Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Kosovo remains at the core of Serbian nationhood and dominates politics and foreign relations of the country. Nationalists use it to preserve the mindset created under Milosevic and hinder reforms and democratization. Serbs from Kosovo have been victims of the policy of Serbia focused on territory and not the people.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Debates on the changing nature of sovereignty in the post Cold War world have left many diplomats, military planners and academics uninterested. The debate has been widely treated as something of 'purely theoretical' appeal with little or no application in the real world. Proponents of a Realist world view based on the primacy of the state and the enduring and overwhelming importance of national security have largely treated the debates on new models of sovereignty as having little or no application in the real world and as having an appeal only for those interested in social constructivist approaches. It has also been argued that while stable liberal democracies may engage in the nuances of sovereignty-pooling, the ethnic hatreds of the Balkans, Chechnya or Palestine make such solutions to conflict impossible. The gap between the post-structuralist debates on IR theory and the more empirically based literature on conflict resolution and changing forms of governance is unfortunate and weakens both sets of debates. The evidence of emerging models of sovereignty in actual use by political actors, or implied in the pragmatic compromises made or being actively discussed by political actors in contemporary peace making processes, fundamentally challenge the absolutist state-security conception of sovereignty. In this context maintaining the fiction of traditional sovereignty hampers our capacity to construct models of governance appropriate to serious ethnic conflict or areas of contested sovereignty. It creates a model which by definition says to political actors in a conflict that any offer in negotiations which is less than traditional absolute sovereignty is a second-class offer, while in fact it may well offer them substantially the same level of de-facto 'self-determination' and 'sovereignty' as the traditional model. This paper examines the new models of sovereignty in practice in Northern Ireland since the 1998 Agreement and in Kosovo since the 2001 Constitutional Framework (following closely the Rambouillet Draft Agreement on these issues). In both cases the models of sovereignty are clearly not Westphalian and are supported by major powers including the USA, representing a grounded challenge to the unitary view of sovereignty still dominant in international relations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: It is often claimed that television images move foreign policy. This paper assesses the validity of this claim by reviewing the prelude to the Kosovo conflict and Western government reaction to television images. From February 1998 (when the first major clash took place between the KLA and Yugoslav authorities) to March 1999 (when the West intervened militarily), I tracked American television news coverage of the Kosovo civil war and press release/statement on Kosovo by major Western government institutions over the same period. For each of these government releases/statements, I reviewed three factors: the framing of issues, the assignment of blame and the propensity for military intervention. My findings suggest 1) a link between television coverage of the conflict and government foreign policy activity, 2) disproportionate reactions by Western governments each time a major televised massacre occurred versus non-televised ones and, 3) distinguishable shifts in Western policy towards intervention in the immediate aftermath of these televised massacres.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Kosovo and Macedonia stand out to be two cases that demonstrate challenges to the post-conflict reconstruction initiatives by the third parties. I discuss the success of the third party involvement with regard to the reduction of the security dilemmas in these two countries. Being neighbours, having similar populations and sharing common histories Macedonia and Kosovo were treated differently by the international community to overcome their existing security dilemmas in the post-conflict stage. As a consequence Kosovo is still on a fragile peace, whereas Macedonia moves very slowly towards a more inclusive and functional democracy. In this paper first I discuss the implications of a negative peace on the persistence of a security dilemma, and then the role of international organizations in reducing the security dilemma in Kosovo and Macedonia.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Since the late 1980s Western governments, international organisations and private donors have channelled considerable resources in terms of money and personnel to civil society promotion across the globe. In donor conceptions, civil society is treated as a panacea to overcome a vast array of problems including existing and potential ethnic conflicts. Numerous NGOs, which are supposed to be expressions of civil society, work on the improvement of interethnic relations. But are NGOs an appropriate tool for this task? In this paper, I argue that the ethnic divisions that characterise state institutions and society, are also reflected in NGO activities, making NGOs part of the problems they are supposed to solve. NGOs in the former Yugoslavia, including those working on the improvement of interethnic relations, are usually monoethnic. Informal institutions like corruption and monoethnic clientelist networks also alter the effectiveness of NGO activities. In addition, the problem of state weakness influences NGO activities. I argue that service NGOs, which offer tangible material benefits for their constituencies, are more likely to achieve positive results in the improvement of interethnic relations in the short run, because they supplant the state by taking on state functions in areas like education, infrastructure or health. In contrast, advocacy NGOs, which are lobbying the state on issues such as minority rights, need functioning executive structures, encompassing law implementing structures and effective bureaucracies. These last problems are particularly salient in the cases of Kosovo and Macedonia, considering that the stateness question is yet to be solved.