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.
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.
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.
Using survey and focus group data from Kosovo, Macedonia, and Serbia, the paper finds that ethnic minorities are more likely to consider bribery acceptable in societies where minorities have lower ...social status. Ethnic minorities are also more likely to bribe or use contacts to find jobs. Several explanations account for this variation in bribery beliefs and behaviors among minority and majority respondents. First, faced with state discrimination and neglect, minorities tend to "try harder" than majority citizens, in order to compensate for their disadvantaged status. Second, war legacies and postwar lawlessness in particular border regions where minorities reside contribute to corruption. Finally, clientelist practices contribute to corruption in decentralized municipalities where public officials belong to the ethnic minority group.
This article compares the results of police reform in three post-Yugoslav states that vary in terms of local ownership. Using survey, focus group, and interview data gathered in Kosovo, Serbia, and ...Macedonia, we find that the public perceives the police force created and trained by international oversight as more capable and legitimate when compared to police forces that grew under local ownership. Insulation from political and societal influence led to a more capable and legitimate police force in Kosovo, while the politicization of the police force under local ownership undermined its capacity and legitimacy in Macedonia and Serbia.
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.
Deadly Cocktail Skendaj, Elton
Creating Kosovo,
11/2014
Book Chapter
“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
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