State-building or state-capture? Institutional exports, local reception and hybridity of reforms in post-war Kosovo

ABSTRACT

Post-war Kosovo has been the subject of a highly intrusive international state-building project, including an unprecedented influx of international administrators, assistance and funds. However, it increasingly bears the hallmark of a weak and captured state. This special issue contributes theoretical and empirical insights that shed light on possible explanations, difficulties and prospects of the state-building project in Kosovo. Theoretically, we investigate how international and local explanations play out, interact and gain dominance over each other; highlight the local factors that shape the experience of state-building; and focus on the hybridity of institution- and state-building on the ground. Empirically, we take stock of two decades of international state-building activities and one decade of independent statehood by providing long-term and in-depth analysis of specific areas of reform – municipal governance, state bureaucracy, normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo, education, creation of armed forces, security sector reforms and reception of Salafi ideologies. Such time-sensitive, case-nuanced and empirically heavy analysis enables the authors to go back and forth between the role of international activities, domestic strategies of resistance and evidence of hybrid reforms in order to test the role of competing explanations.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-conflict state-building
• international intervention
• international aid
• United Nations
• European Union
• institutional change
• local ownership
• Kosovo

Introduction

Post-war Kosovo has been the subject of an unprecedented internationally led state-building project. Besides hosting a series of international missions endowed with extensive powers in key areas of state- and institution-building, the country received a massive flow of external experts, projects, assistance and funding. The scale of sources allocated to Kosovo surpasses by far those offered to any other high profile cases of international intervention. In 2005, the country received 25 times more money and 50 times more troops per capita than Afghanistan. Even after the declaration of independence in 2008, international structures kept proliferating as did international sources and projects. In 2009 the country still received an influx of US $345 per capita aid only in sectors of governance, as compared to $62 in Afghanistan and $41 in Iraq (OECD 2014). The scope of sources and the authority vested in the international administrators places Kosovo in the embarrassing position of being the most expensive externally led state-building project, which increasingly features ‘the hallmark of a failed state’ (Hehir 2016). Cumulative evidence from the country raises a challenging dilemma for broader cases of internationally led state- and institution-building attempts: even when endowed with massive resources and unlimited powers, the international community has not been able to deliver on its own set of goals: a multi-ethnic, functional and democratic state. Similarly, it failed to deliver on local subjects’ expectations of statehood, with the majority of Kosovars turning critical to the international structures dispatched in the country (Lemay-Hébert 2009). Hence, the case of Kosovo calls for theoretical and empirical answers as to why the international community has not delivered on its own goals as much as on locals’ expectations; it also calls for an assessment of the emerging state-building outcomes on the ground.

Current research on Kosovo privileges either the role of international or domestic factors, usually depending on which agents hold ultimate power in the shifting pendulum of institutional balances and authority that characterizes states in the making (King and Mason 2006; Paris and Sisk 2009; Skendaj 2014; Coelho 2015). Typically, the international crafting of new states involves an ongoing distribution of political and institutional competences between the international and local actors. In the case of Kosovo, during the reign of the United Nations mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), 1999–2008, the international community enjoyed virtually unlimited powers to design the new institutions, enforce-related rules and direct the course of state-building. Hence, a rich body of research delves into different facets of international activity to explain what was achieved and what not. The transfer of UNMIK’s all-encompassing competences to elected local authorities, a process which gained steam after the declaration of independence in 2008, gave local powerholders the key to state power. The shift moved the focus of research into how local actors receive, resist and reshape the externally promoted rules and institutions, but also to the broad context in which they operate, hence the local turn of state-building research (Beysoylu 2018; Jackson 2018; Kursani 2018; Phillipps 2018; Selenica 2018; Tadic and Elbasani 2018; Triantafyllou 2018; Troncota 2018). The shift also brings new attention to the hybridity of external institution-building experiences– internationally promoted institutions that resemble Western templates in form, but operate according to other logics in practice. Given the record of two decades of state- and institution-building efforts, post-war Kosovo is the perfect laboratory to compare and juxtapose the contribution of international and local activities while also exploring why most internationally sponsored ‘reforms’ tend to coexist with ‘the ways such reformation is designed to eliminate’ (Belloni 2012; Roberts 2013, 95).

