Kosovo between War and Peace

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the practices of international intervention, peace-building and the reconstruction of war-torn societies have increasingly taken the shape of ambitious de facto trusteeship arrangements with the ongoing international administration of Kosovo as the primary example. This book examines the obstacles to reconciliation and social reconstruction in Kosovo in the context of what is neither war nor substantial peace. It also discusses the potential and problems of the revived trusteeship institution more generally, as well as its ramifications for the institutional machinery of international society. The book brings together a combination of internationally distinguished academics and younger scholars representing practical knowledge as well as theoretical analysis.
At the practical level the book discusses a number of the major problems, challenges and dilemmas that the local parties and the international community have encountered in Kosovo including how to develop effective and inclusive local government, how to counter crime and the dysfunctional aspects of liberal economic reform, how to construct an educational system capable of stimulating integration and development, how to unite the partly opposed goals of reconstructing the province while avoiding renewed ethnic and international strife over its future, and how to handle the specific challenge of Kosovo’s future status. The book also re-examines the background factors that continue to influence and hamper the attempt to administrate and reconstruct the province, first of all the nationalist ideologies and the record of ethnic violence. At the more general and theoretical level, the book asks whether the revived international trusteeship arrangement is a dead end or the way forward for the international community when faced with reconstruction challenges of the scale of Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq.
In perspective, it also discusses the ramifications of the increasing securitization, militarization and great power domination of international trusteeship arrangements indicated by the examples of Afghanistan and Iraq. This volume makes a highly important contribution to the specific debate about the reconstruction of Kosovo as well as the general one about the pros and cons of the revived trusteeship institution in the context of the UN internationalism of the 1990s and the war against terror following 9/11.

Author Biography

Tonny Brems Knudsen, Carsten Bagge Laustsen