At the Margins of Sovereignty: Policies, Politics and Actors in Post-Conflict Kosovo.

摘要

This research aims to understand the nature, the capacities and the salience of local agency in international state building projects. Applied in highly varied contexts such as Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Timor East, Afghanistan, Iraq or Kosovo, international state building is predicated on a highly intrusive role of international community. But where does this leave the local actors in sites of intervention? Using Kosovo as a case study, I find that local agency is much more prominent and relevant in political life than has often been assumed. Domestic actors in Kosovo do not necessarily resort to the enclosures of past political traditions, nor do they blindly endorse the new roles imposed upon them by the international regime. A close analysis of local actors in Kosovo indicates that their styles of political action, modes of organization and techniques of political engagement are complex, spontaneous and innovative. Local agency is generated in everyday encounters between the local and the international, in response to challenges for political survival and through re-appropriation of political spaces. To uncover the modes through which the local agency is produced and sustained means to provide for a better understanding of the vernacular prospects of peace building.