Kosovo Divided

Given the recent revival of nationalism in many parts of the world in tandem with new conflicts and forms of interventionism, this book uses the case of Kosovo to discuss some of key problems around contemporary practices of state-building. Based on exhaustive research and fieldwork, Marius Calu investigates how the management of plurality is a fundamental element of contemporary state-building seeking to build social cohesion, while for the new-born Kosovo it stands as vital symbol for its domestic sovereignty and legitimisation. With the aim of understanding why and in what ways the management of diversity has become a central element of state-building in post-conflict Kosovo, this study juxtaposes the de jure multi-ethnic liberal democratic form of governance with the de facto results and consequences of Kosovo’s task to protect, accommodate and integrate its ethnic minorities.

By exposing the unintended consequences of the internationally engineered management of diversity that both weakened the state and hampered integration of minorities in post-conflict Kosovo, Calu makes a crucial and indispensable argument for examining the fatal gap between state-building templates and state-building practices., Marius Calu’s empirically rich and theoretically robust analysis is a fascinating, and original contribution. By highlighting how the ambitious aspirations of liberal state-building floundered when implemented in Kosovo, Calu demonstrates that externally contrived policies designed to facilitate plurality and multi-ethnic harmony, had a series of unintended negative consequences. The book’s findings have great relevance beyond Kosovo and should be read by all those interested in managing divergent identities within the modern state., This valuable work carefully analyses the gap between the rhetoric and practice of building a multi-ethnic Kosovo. Importantly, it goes beyond the Serbian community and considers other often overlooked groups, such as Roma, Ashkali and Bosniaks. This makes it a particularly welcome contribution to our understanding of contemporary Kosovo.

Marius Calu is a lecturer specialising in the fields of Global Politics, Contemporary Security and Research Methods. He has worked at Regent’s University London, King’s College, UCL and Queen Mary, University of London. He earned his PhD in Political Science in 2015 and he has also completed an MRes in International Relations (Queen Mary, UoL) and a BA in Politics (University of London). He has undertaken research in the fields of International Relations, Comparative Politics and Nationalism Studies with a focus on contemporary norms and practices of post-conflict statebuilding and nationbuilding, the critical analysis of interventions and governance in multiethnic societies. As a research associate for LSE, he worked for the MAXCAP project in Serbia investigating the independence of the judiciary in the context of Europeanisation.