Sustainable development blog : ecology and humanitarian aid

Recent attention on the independence of Kosovo sparked new interest in an area long forgotten by Western prophets and demagogues. While adepts of the conspiracy theory rush to unmask the alleged ‘fakeness’ of the 1998 Racak massacre and similar murders, international politicians urge locals to uphold ‘global’ values delivered through the express U.N. caravan. Kosovars finally have a word. Their freedom had been extracted painfully after... hundreds of years of oppression of both Albanians and Serbs. As power shifted from one group to another, the dominated and dominators changed places. But the roles remained the same, even when the United Nations established its offices in Pristina.

The long turmoil in Kosovo resulted from the explosive interaction between ethnic disputes over territorial supremacy, the technological development of weapons, and a new paradigm in international law stressing the ‘responsibility to protect’ the population of foreign states from gross human rights abuses. In this paper, I propose an analysis of the role played by international actors—KFOR and UNMIK—in reinforcing a political culture of impunity based on ethnic lines. In other words, I will answer the following question: To what extent did the international administration and police force influence the perception of national identities in Kosovo? My findings show that by reproducing a pattern of domination similar to that imposed by the previous regime, the interim administration indirectly reinforced stereotyped national identities that justified ethnic hatreds.

For the purpose of this essay, I will use secondary sources to analyze the construction of identities from a structural macro-social perspective. This post is divided into three parts. After outlining and refuting some of the main theories pertaining to the relation between war, ethnicity, and international intervention, I will provide an alternative explanatory theory. This model will be applied to the case of Kosovo. First, I will give a brief account of the international and national factors that converged to produce an outbreak of ethnic hatreds in 1999. In the next chapter, I will examine the methods employed by Milosevic to mobilize support for his nationalist—and genocidal—plans.

I will then proceed with a detailed explanation of the role played by the international structures of power in defining the post bellum situation in Kosovo. This second subsection will focus on the analysis of Milosevic’s tactics based on a particular understanding of Serb and Albanian ethnicities. Finally, I will illustrate, through concrete examples, the extent to which UNMIK and KFOR reproduced Belgrade’s logic of domination by disempowering local ethnic communities. The conclusion will offer a few brief recommendations and pinpoint further gaps in the literature. Among the various theories that explore the triangulation between ethnic relations, social conflicts, and political activities, five main paradigms have become predominant in conflict studies. In the following paragraph, I will sketch the main arguments of their representative authors: According to the psychosociological approach, deprivation-induced discontent stimulates collective violence. Relative deprivation, the “perceived discrepancy between men’s value expectations and their value capabilities,” intensifies the level of societal dissatisfaction (Gurr 1971: 13, 24).

Dissenters only make use of new political opportunities when the costs of inaction are perceived as extreme and unjust and when the ‘structural potential’ for success exceeds all possible threats (Tarrow 1998: 77, McAdam 1982: 43, 51). For cultural theorists, nations exist as imagined communities: “the fellow citizens of a nation exist within the minds of every individual in that communion, although he does not personally know everyone” (Andersen 1991: 6). Their identity is founded on a constructed image of ethnic ties crystallized through national myths within a historic territory (Smith 1991: 40). Cultural identity therefore maintains itself thanks to the continuity of a time-space framework that reduces the abstractness of language by reinforcing local and familial bonds (ibid 78). As they destroy this collective order, all major persecutions invariably lead to the “complete destruction of the social life in itself, to the end of the norms and of the ‘differences’ that define cultural rules” (Girard 2000)[1].

Starting from a different premise from that of culturalists, Marx grounds ‘the human essence’ in the economic structure of society. He explains ethnic tensions as a byproduct of increased exploitation (Flere 1991: 183). Because all societies are based on class hierarchy, none can undergo fundamental changes without the emergence of violent disputes (Marx in Wood 1981, 2004: 16). In a similar vein, neo-Marxists interpret contemporary ethnic conflicts as a form of ‘incomplete modernity’: mobilization and modernization aggravate ethnic conflict (Connor in Khazanov 2005: 277). In modernizing societies, the clash between solid modernity—that equates land conquest with political power—and liquefied modernity—that virtualizes space—can engender “man a monstrous, abortive and ‘unfit’ mutation” (Bauman 2000: 198). Since modernity correlates with stability, “incomplete and insufficient modernity” can generate or at least accompany instability. For instance, during periods of transition from feudal bureaucracies to an open market, nationalist movements can amplify as a form of protection against the shortcomings of the new system (Khazanov 2005: 276).

New modernization theorists attribute such mutations to a general loss of trust among various groups in society. While “war shaped and reshaped the European state system” (Tilly in Tilly 1975: 75) militarily and politically in previous centuries, in contemporary history dissenting factions use asymmetric wars (Kaldor 2004: 169-70) to change the balance of power within the political systems they perceive as oppressive. Corrupted state structures inherited from old regimes and international aid prompt warlords to resist fair play in warfare and condone the terrorist tactics they employ against all religious or ethnic groups construed as a threat to their national unity (Kaldor in Malesevic 2008: 100-1). As the target of contemporary war shifts from an organized armed enemy to an unarmed civilian population, the battlefield forecasts a degenerate war (Shaw 2003: 5-6) defined by large-scale massacres.

In contrast to the aforementioned theorists, ethno-sociologists stress the interactive role of nationalism in modern warfare. They emphasize that the suppression of differences through a universal categorization creates an artificial breach between insiders and outsiders (Young 1990: 99). Imperial rulers can reinforce bipolar identities already institutionalized in pre-colonial states by defining local cultures in terms of majority-minority and by condoning a pre-established culture of impunity (Mamdani 1996: 21).

Drawing on McNeil, Mann, Giddens, and Hirst, Malesevic states that the centralisation and bureaucratisation of authority combined with scientific and technological advances stimulated the intensive proliferation of warfare, while the emergence of nationalism as a popular dominant ideology of the nation-state supplied a potent source of justification for warfare. Thus modern social order enforces a strict division which separates internal from external forms of violence: killing your fellow countryman is a heinous crime whereas killing the foreign enemy on the battlefield is a noble deed. (Malesevic 2006: 141)

On a general level, each of these theories proves unsatisfactory when applied to the conflict in Kosovo. Psychosocial theories are abstract and subjective. They slide along a path of self-fulfilling prophecy in which the progressive closure of the political system contaminates all other dimensions of social life. Neo-marxists fail to grasp the interdependence between economy and other social subsystems[2] (Flere 1991: 183).

Most cultural theorists employ identity as an absolute zero difference (Malesevic in Malesevic and Haugaard 2002: 200-1), namely based on the rationality of the group and independent of external variables. New modernization theorists, especially Kaldor and Shaw, offer disproportionate attention to the technological dimension of warfare to the detriment of social behavior and of ideology.

As Mertus (1999: 7) astutely remarks, it is important to remember that “people are behind guns and politicians depend on people”. While ethno-sociologists avoid an excessive reification of human behavior, most of them downplay the ‘explosive modernity’ that has contributed to the reshaping of national identities in present times. I therefore propose a new model of explanation that incorporates various compatible aspects of these theories. My premise is that bipolar identities inherently linked to conflict are malleable to change through a reframing of the perpetrators’ own ideology[3].

Through my example, I will explore some of the variables that account for their formation: national myths, territorial conquest, and radicalized political mobilization. My second contention is that the interaction with an external factor corrupts this bipolar identity by fragmenting the bipolar union. In the case of Kosovo, the juxtaposition of an international structure on that inherited from a failed communist state reinforced Belgrade’s logic of domination indirectly.