Domino Effect of Negative Hybrid Peace in Kosovo's Peacebuilding

ABSTRACT

The concept of hybrid peace is at the forefront of recent scholarship on the local turn in peacebuilding. It highlights the interplay between the international and local, and advocates for better involvement of local actors and agencies. This paper adds to the growing scholarship on hybrid peace by substantiating the concept of negative hybrid peace and characterizing its dynamics on the ground. Using the case of Kosovo's post-conflict peacebuilding process this paper reveals that the co-option of a select group of local actors unintentionally contributed to a rejection of minority rights, resistance to liberal justice, and contextualization of healthcare provision. It shows that negative hybrid peace has a domino effect in that when a negative form of hybrid peace takes root in a peacebuilding component, other peacebuilding components become susceptible to other forms of negative hybrid peace. The analysis in this paper proves the utility of the concept of negative hybrid peace in understanding the consequences of unresolved tensions from international/liberal–local encounters during internationally administered peacebuilding missions.

KEYWORDS:

• Kosovo
• peacebuilding
• hybrid peace
• negative hybrid peace
• security

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. She also wishes to thank Luke Glanville and Joanne Wallis for their academic guidance, and her dissertation examiners for their insights and recommendations. This research would not have been completed without the Australian National University’s research scholarship and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellowship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Dahlia Simangan is a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) postdoctoral fellow at the United Nations University-Centre for Policy Research (UNU-CPR) in Tokyo. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Australian National University. Her main research examines why local involvement in rebuilding post-conflict societies sometimes fails to build lasting peace.

ORCID

Dahlia Simangan http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9418-969X

Notes

1 In 2013 the government published a three-year strategic action plan for the control and collection of illicit weapons (Republic of Kosovo 2013).

2 In May 2000 UNMIK established the Joint Interim Administrative Structure (JIAS) as its local counterpart, which was replaced by the PISG after the nationwide elections in May 2001 and the adoption of the constitutional framework. UNMIK passed Regulation 2001/9, which provided a constitutional framework for provisional self-government in Kosovo and stipulated the local competencies of the PISG (UNMIK 2001). However, until 2008, the SRSG remained the final decision-making authority in Kosovo despite the establishment of local institutions and the adoption of the constitutional framework (Reka 2003).