Mark Weller, CONTESTED STATEHOOD: KOSOVO'S STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com), 2009. xxvii +321 pp. ISBN 9780199566167. £40.

Document Cited in Related
AuthorThérèse O'Donnell
DOI10.3366/elr.2011.0064
Published date01 September 2011
Date01 September 2011
Pages486-488

“It has never been easy to square a circle …. This looked like a zero-sum game if ever there was one” (191). Weller provides the historical and political context for the emergence of the state of Kosovo from its medieval origins, through 20th century upheavals, its existence as an autonomous province of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the re-centralising constitutional developments of 1990, the 1999 NATO military action, UN territorial administration, the eventual declaration of independence in February 2008 and the crafting of the subsequent state. As such, its scope is potentially awesome but Weller nimbly manages his material. As well as building upon his more general work on self-determination, (including work on the “self-determination trap”) the book also complements his previous publications on Kosovo (The Crisis in Kosovo, 1988–1999 (1999)). Weller is undoubtedly immersed in the legal history of Kosovo. He served as a legal adviser to the Kosovo delegation at Rambouillet and at the Vienna negotiations on the future status of Kosovo. Weller was also an expert adviser in relation to the constitutional drafting process in Kosovo, and the book very much has a bird's-eye sense to it (see also Weller, “The Rambouillet conference on Kosovo” (1999) 75 International Affairs 211). It also provides a context against which to read the 2010 Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice regarding Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence.

Given the book's title, it is no surprise that Weller is highly critical of the Serbian leadership's conduct during the 1999 hostilities, which...

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