Introduction

Abstract

Currently in its twelfth year of independence, and despite significant steps forward in many policy areas, Kosovo continues to struggle with a number of policy challenges, both domestic and international. This book offers in depth analyses on a number of these policy challenges, attempting to make a contribution to both scholarly analysis and policy thinking on the domestic and external influences and determinants to Kosovo’s statehood. The book is divided in three parts or pillars of analysis, each corresponding to one of the key policy areas and sources of challenges to Kosovo’s statehood. Part I tackles issues of civil society and civic mobilization. As a response to social phenomena and political problems, and in juxtaposition with top down perspectives and elite level solutions, the three chapters in this part dissect grassroot agency and its role in some of the important political developments and policy areas in Kosovo in the last thirty years. Part II turns attention to issues of identity and otherness. The chapters in this part investigate instances and situations whereby Kosovar identity, whether in more formal and institutionalised forms or as a lived experience, encounters the ethnic and national other. The chapters in this part offer in depth and nuanced analyses that challenge conventional, and at times stereotypical, understandings of these encounters and their implications and consequences for Kosovo’s statehood and national identity-building. Finally, Part III focuses more on the external challenges of Kosovo’s statehood by analysing various aspects of Pristina’s relations with the EU and European non-recognisers. Here again the policy challenges for Kosovo are significant and tend to become even more complicated due to the institutional and political realities of the EU as well as the non-recognisers’ own domestic problems and dilemmas. In what follows, we present briefly the conceptual and analytical issues of the three parts of the book as well as offer a brief introduction to each of the chapters in this volume.