‘The association that dissociates’ – narratives of local political resistance in Kosovo and the delayed implementation of the Brussels Agreement

Explaining municipal governance in Kosovo: local agency, credibility and party patronage

“…Such research should appreciate the di erentiated nature of local agency (Beysoylu 2018;Kursani 2018;Phillipps 2018;Selenica 2018;Tadic and Elbasani 2018;Triantafyllou 2018;Troncota 2018). While the 'local turn' in the statebuilding literature has provided new insights into statebuilding dynamics, the literature has been less disposed to exploring the di erent facets of local agency, to understand their relevance and how they may contradict each other.…”

“…is research contributes to the now prominent literature on the importance of local factors in determining outcomes in statebuilding, which has helpfully turned attention to how local actors react to and in uence statebuilding (Beysoylu 2018;Elbasani 2018;Kursani 2018;Mac Ginty 2010, 2011Phillipps 2018;Selenica 2018;Triantafyllou 2018;Troncota 2018). e research demonstrates the importance of one particular type of local agency: political leadership.…”

“…Rather, they only have impact if, as in Hani i Elezit, these measures are given impetus by local leadership on the ground. When international strategies diverge with local political agency, the e ectiveness of statebuilding strategies is likely to be constrained (Beysoylu 2018;Selenica 2018;Tadic and Elbasani 2018;Triantafyllou 2018;Troncota 2018).…”

State-building or state-capture? Institutional exports, local reception and hybridity of reforms in post-war Kosovo

“…The transfer of UNMIK's all-encompassing competences to elected local authorities, a process which gained steam after the declaration of independence in 2008, gave local powerholders the key to state power. The shift moved the focus of research into how local actors receive, resist and reshape the externally promoted rules and institutions, but also to the broad context in which they operate, hence the local turn of state-building research (Beysoylu 2018;Jackson 2018;Kursani 2018;Phillipps 2018;Selenica 2018;Tadic and Elbasani 2018;Triantafyllou 2018;Troncota 2018). The shift also brings new attention to the hybridity of external institution-building experiences-internationally promoted institutions that resemble Western templates in form, but operate according to other logics in practice.…”

“…This special issue explores how the international and local explanations play out, interact and gain dominance over each other at different stages of state-building; highlights the input of local agents; and taps into the evident gap between internationally sponsored reforms and persisting domestic strategies of resistance to account for the state-building experience on the ground. To this end, articles in this issue adopt a long-term and in depth investigation of specific areas of reform -municipal governance (Jackson 2018), state bureaucracy (Tadic and Elbasani 2018), normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo (Beysoylu 2018;Troncota 2018), education (Selenica 2018), creation of armed forces (Triantafyllou 2018), local input into Security Sector Reforms (SSR) (Phillipps 2018) and the re-culturation of Salafi ideologies (Kursani 2018). Such time-sensitive, case-nuanced and empirically heavy analysis enables the authors to go back and forth between the role of international activities, domestic strategies of resistance and evidence of hybrid reforms to trace the role of different explanations.…”