This special issue explores how the international and local explanations play out, interact and gain dominance over each other at different stages of state-building; highlights the input of local agents; and taps into the evident gap between internationally sponsored reforms and persisting domestic strategies of resistance to account for the state-building experience on the ground. To this end, articles in this issue adopt a long-term and in depth investigation of specific areas of reform – municipal governance (Jackson 2018), state bureaucracy (Tadic and Elbasani 2018), normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo (Beysoylu 2018; Troncota 2018), education (Selenica 2018), creation of armed forces (Triantafyllou 2018), local input into Security Sector Reforms (SSR) (Phillipps 2018) and the re-culturation of Salafi ideologies (Kursani 2018). Such time-sensitive, case-nuanced and empirically heavy analysis enables the authors to go back and forth between the role of international activities, domestic strategies of resistance and evidence of hybrid reforms to trace the role of different explanations. Ultimately, the analysis speaks to important theoretical and empirical dilemmas regarding the limits of external interventions in war-torn societies, the local turn of state-building research, and the many formal and informal facets of institution building on the ground.

This introduction  of the special issue provides an empirical summary of the Kosovo state-building project to date, identifies the major explanations, and provides an outline of the articles and major findings. The argument is organized in three sections. Section one provides an account of the state-building experience through revisiting major events that marked Kosovo’s tenth anniversary of independent statehood, in February 2018. The second section explores available explanations and identifies the theoretical and empirical focus of the issue – the interplay of international and local activities, the focus on local agency and the hybrid mode of state-building on the ground. The final section outlines the articles and their findings regarding the main focus of this issue: input of internal and external agents; the scope of domestic challenges and evidence of hybridity in key areas of reform.

An outlook of events marking the tenth anniversary of Kosovo’s statehood

On February 2018, an academic and a long-term observer of Kosovo rightly summarized the state of the country following a decade of independent statehood: ‘It is not a happy anniversary for Kosovo’ (Austin 2018). A snapshot view into key events that preceded this important anniversary offers rich empirical hints on the current state of the country, its achievements, failures and the projections of the future.

Perhaps most telling for the country’s bleak mood in this jubilee of state-building was the refusal of well-known Kosovar politicians, intellectuals and war-time protagonists to accept the presidential awards announced on the occasion. Among the rebuttals stands out that of Rexhep Qosja, a reputable academic, analyst and protagonist in the events that culminated in international intervention,

I refuse the award from a regime that with its internal and external policies has compromised the Kosovar state to date… [Governing politicians] have turned Kosovo, our Kosovo, which we believed is everyone’s state into a private state… They saw the seeds of turmoil and institutional degradation, thus tarnishing country’s image abroad and leading to its isolation, a too big price to pay. (2018)

Qosja’s critique reverberates a sense of general malaise and malfunctioning of two decades long Western investment in the country, while turning attention to the role of local political structures and governing actors. It also juxtaposes the gap between citizens’ expectations of Kosovo statehood and what it came to be. Most importantly, it lists key issues – the contribution of local agency, the privatization of the state, political turmoil, institutional degradation and the tarnished international image – that have emerged as key features of the Kosovo state to date.

Institutional weakness, if not degradation, is probably the most reminiscent trend and a continuous refrain of the events preceding country’s tenth anniversary. For much of the previous year, Kosovo’s assembly became stage of palpable divisions and conflict, sometimes violent ones, among its constituting parties. The 2017 snap elections, itself the result of a vote of no-confidence, followed after a long constitutional crisis that deprived the country of a government for several months after the 2014 elections. The incoming 2017 cabinet – 22 ministers and 68 deputy ministers – became the largest ever, seemingly due to governing coalitions’ inclusion of many small parties in search of state jobs and the spoils of state control. The fact that the main protagonists of the cabinet, as much as of other elected institutions, came from the close circle of political protégés implicated in allegations of corruption, including the ‘Pronto Affair’, did not facilitate citizens’ reception of the governing team (Bailey 2017). Evidence in the public domain regarding politicians’ inexplicable wealth, abuses of office, and tight control over the emerging state institutions and decision-making processes tend to place Kosovo firmly into the category of captured states (Gashi and Emerson 2013).

The international community has been increasingly weary in dealing with local trends of governance, especially attempts by the governing elite to control the state apparatus and undo the internationally sponsored institutions. Kosovo Assembly’s attempt to revoke the Specialist Chambers Law (chambers) during a late night ‘extraordinary’ session, in November 2017, became the tipping point for the international community’s more coercive tone towards their local governing allies. The chambers, which were adopted after much external pressure on Pristina back in 2015, aim to investigate war-related crimes perpetrated by Kosovo Albanians, particularly fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). From the outset, most Kosovo Albanians doubted the law as a selective form of justice considering KLA fighters were largely catapulted to the role of heroes and widely seen as legitimate winners of the war. However, key political allies and interlocutors of international structures had voted to institutionalize the chambers. Political maneuvers from the same actors to actually undo what was already agreed upon at the decision-making level climaxed when the chambers came near to issuing possible indictments that would target senior KLA figures, now political leaders who controlled the heights of state power: the Assembly, the executive and the Presidency (Hopkins 2018). Harsh international reactions including a warning from the US ambassador that ‘This effort, if it succeeds, will … be considered by the United States as a stab in the back’ (US Embassy in Kosovo 2017) outmaneuvered the complex inter-institutional attempt to undo the chambers. However, the event highlights the general mode in which local political actors ‘received’, selected, resisted and when viewed necessary attempted to undo the externally promoted standards and institutions that threatened their grip on power.

Other events that tainted Kosovo’s tenth anniversary highlight the implicit, if not explicit, role of the international community in this state of affairs. Specific allegations of wrongdoings within the European Union Rule of Law Mission (EULEX), the EU’s flagship mission to combat crime and corruption, resurfaced again in 2017 (Hopkins 2017). By then, the mission had become the subject of various reporting that exposed a mismanagement of its resources, disregard for its mandate, corruption of foreign judges and, most importantly, minimal to no contribution in the fight against corruption (Borger 2014). The passivity of the mission in tackling cases of corruption is particularly evident given its rally of nearly 3000 foreign employees, expansive judiciary powers and an extravagant spending budget of 613.8 million euros only in the period of February 2008 to June 2013 (Council of the EU 2012). The allegations connect to a wider trend in the decreasing legitimacy of the army of international employees and experts that enjoy lucrative benefits and inflated salaries without much ado or accountability for their (miss)deeds (Visoka 2012; Elbasani 2018).

Another issue which hinges on the malfunctioning of the attempts at state-building, but also the input of various local and international actors, is the diffusion of Salafi ideologies and militant Islamism, a running topic in 2017. Certainly, Western organizations and actors that took over the reconstruction of Kosovo after NATO’s intervention were joined by a myriad of religious networks that saw the post-communist and war-torn country as the ideal terrain to ‘gain’ post-atheist souls. Globalized Islamic networks, including radicalized ones, had long targeted Muslim populations in the post-communist Balkans to deliver their message and seed militant cells close to Europe (Elbasani 2016). Cash-rich Islamic networks, which had profited from weak institutional controls and corrupt politics to establish themselves in the neighboring countries, could similarly take advantage of a frail state architecture, poor institutional restrictions and inexperienced or corrupt politics to expand into post-war Kosovo. When the range of foreign fighters from Kosovo placed the country on the map of international terrorist threats, the governing elite moved to tackle the issue in conjunction with evolving anti-terrorist Western policies (Sadriu 2017). By then, however, religious networks, authorities and outlets propagating Salafi ideologies had taken root in small and isolated localities, usually outside of government or official Islamic authorities’ attention. In 2017, the threat from both foreign fighters and isolated Salafi communities topped Kosovo’s security agenda as ‘a permanent, unpredictable and long- term problem’ (UNDP 2017). At the same time, local authorities and believers proved active in screening and localizing the incoming ideologies along a post-communist trend of the personalization of religion and re-culturing of foreign ideals (Elbasani and Roy 2015). The mushrooming of practice communities has reshuffled the religious field and given rise to various, at times overlapping and conflicting trends merging localization and radicalization.

Finally, the normalization of relations between Kosovo and Serbia, which promised to settle ongoing conflicts between parties under the guidance of the EU has stagnated, experiencing frequent blockages, persistent accusations and escalating tensions in 2017. The First Agreement of Principles, which both parties signed in 2013, has only triggered conflicting narratives among the dissenting parties regarding what those principles entail and how to implement them. The regular train between Belgrade and Northern Mitrovica, which in January 2017 attempted to enter Kosovo displaying ‘Kosovo is Serbia’ slogans, prompted explicit threats between Albanian and Serbian politicians regarding the involvement of armies and use of force to protect the contested border, a strong reminder of the fragile stability in the region. Russian support for its traditional Serbian ally and common threats that ‘who attacks Serbia has attacked Russia’ further placed the bilateral conflict into a wider context of geo-strategic divisions and grand security calculations that loom around Kosovo’s pending solution to state sovereignty.

Kosovo’s tenth anniversary of statehood also marks a tentative progress-in-the-making, despite all odds. Throughout the many crises that ravaged the country, governing elites proved determined to closely collaborate with the Western structures, pledge commitment to international standards, remain anchored in the promise of a European future and pursue institutional reforms. The international community, including EULEX, maintains an extensive, even if downscaled, presence in the country and continues to assist and monitor different sectors of reforms, particularly those related to security and the rule of law. Negotiations for the normalization of relations with Serbia also proceed amidst the EU offers of carrots and sticks. This mixed record of tumultuous and dysfunctional but persistent ‘reforms’ thus implicates local and international actors and features ongoing institutional changes, but also local resistance and reversals. The result is, more often than not, the emergence of hybrid institutions that strikingly resemble their external templates in form, but operate differently in practice.

External rule promotion, local reception and hybrid institution-building

What explains the dismal, at best, mixed record of externally led state- and institution-building in Kosovo? Why have the international attempts triggered meager results on the ground? How do local agency, interests and practices factor in? How can we assess the mixed trends of tentative achievements and failures in different time periods and areas of reform? These questions have been the subject of a burgeoning and diverse body of research that revolves around the results of external peace- and state-building missions in war-torn societies; the transfer of external rules in the framework of EU enlargement policies; and a more recent focus on how local actors receive, select and implement externally promoted rules in the specific contexts where they operate. Available explanations in the literature reflect the main focus of different bodies of research and range from the type of external involvement and activities; to the processes of localization and resistance; and to the many configurations between the external and internal, or conflicts between the two (Elbasani 2013; Skendaj 2014; Capussela 2015; Coelho 2015; Grasten and Uberti 2015). The explanations that trend more in a particular time period, however, depend on which agents hold ultimate power in the shifting pendulum of political and institutional authority that characterizes the external state- and institution-building process. Typically, the external crafting of new states and institutions, as much as the transposition of new rules, involves an ongoing redistribution of political and institutional power between the international and local actors at different stages of state-building.

Specifically, during the UNMIK reign (1999–2008), the head of UNMIK and a close circle of international administrators exerted executive, legislative and judicial powers, and thus the authority to determine the course of change, envisage new institutions and execute them on the ground. The Special Representative of the UN Secretary General (SRSG), who was also the head of UNMIK, was tasked with ensuring coherence of the mission and inhabited virtually unlimited powers. The first UNMIK-promulgated regulation made it clear: ‘all legislative and executive authority with respect to Kosovo, including the administration of the judiciary, is vested in UNMIK and is exercised by the SRSG’ (UNMIK 1999, Sec. 1, Art. 1). A follow up regulation on ‘the status, privileges and immunities of KFOR and UNMIK and their personnel in Kosovo' accorded the international staff effective legal immunity. From the outset, however, the responsibilities enshrined in UNMIK posed the dilemma of expansive powers without a hierarchical line of authority or accountability, an issue which translated into weak coordination across various international activities, inconsistent legislation, loose legislative enforcement and waning legitimacy on the ground.

UNMIK was never a smooth-functioning operation, given that the command structure was not hierarchical, well-coordinated, or united: it has been difficult if not impossible for both internationals and the citizens of Kosovo to understand who is in charge, and what they are charged to do. As U.S. Ambassador Jacques Klein illustrated colorfully …: ‘You have the pillars and poles and the what-have-yous – a OSCE, KFOR, “why for” – then you wonder why an SRSG has to struggle with organizations which don’t like to be controlled, because if I don’t pay you, you don’t work for me’. (Howard 2014, 121–122)

A large strand of empirical research unsurprisingly digs into the multifaceted hindrances of the international mission and its activities in order to explain why so little was accomplished at such high financial cost. Among the frequently noted problems are: the scope of international mandate, poor coordination, lack of accountability, vague goals, legal uncertainty, insufficient resources, the prioritization of stability, erratic policy choices, the politicization of the mission, a dearth of local knowledge, misunderstanding of context, institutionalization of ethnic divisions, propping up of a select group of politicians, post-colonialist preponderance and even the self-interests of foreign staff. Despite mounting the most expensive international intervention ever, UNMIK-led Kosovo was not only an illusion of self-rule, but also persistently underperformed in key indicators of state – and institution-building reform, particularly those related to the rule of law that were under tight international controls. Back in 2005, The UN’s envoy to Kosovo, Kai Eide, reported ‘Today, the rule of law is hampered by a lack of ability and readiness to enforce legislation at all levels… Organized crime and corruption have been characterized as the biggest threats to the stability of Kosovo and the sustainability of its institutions’ (Eide 2005, 2).

The failure of international structures to deliver, be it self-rule or good governance, has fed into local mistrust towards external missions, and a sense of failure they came to christen as ‘UNMIKistan’ (Lemay-Hébert 2009, 201). That international staff travelled around Kosovo in luxury cars, frequented upmarket cafes that catered specifically to them and lived exclusive lifestyles without much ado set them a world apart from the impoverished and dysfunctional polity they helped to create. Even the financial assistance allocated to different areas of state- and institution-building remained mostly within the deep pockets of the international personnel: ‘[only] the European Union has spent in Kosovo 4 billion euros... From those 4 billion, 80 per cent was spent in capacity building and consultancy, which means that 3.2 billion went back to the base … that base has been made by two or three countries’ (Cunha 2008, quoted in Lemay-Hebert 2011, 191). Not surprisingly, locals came to progressively distrust UNMIK as a top-down imposing structure neglecting ‘the will of the people’ and even exacerbating their problems. ‘If UNMIK had been up for election, it would have needed to campaign hard to win votes from anybody in Kosovo other than its own staff’ (King and Mason 2006, 220). However, UNMIK and its staff did not face any mechanisms that resembled elections or accountability, and neither did the international structures that followed (Visoka 2012). How UNMIK and other international personnel were recruited, what the required expertise and qualifications were for the job, whether personnel had the minimum knowledge of the local context, what institutional mechanisms were in place to monitor performance and uphold accountability, all provide questions which received little scrutiny. Holding international staff accountable for performance and results remained an internal issue, impossible to access to anyone outside of the international circle.

Evidence of UNMIK dysfunctionality set in motion the policy of transferring authority to Kosovo elected authorities, later enshrined in the Ahtisaari proposal of supervised independence. The transfer of UNMIK’s executive and judicial powers to Kosovo-elected institutions empowered political elites in remaking, enacting and enforcing the newly installed rules. The unilateral declaration of independence in 2008 then marked an official shift of ultimate authority, and also scholarly attention, from international activities to the role of the local agency, its behavior, practices and formal and informal rule resisting strategies. To be sure, local authorities were from early on incorporated into the evolving state infrastructure and attained administrative competences via the Provisional Institutions of Self-Governance (PISG), back in 2001. Even before the creation of the PISG, UNMIK did not enter a ‘political vacuum’ or the blank slate they assumed the war-torn country to be. Instead, the international structures had to face various local political actors with their respective agendas, practices and political arrangements (Chesterman 2004, 128; Lemay-Hebert 2011). Before and soon after the war, both Kosovo Albanians and Serbs had established parallel structures of administration in their zones of influence. Albanians, moreover, were divided into a pacifist camp led by Ibrahim Rugova and a more militant political fraction led by Hashim Thaci; with both camps establishing separate institutional apparatuses and carrying out rudimentary functions of the withdrawing Yugoslav state. Once on the ground, UNMIK took several months to incorporate Albanian structures into its own institutional apparatus, while the Serb enclaves were left to their own devices and remained loyal to the Belgrade authority (van der Borgh 2012). Co-opted or not into the international structures, local structures gradually expanded their reach and saw international authority as a straightjacket to their own power. After independence, local authorities took over to remake the rules and formally exercise state power, triggering a process of passage to local ‘ownership’ (Qehaja and Prezelj 2017). The end of supervised independence in 2012 consolidated local authorities’ gains and gave them the key to state power. Subsequently, the main burden of explanation for the country’s achievements and failures fell on local agents, their reception of state-building activities and the socio-political context in which they were embedded. The related explanations that subscribe to the so-called ‘local turn’ of research invoke the role of indigenous factors: resisting strategies, ethnic animosities, parallel state structures, weak leadership, an absence of governing experience, dependency on foreign assistance, political feuds, patronage relations, lack of governing programs, powerful organized crime, systemic corruption and even state capture – as key explanations of the struggling state-building experiment.

This more recent body of literature also ponders how local ‘ways’ persist, bypass and undermine externally promoted rules, hence the gap between rule transfers and rule reception and the resulting hybrid forms of state- and institution-building on the ground (Mac Ginty 2011; Elbasani and Šabić 2017). Even at the peak of international intervention, external actors depended on a chain of delegation and cooperation with domestic partners to conduct their tasks. The local implementers invariably retain some discretion when choosing what to implement and how. Their input is important during the process of rule enforcement, especially given the broad scope of informality that defines ‘transitory’ regimes. Still, local actors’ rule reception and rule resistance activities, which usually loom large during the process of implementation, are rarely straightforward. Instead, they manifest in subtle and often informal ways, requiring the researcher to go back and forth between rule compliance, rule resistance and rule enforcement to trace their role. Despite the forms it takes, local resistance can effectively change the intended meaning of rules:

Local actors [may] seemingly comply with … imposed norms and institutions, while at the same time, subtly reject these norms and institutions…. Under a veil of compliance, local actors discursively reframe the international norms and reinterpret their meaning in ways that essentially contradict the intentions of international peacebuilders. (Lončar 2016, 280)

Local actors’ rule reception and rule resistance strategies are part and parcel of all stages of the rule transfer process, but gain dominance once local actors take over substantial governing tasks, and ultimately, the authority to set the agenda and reshuffle the externally promoted rules.

Still, international actors’ continuing presence, as much as local actors’ dependency on foreign assistance, after the declaration of independence, makes it impossible to assess the local ‘life’ of externally-promoted rules and institutions through local lenses alone. The Ahtisaari model of supervised independence, which lasted until 2012, reserved crucial decision-making powers to the international administrators, this time in a supervisory and co-governing role vis a vis the elected power-holders. The plan also empowered the EU to assume major executive functions from a shrinking UNMIK presence. Installed in the country in 2008, EULEX has the mandate to ‘monitor, mentor and advise’ while also exercising specific executive authorities, including prosecution and adjudication of serious crimes (Council of the EU 2008). However, the EULEX presence did not help to reduce the presence of international structures or to improve the performance of the international community.

Apart from UNMIK and the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR), there is the International Civilian Office (ICO), the European Union’s Special Representative (EUSR), EULEX, the European Commission’s Liaison Office (ECLO), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission in Kosovo, the EU’s special representative for the North, and the EU’s special coordinator on religious heritage. On top of these, there is the ‘Quint’ – the embassies of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy – which play a very important role in Kosovo’s political development. (Deda 2010, 87)

In 2013, Kosovo still hosted 5134 KFOR troops, 400 UN civilian staff, more than 3,000 EULEX police and judicial personnel, and numerous other international staff, all vying for authority, influence and often reduced international positions (Woehrel 2013, 2). Most of the remaining structures, moreover, continued operation without transparency or proper public and institutional mechanisms of monitoring. That major international actors, the UN, EU and NATO, failed to agree on a final status solution, also implicated the international structures into much of the same battles of legal uncertainty, conflicting goals and lack of coordination that had hampered UNMIK functioning (Brosig 2011). EULEX itself was in an awkward position ‘of assisting the Kosovo government while having no formal opinion about whether Kosovo was an autonomous region of Serbia or an independent state’ (Radin 2014, 183). Post-independence Kosovo has also inherited many of the vague, inconsistent and overlapping legal templates that date back to UNMIK reign, thus carrying the heavy baggage of a patchy internationally led state-building process (Tadic and Elbasani 2018). This shifting set of responsibilities, as well as the convolution of international and local layers of authority, implicates different actors, but also rule-export and rule-resisting strategies. ‘The hybridized form [of state-building]…that has emerged is indicative of an uneasy confrontation and relationship between the agents of the liberal peace, and often, the agents of the conflict itself’ (Richmond 2009, 326).

Outline and contribution of articles

This special issue contributes theoretical and empirical insights that advance our current knowledge regarding trending explanations, difficulties and prospects of state-building in post-war Kosovo. Theoretically, we contribute to the current state of research by comparing the role of international and local actors during different stages of state-building; exploring domestic challenges, which gained ground after independence; and highlighting the gap between externally promoted rules and persisting local practices and resisting strategies, hence the hybridity of state-building on the ground. All articles in this issue embrace a common analytical approach that revolves around the localization of state-building and shifts attention to local agents’ reception and resistance to externally promoted rules. Empirically, we aim to take stock of two decades of international state-building activities and a decade of independent statehood by providing long-term in-depth analysis of key sectors of reform – municipal governance, state bureaucracy, the normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo, education, armed forces, the security sector and the reception of Salafi ideologies. Such analysis brings rich empirical detail into the evolution and general direction of Kosovo’s state-building experience. The findings of the articles also contribute to broader and timely theoretical and empirical dilemmas regarding the effects of external intervention, the role of local agency in selecting, reshuffling and transforming international rules, and the formality and informality of the institution-building experience on the ground.

David Jackson’s article points at the dominant role of political leadership in explaining different trajectories of governance in two municipalities: Hani i Elezit and Kamenica (2018). Both municipalities have been subject to similar attempts at state-building and have received a massive injection of foreign assistance, projects and funds, thus allowing the author to explore the traits of municipal leadership in explaining the differences: effective and accountable governance in Hani i Elezit and persisting clientelist practices in Kamenica. By shifting away from perspectives that spotlight international activities towards those highlighting local actors’ reactions to state-building, the article traces how the local agents, and the domestic constraints they are embedded in, shape governing models on the ground. A politically independent and widely trusted mayor in Hani i Elezit has succeeded to engage citizens in a participatory and indiscriminate governing project. By contrast, the party-backed mayor of Kamenica, who operates under the influence and control of the political ‘center’, has instigated a type of governance that caters to a close circle of political and personal loyalists. Given the constraining effects of hierarchical party organizations, where those at the top command the decision-making process and distribution of resources, the author concludes that it takes strong personalities to break the mold. The article thus makes the case for consideration of the traits of local leadership, and the constraining conditions in which they operate, as determining factors in explaining the course of state-building.

Katarina Tadic and Arolda Elbasani’s article pursues a similar analytical approach in emphasizing the role of local agency and rule resisting strategies as explanations for the endemic system of political patronage across all layers of the newly built Kosovo bureaucracy (2018). Accordingly, given the country’s initial conditions, it is hardly surprising that patronage and even state capture found fertile terrain in which to thrive. What indeed is counterintuitive, and in need of explanation, is how and why the patronage networks sprouted under the internationally-designed and -supervised state-building activities. The analysis thus incorporates international activities and local behavior into an interactive explanation that vacillates depending on who holds the reins of power at different stages of the state-building process. Specifically, UNMIK-promulgated and enforced rules of recruitment in the civil service system mounted to a pool of inconsistent, overlapping and poorly enforced legislation, which granted local actors the institutional space to infiltrate party cronies across the state bureaucracy. The transfer of power to elected authorities after independence further exposed the rules of recruitment to governing actors’ formal and informal strategies of political control. The analysis makes a strong case to tracing rule-resistance at the interface of the formality and informality of political behavior, a division which becomes particularly blurred in the context of overlapping legislation, frail institutional capacities and powerful politicians’ abuse of inconsistencies that permit new legislation. The emerging Kosovo bureaucracy carries the typical features of a hybrid system: it replicates the internationally-promoted Weberian standards on paper, and functions according to the dominant principles of political patronage in practice.

The next two articles in this issue focus on the (non)implementation of the EU-brokered agreements regarding the normalization of relations between Kosovo and Serbia. Both articles invoke the interplay between the EU negotiating strategies and local actors’ competing narratives on what normalization means, but explore different sides of the equation to explain how various actors and processes shape non-implementation. Cemaliye Beysoylu’s article (2018) emphasizes the role of EU strategy (a combination of piecemeal negotiations with constructive ambiguity) and local adversaries’ doubts towards the EU as the main factors of non-implementation of the agreements tackling the status of the Serb-inhabited northern municipalities. Accordingly, the local and international strategies are interwoven –the EU strategy to proceed in cycles where nearly all issues are passed back and forth is expected to institutionalize cooperation but de facto it is steering further resistance. The article also stresses the hybridity or disjunction between a relatively straightforward formal negotiation of the agreements and their intricate implementation, which brings to the fore contrasting international and local visions of peace. The EU strategy to tackle issues in cycles and the policy of keeping the negotiated items ‘constructively ambiguous’, in order to reach an agreeable formula among various EU member states and local adversaries, permits local actors innovative ways to resist, reverse and delay the process. Hence, every agreement concerning the status of the northern municipalities sparks new cycles of resistance as local actors bring to the negotiating table conflicting issues and interpretations all over again. Another  finding which emerges from the analysis is that internal divisions run deeper than a simple Serb-Albanian conflict. Serbian politicians, Kosovo Serbs, Pristina’s government and opposition, all have specific and often contrasting interests and visions of peace.

Miruna Troncota’s article takes up the implementation of the most difficult issue within the EU- brokered Agreements: the status of Association/Community of Serb municipalities (ACSM) (2018). The analysis highlights local actors’ strategies of resistance and the narratives they use, as a leading explanation for the difficulty of implementation. Accordingly, the very dual label ‘Association/Community’ reflects the EU’s use of ambiguous language and local actors’ conflicting interpretations on what status the foreseen entity would have. The analysis explicitly challenges the often-assumed homogenous ethno-political lines of conflict by unpacking the actors and views that inform multiple sources of local resistance. Kosovo Albanians are divided into a camp representing the governing coalition and another representing the opposition parties and a group of NGOs. The first camp tends to support the agreement only to the extent that the municipalities at stake don’t acquire additional executive authority; the second, vehemently contests the agreed terms of ACSM as laying the ground for ‘the Bosnification’ of Kosovo, i.e., institutionalization of divisions and continuous interference from Serbia. Serbs too include diverging voices between the Belgrade officials and the Kosovo Serbs, who inhabit the municipalities at stake. Both parties agree on the status of ACSM as a ‘governing entity’, but Kosovo Serbs don’t always share the political interests of their distant official representatives in Belgrade. The EU itself often stands in the midst of contestation due to the format of negotiations with a closed circle of elites at the expense of inclusion of different voices and transparency of the process. All parties, moreover, resent and question the commitment of others, including the EU. By outlining the heterogeneity of local actors and narratives of resistance, the article shatters political elites’ show of compliance with the EU brokered agreements, thus providing specific theoretical and empirical insights on ‘subtle’ forms of resistance that play out during implementation process.

