Mass Violence and the Recognition of Kosovo: Suffering and Recognition

Abstract

In instances of international negotiations over state recognition, the way the violence sustained by a given group is categorised becomes a critical factor in the international community's decision to support independence or not. This essay argues that the recognition of Kosovo in February 2008 was made possible by the use of justifications based on Kosovo Albanians' collective status as victims of ethnic cleansing. The essay bridges the gap between two bodies of literature that have not been used in conjunction up to now, namely normative theories of ‘remedial’ secession and works on the logic of mass violence against ethnically defined groups. It finds that the international community has used the ‘remedial argument’ for Kosovo's recognition because it allowed it to minimise the risk of further unilateral declarations of independence in a volatile region.

Notes

This paper builds on an earlier version presented at the conference ‘Kosovo: From one Protectorate to Another’, organised by the Raoul-Dandurand Chair in Strategic and Diplomatic Studies, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), Montreal, 11 February 2010. I thank all participants for their comments and suggestions. I also thank Michel Seymour, Margaret Moore and Jean-François Ratelle for helpful comments. Many thanks to Zsuzsa Csergo˝ for devoting so many hours to this project.

¹ As of 5 November 2012, 92 countries have recognised the independence of Kosovo.

² While the international legal community does not view the case of Kosovo as genocide, local and international political actors commonly present the conflict in such terms.

³ Chalk (1989, pp. 151–52) has in mind social groups defined by their living conditions (urban/rural), their occupation (peasants, workers) or their putative ideological stance. According to the UN Convention, for example, the massacre of urban Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge regime does not fit the definition of genocide.

⁴ This analysis should in no way be interpreted as putting forward a normative theory of secession and independence. Rather, it seeks to understand how the arguments contained in those theories inform the action of actors that try to justify the recognition of a contested territory.

⁵ Some scholars working within the tradition of remedial secession also argue for a loosening of what they see as Buchanan's restrictive criteria of legitimate secession. Seymour (2007) argues that nations possess a primary right to internal self-determination and that state-level failure to recognise that right constitutes a basis for legitimate remedial secession.

⁶ A subset of primary right theories of secession, associative group theories define legitimate secession as one proceeding from the collective desire for independence of freely associated individuals. This association is independent of any shared ascriptive criteria, such as ethnicity, race or language (see Beran 1984; Buchanan 1997; Wellman 2005).

⁷ The humanitarian argument makes reference to the perceived failure of the international community to sanction war crimes, crimes against humanity and perceived genocide in Bosnia & Hercegovina. See Barthe and David (2007) on the ‘Bosnia Analogy’ used by the Clinton administration in its decision in favour of air strikes in Kosovo, as well as Steinweis (2005) on Holocaust memory and intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo.

⁸ A poet and writer, and founder of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), Ibrahim Rugova emerged as the leading Kosovo Albanian politician in the early 1990s. A proponent of full Kosovo independence, he advocated nonviolent resistance to Serbian control, including the running of a parallel state outside formal Kosovo institutions. With the end of the war in Bosnia & Hercegovina in 1995, his nonviolent option was progressively displaced by the emergence of the Kosovo Liberation Army (Janjić et al.2009).

⁹ Human Rights Watch (2009, pp. 38–73) denounces the failure of Georgian forces to distinguish between civilian and military targets during their short offensive on South Ossetia, especially during the indiscriminate bombardment of Tskhinvali. It does not report, however, any mass violence tantamount to organised ethnic cleansing.

¹⁰ The debate on total casualties for the 1998–1999 war in Kosovo rages on, but Lukić (2003) places the number of deaths at between 4,000 and 11,000, and the number of refugees at over a million.