Kosovo: Statebuilding Utopia and Reality

ABSTRACT

Twenty years of international statebuilding have made little impact on the ‘stateness’ of Kosovo. This article puts this failure in the broader context of the shift from the liberal internationalist assumptions of the late 1990s to the pragmatic realism of today. It does this through the lenses of E H Carr’s classic work The Twenty Years’ Crisis, UN policy thinking on the problematic assumptions of international statebuilding and the diagnoses in David Lake’s 2016 book The Statebuilder’s Dilemma, which sets out three pragmatic alternatives. The article concludes that all three of these alternatives can be seen in practice in Kosovo.

KEYWORDS:

• Statebuilding
• Kosovo
• E H Carr
• pragmatism
• liberal internationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, London. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding and has published extensively in the area of post-conflict peacebuilding and statebuilding.