Role of an Agent in (un)Keeping the Multiethnic State Together: The Case of the Secession of Kosovo

References (2)

1. In a recent case, the first of its kind, the International Court of Justice ruled that Kosovo's declaration of independence did not violate international law. The Court issued its opinion in response to the request of the UN and many point that its ruling could have important consequences for the existing world order of states and other separatist movements. Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States. State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988) Although ethnic Albanian majority inhabitants call it Kosova, in this paper it will be referred t as Kosovo since that is how it is usually referred to by the international treaties and agreements. For example see United Nations Peacemaker. ”Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo (Rambouillet Accords)” February 23, 1999. Accessed December 11, 2013, http://peacemaker.un.org/kosovo-rambouilletagreement99
2. Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups. (Harvard, U.K.: Harvard University Press, 2006) 12. Dragoljub R. Živojinović, “Islam in the Balkans: Origins and Contemporary Implications.” Mediterranean Quarterly 3, no. 4 (1992): 51-65. Robert J. Pranger, “The Milosevic and Islamization Factors: Writing Contemporary History in the Balkans.” Mediterranean Quarterly 22 (2011), no. 1: 1-14. To explain Milošević’s Serbian nationalist mobilization against their Bosnian and Albanian neighbors, Pranger (2011, 5-6) concludes: “It should not have been surprising to outside observers that, with the breakup of Yugoslavia and the rise of a drive for independent statehood among Bosnia’s Muslims, Serbs throughout the Balkans, most notably in Serbia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, should have yet again rushed to the barricades against another rising tide of Islam.” The previous instance, for Pranger was probably the Ottoman conquest of the region several centuries earlier. In that sense Pranger is implicitly making a parallel of Bosniak and Albanian demands for national states same as the Ottoman conquest, even though both Bosniak and the majority of Albanians are autochthonous Muslims populations of the Balkans for last several centuries living in their own territories, with own independent cultural and political aspirations. More recently Norwegian terrorist Breivik (2011) in his manifesto on almost 50 pages also wrote about the same ‘Islamic danger’ to Europe and often invoked forces created and led by Milošević as his forerunners. For more see Ande