3 - Peace Multitudes: Liberal Peace, Local Agency and Peace Formation in Kosovo

Summary

Introduction

Over the past two decades, Kosovo has experienced extensive international involvement as the international community attempted to build a liberal peace and establish institutions, while trying to accommodate and transform ethnic cleavages and resolve the question of statehood. In general, most practitioners and scholars consider Kosovo a successful case of peacebuilding and statebuilding. While international peacebuilders often take the credit for this success, the peace-shaping role of local agency and dynamics is often ignored and underestimated. A closer look shows that the entire peace process in Kosovo is shaped by the interplay of international peacebuilding and statebuilding, local engagement in state formation and the reactionary state contestation dynamics. But the space for peace formation has taken place beyond these confrontational dynamics, at the everyday sites and through nonviolent civil society based initiatives. Peacebuilding and statebuilding attempts in Kosovo have not resulted in creating a sustainable peace grounded on local legitimacy, progressive politics, social emancipation and equality. In Kosovo, the liberal peace approach was preoccupied with immediate impact, motivated by self-interest, and has operated with a short-term perspective, thereby failing to engage sufficiently with local needs, interests and the potential for bottom-up peace formation. The suppression and exclusion of local agency, needs, and perspectives and popular representational politics have consistently backfired, triggering local resistance and alternative modes of peace formation. These local dynamics certainly constitute the transition from liberal to postliberal peace in Kosovo.

This chapter examines the pitfalls of liberal peace in Kosovo, traces some examples of peace formation. The chapter argues that traces of local peace formation in Kosovo have emerged in fragments as part of the complex configuration of interrelated, overlapping, yet conflicting and harmonising processes of international peacebuilding and statebuilding and local state formation, contestation and resistance movements. Notwithstanding the role of local resistance, another strand of local agency was crucial for peace formation, which operated under the liberal (emancipatory) peace agenda in Kosovo, leaning mainly on liberal normative frameworks and dependent on liberal blueprints and external donor support. Oliver Richmond defines peace formation as the most promising avenue for building a sustainable peace whereby local initiatives through non-violent dynamics negotiate and find pathways to form peaceful practices and utilise the international assistance to facilitate local peace formation.