liberal peace in practice.

Everyday peace capture: Nationalism and the dynamics of peace after violent conflict

“…The international community deployed several missions to assist with post‐conflict recovery. The international missions chose peacebuilding to appease the Kosovo Serbs, while state‐building was used to appease Kosovo Albanians (Visoka & Richmond, ). The peacebuilding agenda in Kosovo focused on supporting multi‐ethnicity through accommodating and appeasing the Serb community via expanded forms of local self‐governance, the sustainable return of displaced Serbs to their homes in Kosovo, institutional privileges, and special protections for religious and cultural heritage.…”

Spaces and Institutional Logics in Post-Conflict Settings of Mitrovica

“…Despite high investments in terms of financial and human resources on the EU's part for the last two decades, perceptions of their crisis management efforts among the local population in Kosovo have been relatively mixed (Blease and Qehaja 2013;Visoka and Richmond 2016;Bátora, Kursani, and Osland 2017;Bátora, Osland, Kvamme, et al 2017; Qehaja 2017; Qehaja and Prezelj 2017; Ejdus and Juncos 2018). While Kosovo has been a symbol of the EU's efforts in effectively stabilizing post-conflict societies, it has also come to symbolize the complexity of such processes and the often occurring mismatch between the EU's expectations and the expectations of the local communities (Hehir 2019).…”

Normal Peace: A New Strategic Narrative of Intervention

“…Strong emphasis on institution-building aims to generate predictable social and political behaviour and establish a social contract with strong political obligations for citizens (Visoka & Richmond, 2017). New regulatory regimes are imposed to govern political life in such a way as to ensure ethnic accommodation and reduce local resistance to and accept the authority of international interveners.…”