One year after Kosovo celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its de facto independence from Serbia, the Western Balkan country still struggles to secure sustainable peace. According to Kosovar and U.S. experts, the continued conflict in Kosovo has been caused by a variety of factors. These include the ambiguous objectives of international actors, Serbian nationalism, a failure by Kosovo’s government to integrate its Serb minority, and the country’s weak civil society.

Kosovo, formerly an autonomous province of Serbia, became independent after the 1998-1999 Kosovo War. The war pitted the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav rump state against the Kosovo Liberation Army, an Albanian separatist rebel group. During the war, NATO carried out bombardments of Serb forces, and Kosovar Albanians were victims of a campaign of ethnic cleansing. After the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces, the United Nations administered Kosovo until it declared independence in 2008.

Internally, tensions have remained between the Kosovar government in Pristina and Serb-majority provinces in the north, with authority in the region often overlapping and unclear. Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti has been criticized and sanctioned by the EU and US for measures seen as undermining peace, such as an increasing heavily armed police presence in the north, embargoing necessary Serbian goods, and banning the use of Serbia’s currency. Pressure from the central government has led thousands of Serbs to migrate from Kosovo.

Abroad, Serbia has refused to recognize Kosovo as an independent state, although the latter is recognized by 104 of the UN’s 193 member states. Serbia’s President, Aleksandar Vučić, has also stalled on signing a 2023 normalization agreement that would have committed Serbia to recognition in exchange for semi-autonomous powers for Serbs in the north.

Tension between Kosovo and its neighbor, and the trauma of ethnic cleansing, continue to affect Kosovar society. “In Kosova today… 1,586 people [are] missing,” said Sislej Xhafa, an Albanian Kosovar artist. “And our own north neighbor still doesn’t recognize that we exist, first, and as a second thing, does not even have one monument in Serbia that says, ‘Yes, my grandfather did something to this country.’”

Elizabeth Hume, the Executive Director of the Alliance for Peacebuilding, who was sent by the U.S. Department of State to serve as Chief Legal Counsel to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Kosovo from 1997 to 2001, remembers the immediate aftermath of the end of the Kosovo war as ecstatic and celebratory. However, she said that post-independence violence against the Serb minority soured international expectations. 

Infighting also took place between Albanian political parties, with electoral violence and killings taking place during Kosovo’s first elections, said Hume. “You had intra-conflict happening, and then you had obviously inter-conflict,” she said, referring to the continued tension with Serbia. “We were trying— how do you reconcile this country? How do you keep it as a country?”

Hume said many of the AfP’s members are present in Kosovo, but are mostly focused on issues of livelihoods and economic development. While she acknowledged the importance of these projects, she said that peace in Kosovo ultimately depends on a settlement that properly integrates the Serb-majority municipalities. She highlighted the work of AfP members working on Serb-Albanian mediation. “That is the key to unfreezing. Getting Serbia to recognize Kosovo, figuring out what you do especially in those three northern provinces… Without that, it’s just going to be the same, you’re just going to be doing the same.”

Many of these programs, she said, had been terminated as a result of funding cuts and the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), undermining peace in the region.

Dr. Gëzim Visoka, a Kosovo Albanian associate professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Dublin City University, said the current situation in Kosovo was set in motion by the unclear goals of the international forces that intervened in Kosovo. “The international community never made up their mind about Kosovo, and that dualism, that ambiguity, still exists,” he said. Foreign powers, said Visoka, were never clear on whether the ultimate goal was for Kosovo to become a fully independent state or an autonomous region of Serbia, and confusion over its future place in international institutions has helped keep the country in a limbo.

“There is this big crisis of international determination about Kosovo, or clarity about what they want to do with the country, and I think that is the foundation of the problem, which to date hounds both the international community and Kosovo, including the ethnic groups,” added Visoka.

Hume argued that rather than demonstrating indecisiveness, the international community had merely adapted to a changing situation. She said that originally, the goal was to “stick it to Milosevic, then it was ‘okay, how do we keep the peace here?’” 

A lack of a mutually comprehensive settlement between the parties and weak enforcement of existing agreements, Visoka said, had laid the basis for “peacemaking without peacebuilding,” and what he called a “conflict culture,” in which parties became comfortable with an ambiguous status quo and were unwilling to change. “That is why whoever in Kosovo is pro-peace, or in Serbia is pro-peace, is labeled as a traitor and prone to losing elections or exposed to intra-group problems.” 

Visoka added that Kosovo, however, was still somewhat of a success story compared to other post-conflict countries, having quickly recovered both politically and economically and taken actions to protect minority rights, even if enforcement remained imperfect.

Still, Visoka said, “There is no sustainable infrastructure for peace in Kosovo, which is civil society-driven, sustainable, and resists pressure from politicians and the international community.” Kosovar NGOs, he argued, are dependent on foreign funding, allowing international actors to set the agenda. Furthermore, amidst cuts in development funding in Europe and the US, the positive effects of peacebuilding in Kosovo were at risk of disappearing.

This lack of a resilient civil society, Visoka said, meant that when outbursts of violence take place, people retreat to their ethnic trenches. This has allowed civil society in northern Kosovo to be politicized and directed by the Serbian government, he argued, undermining its credibility with potential Albanian partners.

Visoka said that to demonstrate goodwill to its ethnic minorities, Kosovo could establish an international commission to examine legislation and enhance and improve the implementation of minority rights. He said this would help build a common basis of understanding about the reality on the ground.

Visoka also presented Northern Ireland as a useful case study for Kosovo. He said that Kosovar Serb politicians could learn from Northern Ireland’s power-sharing by leveraging their institutional positions to actively represent the interests of Serbs within Kosovo’s political system. He also said that Northern Ireland’s model of shared education could be used as a model for Kosovo’s, and that achieving integrated education was the biggest long-term challenge to peace in the country.

The statements by Sislej Xhafa, Elizabeth Hume, and Dr. Gëzim Visoka were made during a conference on US-Kosovo relations hosted by George Washington University’s Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication (IPDGC). The discussion was moderated by Dr. Babak Bahador, Director of both IPDGC and Peace News Network.

Keywords: Kosovo, Kosovar, Albanian, conflict, peace, peace and conflict, minority rights, Balkans, conflict resolution, peacebuilding, serbia, serb, serbian