Performing statehood in Northern Kosovo: Discursive struggle over contested space
| Author | Marina Vulović |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836720906851 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836720906851
Cooperation and Conflict
2020, Vol. 55(3) 326 –346
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836720906851
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Performing statehood in
Northern Kosovo: Discursive
struggle over contested space
Marina Vulović
Abstract
Since Serbia and Kosovo began their political and technical dialogue mediated by the European
Union in 2011, numerous agreements were signed, but few of them implemented. In addition,
since 2018 the idea of partitioning Kosovo along ethnic lines has entered public debates. This
article asks why that is the case and argues that Northern Kosovo – specifically, who has the right
to claim statehood over this area – lies at the heart of why partition was suggested as a viable
option and why so few agreements have been implemented. In order to demonstrate this, the
article adopts a performative view of statehood, particularly suitable for states ‘in-becoming’, such
as Kosovo. As only externally performed statehood has been examined so far, that is, efforts for
international recognition, this article extends performativity to internally negotiated statehood,
against the background of two political systems competing for legitimacy in the long run. This is
the case with Northern Kosovo, conceptualized as an area of overlapping limited statehood. The
developed analytical framework can be extended to other cases of territorial disputes, such as
Crimea or Palestine. The framework can also be expanded to explore performativity of statehood
in areas where statehood is not institutionally disputed, but rather symbolically.
Keywords
Brussels dialogue, discourse, Northern Kosovo, partition, performative statehood
Introduction
Since Serbia and Kosovo began their technical dialogue mediated by the European Union
(EU) in 2011, seeking to solve their dispute, numerous agreements were signed, but few
of them implemented. Most notably, these are The First Agreement of Principles
Governing the Normalization of Relations (otherwise known as the Brussels agreement),
initialled in April 2013 (Government of Kosovo, 2013), and the subsequent Agreement
Corresponding author:
Marina Vulović, Department of Cultures, University of Helsinki, Unioninkatu 38A, P.O. Box 59, 00014
Helsinki, Finland.
Email: marina.vulovic@helsinki.fi
906851CAC0010.1177/0010836720906851Cooperation and ConflictVulović
research-article2020
Article
Vulović 327
on the Establishment of an Association/Community of Serbian Municipalities (ACSM)
from 2015 (European External Action Service, 2015). Most of the agreements resulting
from the Brussels dialogue concern one particular area – Northern Kosovo, which is the
subject of recent discussions on partition (or exchange of territories/‘correction of bor-
ders’) as a potential solution to the Serbia–Kosovo dispute. The proposed land swap
articulated in 2018 entails that Serbia would gain Northern Kosovo (predominantly pop-
ulated by Serbs) in exchange for letting the Preshevo Valley (predominantly populated
by Albanians) become part of Kosovo. If this happened, Serbia would recognize Kosovo
as an independent state. After seven years of mediated dialogue between Serbia and
Kosovo, how could this solution have been proposed as a viable option and, moreover,
how could the previously negotiated agreements offering a middle way have failed to be
implemented?
This somewhat puzzling issue of Northern Kosovo and the implementation of agree-
ments from Brussels has been discussed from various perspectives in current scholar-
ship. Some research assesses the EU’s mediation efforts and their effectiveness in the
Brussels dialogue (Bergmann, 2018; Bieber, 2015; