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"Skendaj, Elton"
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Creating Kosovo
In shaping the institutions of a new country, what interventions
from international actors lead to success and failure? Elton
Skendaj's investigation into Kosovo, based on national survey data,
interviews, and focus groups conducted over ten months of
fieldwork, leads to some surprising answers. Creating
Kosovo highlights efforts to build the police force, the
central government, courts, and a customs service.
Skendaj finds that central administration and the courts, which
had been developed under local authority, succumbed to cronyism and
corruption, challenging the premise that local \"ownership\" leads to
more effective state bureaucracies. The police force and customs
service, directly managed by international actors, were held to a
meritocratic standard, fulfilling their missions and winning public
respect. On the other hand, local participation and contestation
supported democratic institutions. When international actors
supported the demobilization of popular movements, they undermined
the ability of the public to hold elected officials
accountable.
eBook
Protests in Postwar Societies: Grievances and Contentious Collective Action in Kosovo
Most research on protests has been conducted in peaceful societies, whereas we know far less about contentious collective action in postwar contexts. To fill this gap, we offer a theory that perceived ethnic grievances related to group security and group status are particularly likely to generate protest mobilization in postwar societies. To test this theory and alternative hypotheses, we investigate trends in protest behavior in postwar Kosovo using an original protest event dataset and existing survey data. We find that protest behavior in postwar Kosovo is significantly shaped by perceived ethnic grievances: the majority of protest grievances center around group security and group status concerns. Protests about economic justice or good governance demands are significantly rarer. Using data from existing surveys, we also investigate the determinants of variation in individual protest participation. Our analysis reveals that perceived ethnic discrimination is strongly associated with individual protest participation in Kosovo.
Journal Article
International Insulation from Politics and the Challenge of State Building: Learning from Kosovo
Can international actors build effective state bureaucracies in postwar countries? While the literature on state institutions suggests they are best built under local ownership, this article shows how international actors in collaboration with local actors managed to build two effective state bureaucracies in postwar Kosovo: the police force and the customs service. Contrary to the article's Hypothesis 1 on local ownership, international actors insulated the effective bureaucracies from political and societal influences in order to prevent them from becoming sites of patronage. Thus, these institutions built on meritocratic recruitment and promotion. Employing a comparative research design, the article utilizes national survey data as well as data from 150 semistructured interviews conducted during ten months of fieldwork in Kosovo. By contrasting the state's constituent bureaucracies, which vary in effectiveness, and thus avoiding the reduction of the state to a unitary abstract actor, this research offers a fresh perspective on postwar state building. Furthermore, it contributes three innovative sets of indicators to measure effective bureaucracies: mission fulfillment, penalization of corruption, and responsiveness to the public.
Journal Article
Creating Constituencies for State Building and Democratization
This book gives a nuanced answer to the question posed in chapter 1: Can ambitious international interventions build states and democracies? The evidence provided in this study suggests that international organizations can be successful in both endeavors—if they take different approaches to state building and democratization. To build state bureaucracies, international organizations need to insulate them from political and societal influences, so that recruitment and promotion rest on merit and not political or personal affiliations. In the space of one decade, a professional police force and customs service arose in Kosovo. By contrast, international assistance can support the development
Book Chapter
Deadly Cocktail
“We have low-quality public administrators in our bureaucracy. They get some training, but since their quality is low to begin with, their capacity remains very weak.” Thus spoke the former Kosovo prime minister responsible for building the central administration in the crucial early period between 2002 and 2004 (Rexhepi 2009). This is a frank admission from one of the local builders of the central administration, and it underscores the important fact that both international and government officials agreed on the low quality of the administration.
Kosovo’s judicial system is also universally viewed as ineffective. Interviewees from government, civil society, and
Book Chapter
Mass Mobilization and Democracy in Kosovo
Kosovo’s president resigned unexpectedly on September 27, 2010, because the Constitutional Court stated that he was violating the Constitution by remaining a leader of a political party during his tenure as president. When new elections were called, two new political parties emerged with a youth following. The new successful party, Self-Determination (Vetëvendosje), is a nationalist movement that became the third-largest party in the upcoming Parliament, with fourteen members. A coalition of professional civil society organizations also formed a new party, Fryma e Re (FER), whose name plays on the double meaning of “New Spirit” in Albanian and “Fair” in English.
Book Chapter
Without Fear or Favor
Postwar Kosovo is full of surprises. Although one might expect the entire new Kosovo state to be weak, some bureaucracies have been functioning quite well. The customs service is one such example. In the middle of an interview with a United Nations (UN) bureaucrat working for the European Union (EU), the official stopped our conversation to answer an important phone call. The Kosovo customs director needed help clarifying the tax rate for oil imports because the ambiguity in the current law gave too much discretion to the customs field officer, and this could be exploited by traffickers. I was surprised
Book Chapter