Shaping Peace in Kosovo

Shaping Peace in Kosovo
Author: Gëzim Visoka
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2017-04-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3319510010

This book explores the prospects and limits of international intervention in building peace and creating a new state in an ethnically divided society and fragmented international order. The book offers a critical account of the international missions in Kosovo and traces the effectiveness of fluid forms of interventionism. It also explores the co-optation of peace by ethno-nationalist groups and explores how their contradictory perception of peace produced an ungovernable peace, which has been manifested with intractable ethnic antagonisms, state capture, and ignorance of the root causes, drivers, and consequences of the conflict. Under these conditions, prospects for emancipatory peace have not come from external actors, ethno-nationalist elite, and critical resistance movements, but from local and everyday acts of peace formation and agnostic forms for reconciliation. The book proposes an emancipatory agenda for peace in Kosovo embedded on post-ethnic politics and joint commitments to peace, a comprehensive agenda for reconciliation, people-centred security, and peace-enabling external assistance.

Peace Figuration after International Intervention

Peace Figuration after International Intervention
Author: Gëzim Visoka
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2016-07-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317382757

This book examines the adverse impacts of liberal peacebuilding in conflict-affected societies. It introduces ‘peace figuration’ as a new analytical framework for studying the intentionality, performativity, and consequences of liberal peacebuilding. The work challenges current theories and views and searches for alternative non-conflicted research avenues that are suitable for understanding how peacebuilding intentions are made, how different events shape peace outcomes, and what are the consequences of peacebuilding interventions. Drawing on detailed case studies of peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Timor-Leste, the book argues that attempts to build peace often fail to achieve the intended outcomes. A figurational view of peacebuilding interventions shows that post-conflict societies experience multiple episodes of success and failure in an unpredictable trajectory. This book develops a relational sociology of peacebuilding impact, which is crucial for overcoming static measurement of peacebuilding successes or failures. It shows that international interventions can shape peace but, importantly, not always in the shape they intended. This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, peacebuilding, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR.

Kosovo Crossing

Kosovo Crossing
Author: David Fromkin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2002
Genre: Balkan Peninsula
ISBN: 0684869535

An engrossing, clear-eyed look at the conflict in Kosovo and what it reveals about the limits of America's power to shape the world and impose democratic and humane values in countries under the control of ruthless dictators. 4 maps.

The Kosovo Report

The Kosovo Report
Author: Independent International Commission on Kosovo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2000-10-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199243093

The war in Kosovo was a turning point: NATO deployed its armed forces in war for the first time, and placed the controversial doctrine of 'humanitarian intervention' squarely in the world's eye. It was an armed intervention for the purpose of implementing Security Council resolutions-but without Security Council authorization.This report tries to answer a number of burning questions, such as why the international community was unable to act earlier and prevent the escalation of the conflict, as well as focusing on the capacity of the United Nations to act as global peacekeeper.The Commission recommends a new status for Kosovo, 'conditional independence', with the goal of lasting peace and security for Kosovo-and for the Balkan region in general. But many of the conslusions may be beneficially applied to conflicts the world-over.

The Distinction of Peace

The Distinction of Peace
Author: Catherine Goetze
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2017-05-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0472900765

“Peacebuilding” serves as a catch-all term to describe efforts by an array of international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and agencies of foreign states to restore or construct a peaceful society in the wake—or even in the midst—of conflict. Despite this variety, practitioners consider themselves members of a global profession. In The Distinction of Peace, Catherine Goetze investigates the genesis of peacebuilding as a professional field of expertise since the 1960s, its increasing influence, and the ways it reflects global power structures. Goetze describes how the peacebuilding field came into being, how it defines who belongs to it and who does not, and what kind of group culture it has generated. Using an innovative methodology, she investigates the motivations of individuals who become peacebuilders, their professional trajectories and networks, and the “good peacebuilder” as an ideal. For many, working in peacebuilding in various ways—as an aid worker on the ground, as a lawyer at the United Nations, or as an academic in a think tank—has become not merely a livelihood, but also a form of participation in world politics. As a field, peacebuilding has developed techniques for incorporating and training new members, yet its internal politics also create the conditions of exclusion that often result in practical failures of the peacebuilding enterprise. By providing a critical account of the social mechanisms that make up the peacebuilding field, Goetze offers deep insights into the workings of Western domination and global inequalities.

Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention

Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention
Author: Albrecht Schnabel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 536
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780585433806

The Kosovo conflict has the potential to redraw the landscape of international politics, with significant ramifications for the UN, major powers, regional organizations, and the way in which we understand and interpret world politics. Can the veto now effectively be circumvented to launch selective enforcement operations? Can the humanitarian imperative be reconciled with the principle of state sovereignty? This book offers interpretations of the Kosovo crisis from numerous perspectives: the conflict-parties, NATO allies, the immediate region surrounding the conflict, and further afield. Country perspectives are followed by scholarly analyses of the longer-term normative, operational, and structural consequences of the Kosovo crisis for world politics.

The Conflict Over Kosovo

The Conflict Over Kosovo
Author: Stephen T. Hosmer
Publisher: Rand Corporation
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2001-07-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0833032380

This report examines the reasons Slobodan Milosevic, the then president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, decided on June 3, 1999, to accept NATO's conditions for terminating the conflict over Kosovo. Drawing in part upon the testimony of Milosevic and other senior Serb and foreign officials who directly interacted with Milosevic, the report analyzes (1) the assumptions and other calculations that underlay Milosevic's initial decision to defy NATO's demands with regard to Kosovo, and (2) the political, economic, and military developments and pressures, and the resulting expectations and concerns that most importantly influenced his subsequent decision to come to terms. While several interrelated factors, including Moscow's eventual endorsement of NATO's terms, helped shape Milosevic's decision to yield, it was the cumulative effect of NATO air power that proved most decisive. The allied bombing of Serbia's infrastructure targets, as it intensified, stimulated a growing interest among both the Servian public and Belgrade officials to end the conflict. Milosevic's belief that the bombing that would follow a rejection of NATO's June 2 peace terms would be massively destructive and threatening to his continued rule made a settlement seem imperative. Also examined are some implications for future U.S. and allied military capabilities and operations.

Kosovo

Kosovo
Author: Julie Mertus
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 1999-08-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520218655

Explores the foundations of conflict in Kosovo, charging that the international community's failure to support the Albanians in their initial passive resistance to Serbian repression led to violence.

Unravelling Liberal Interventionism

Unravelling Liberal Interventionism
Author: Gëzim Visoka
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2019-04-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429017936

Despite calls for the decolonisation of knowledge, scholars who come from conflict-affected societies remained marginalised, excluded from the examination of the politics and impacts of liberal interventionism. This edited volume gives local scholars a platform from which they critically examine different aspects of liberal interventionism and statebuilding in Kosovo. Drawing on situational epistemologies and grounded approaches, the chapters in this book interrogate a wide range of themes, including: the politics of local resistance; the uneven relationship between international statebuilders and local subjects; faking of local ownership of security sector reform and the rule of law; heuristic and practical limits of interventionism, as well as the subjugated voices in statebuilding process, such as minorities and women. The book finds that the local is not antidote to the liberal, and that local perspectives are not monolithic. Yet, local critiques of statebuilding do not seek to generate replicable knowledge; rather they prefer generating situational and context-specific knowledge be that to resolve problems or uncover the unresolved problems. The book seeks to contribute to critical peace and conflict studies by (re)turning the local turn to local scholars who come from conflict-affected societies and who have themselves experienced the transition from war to peace. This book, voted one of the top 10 books of 2020 by International Affairs, is essential reading for students and scholars of peace- and state-building, conflict studies and international relations.

Post-Liberal Peace Transitions

Post-Liberal Peace Transitions
Author: Oliver P. Richmond
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2016-01-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1474402186

Why is it that states emerging from intervention, peacebuilding and statebuilding over the last 25 years appear to be 'failed by design'? This study explores the interplay of local peace agency with the (neo)liberal peacebuilding project. And it looks at how far can local 'peace formation' dynamics can go to counteract the forces of violence and play a role in rebuilding the state, consolidate peace processes and induce a more progressive form of politics. By looking at local agency related to peace formation, Oliver Richmond and Sandra Pogodda find answers to the pressing question of how large-scale peacebuilding or statebuilding may be significantly improved and made more representative of the lives, needs, rights, and ambitions of its subjects.