Mark Weller, CONTESTED STATEHOOD: KOSOVO'S STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com), 2009. xxvii +321 pp. ISBN 9780199566167. £40.
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2011.0064 |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Pages | 486-488 |
“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 (
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 he sees as ironically stiffening NATO's resolve in the armed campaign. He also gives time and attention to the Yugoslavian Tribunal's (ICTY) contemporaneous indictment of the top leadership, maintaining that this was decisive: it indicated a point of no return and triggered a strategic shift from NATO's use of force as coercive diplomacy into an action which approximated war in more conventional terms. Further, Weller discusses the significance of the ICTY's assertion of jurisdiction (and the Prosecutor's view that it was an internal armed conflict) as implying recognition of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as an organized armed movement controlling a significant proportion of territory, thereby rebutting Yugoslavian arguments that the KLA were instead gangsters or terrorists who should be subject to internal “police” action. For Weller, as well as...
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