Local and international determinants of Kosovo’s statehood

The Kosovo Foundation for Open Society is proud to present the edited volume Local and international determinants of Kosovo’s statehood, a new academic publication tackling the most pressing issues in Kosovo today. 

The result of a year long effort, the book, edited by Ioannis Armakolas, Agon Demjaha, Arolda Elbasani and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, is a collection of papers produced by a cluster of young and up-and-coming scholars from all over Europe.

The book is also one of the core outputs of “the Building Knowledge about Kosovo,” a project launched by the Foundation in 2016 with the aim of creating a network of young academics and policy analysts whose work focuses on Kosovo and the wider region. 

This new book offers in depth analyses on a number of Kosovo’s policy challenges, attempting to make a contribution to both scholarly analysis and policy thinking on the domestic and external influences and determinants to Kosovo’s statehood. 

The book is divided in three parts or pillars of analysis, each corresponding to one of the key policy areas and sources of challenges to Kosovo’s statehood. Part I tackles issues of civil society and civic mobilization. As a response to social phenomena and political problems, and in juxtaposition with top down perspectives and elite level solutions, the three chapters in this part dissect grassroot agency and its role in some of the important political developments and policy areas in Koso- vo in the last thirty years. Part II turns attention to issues of identity and oth- erness. The chapters in this part investigate instances and situations whereby Kosovar identity, whether in more formal and institutionalised forms or as a lived experience, encounters the ethnic and national other. The chapters in this part offer in depth and nuanced analyses that challenge conventional, and at times stereotypical, understandings of these encounters and their implica- tions and consequences for Kosovo’s statehood and national identity-building. Finally, Part III focuses more on the external challenges of Kosovo’s statehood by analysing various aspects of Pristina’s relations with the EU and European non-recognisers. Here again the policy challenges for Kosovo are significant and tend to become even more complicated due to the institutional and polit- ical realities of the EU as well as the non-recognisers’ own domestic problems and dilemmas.

Authors: Nedim Hogic, Ervjola Selenica, Shkelzen Gashi, Francesco Trupia, Nicasia Picciano, Mary Drosopulos, Katarina Tadic, Doris Manu, Zoran Nechev with Ivan Nikolovski, Pol Vila Sarria, Alex Damian. 

Read and download the entire volume here. 

This volume is produced by the second generation of “Building knowledge about Kosovo” researchers. To read the first volume produced by the first cluster of researchers, click here.