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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 Kosovohighlights 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,Creating Kosovoshows, 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
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
Building Effective Bureaucracies and Promoting Democracy in Kosovo
Dardan Velija (2008), a former senior government official, likes to tell an anecdote about how Kosovo traffic police officers stopped him twice for speeding. The officer stopped the car, politely asked for the driver’s documentation, and then ordered him to pay the fine for driving above the speed limit. The police officer fined Velija even though he had noticed the VIP sticker on the front window of Velija’s car that signaled the driver’s important government position. Velija, a political adviser to the Kosovo prime minister, had to pay a fine just like any other citizen. “In Albania,” he added, “the
Book Chapter
Contested Statehood
On February 17, 2008, the world media focused its attention on the celebrations in the streets of Prishtina, Kosovo’s capital, as its Parliament declared independence. Waving Albanian, American, and European Union (EU) flags, Kosovo Albanians celebrated the creation of their new state. A new monument was unveiled in the center of Prishtina, big capital letters that spelled the English word “NEWBORN.” By contrast, Belgrade saw riots and the burning of the American embassy, as small groups of nationalist Serbs encouraged by their prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, expressed their rage toward the new state that had seceded from Serbia. Kosovo is
Book Chapter