Ervjola Selenica’s article taps into the contrast between the international community’s vision of an inclusive multi-ethnic polity, and the locals’ adherence to an ethno-national exclusive vision, as the prime explanation of educational reforms (2018). Accordingly, post-war educational reforms carry out the input of both international and local actors, and their conflicting ideals about the role of education in the new state. Certainly, internationals have heavily invested in the area of education and initiated the so-called lead agencies approach, whereby different organizations were assigned various functions within the system. The international agencies continued to assist and finance various sectors of reform after the creation of the ministry of education and empowerment of local actors starting in 2001. However, the international strategy of emphasizing collective rights, autonomy of separate communities and decentralized education has seemingly backfired by sowing the very seeds of segregation that it sought to avoid. The analysis also lends support to the local turn of state-building research by emphasizing the role of local political actors and implementers in transforming, indigenizing and resisting the international templates. Local reception of international ideals of multi-ethnic education also fits a standard hybrid mode of institution-building: rhetorical alignment with internationals’ goals of inclusive and multi-ethnic education; actual segregation of education into two parallel ethno-national systems, one serving Albanian national ideals and the other, Serbian ideals. The split of the University of Pristina into two ethnically separate branches, both contending the same name, and both serving the exclusive national ambitions of their respective ethnic community, demonstrates the shallowness of internationally led educational reforms on the ground.

Giorgos Triantafyllou’s article, similarly, emphasizes the conflicting visions between the Albanian and Serbian communities as a key explanation for Kosovo’s failure to establish an army capable of defending its territorial integrity (2018). The explanation also implicates internationals’ failure to neutralize the role of the KLA structure, de facto incorporating KLA fighters into the new security architecture of the state. The continuity between the KLA and the transformed security infrastructure does raise legitimate suspicions among Serbs about the role of a possible armed force in a context where the ethnic separations run deep. That the territorial integrity of the country remains an open question still undetermined by key international players mirrors the ethnic divisions into a politicized legal debate about the establishment and future of a possible army. Given the legal uncertainties concerning Kosovo’s final status, different parties remain entrenched in ethnic divisions: Albanian politicians insist on creating a ‘multi-ethnic’ military force able to defend state borders; Kosovo Serb politicians are fearful that the army will serve the Albanian majority and insist on involving Belgrade in the negotiations; Belgrade politicians strive to connect the issue to the implementation of ASCM status as an ‘executive entity’. Hence, the author suggests that the positions of various domestic actors are rooted into the legacy of conflict between Albanians and Serbs, and the spillover of such conflicts into SSR.

The next two articles offer an innovative way to look at the role of domestic agency as resisting, but also challenging and contributing, to the external ideals of state-building. By specifying the mechanisms through which local actors screen, challenge and entrench externally-led reforms into the local context, the articles provide cutting edge theoretical and empirical insights on the local turn of state-building research. Jacob Phillipps’ article explores how local think tanks and their conducted research supplies much needed knowledge of the domestic context and concerns towards internationally led SSR. The study builds on concepts of epistemic community and the role of research in policy-making processes to analyze the multifaceted interaction between local researchers and international practitioners. Accordingly, local researchers bring much needed input and ground SSR in the local context, interests and priorities via monitoring policy makers’ activities, questioning the work of international actors, investigating potential abuses, identifying new policy alternatives and challenging the normative underpinning of international knowledge. The contribution of local researchers to international practitioners’ understanding of SSR takes the form of collaborations, learning and contextualization, as well as the identification of local actors and concerns. However, the potential of local think tanks to shape the policy-making process is often hampered by the credibility of local research and the marginality that international policy makers afford to sources of local knowledge.

Shpend Kursani’s article turns to a specific dimension of localization processes by investigating how Albanian imams interpret the Salafi doctrinal concepts of takfir (excommunication) and al-wala’ wa-l-bara’ (loyalty and disavowal) in light of topics pertinent to Albanian specific socio-political developments – the secular state, nation and militant Islam (2018). The analysis evidences plural interpretations of Salafi ideals, which position Albanian imams into different factions, one mainstream and the other rejectionist. Both groups reject innovation and attempt to attain the pristine purity of Islamic creed, a typical feature of global Salafism. However, they diverge regarding the application of Salafi concepts in the specific Albanian ethnic, national and political context. The mainstream group, which is more dominant among Albanian-ethnic Salafi imams, adopts a reconciliatory approach towards these concepts, showing the ‘re-culturalized’ and ‘re-nationalized’ face of Salafism. The rejectionist group, which remains marginal, is more apt to utilize these concepts in function of a militant discourse. Even in this case, however, the suggested ‘revolutionary’ action is removed way from home and towards idealized global movements that implement Islamic law abroad. Imams’ discursive engagement with global Islamic precepts and local-specific issues attests to the localization of Islamic discourse, but certainly falls short of outlining an authoritative ‘theological’ interpretation able to fend ideological fonts of radicalization. Whether and how ‘re-culturation’, inherent to mainstream Salafi imams, provides convincing theological arguments to prevent radicalization remains a challenging issue that calls for further research into actors and modalities of the interpretation of Islamic doctrine.

Notes on contributor

Arolda Elbasani is a visiting scholar at the New York University and senior analyst for the Wikistrat Consulting Network. Her research interests lay at the intersection of comparative democratization, post-conflict state-building, EU foreign policy and contemporary Islam with a focus on Southeast Europe and Turkey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.