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.
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
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
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
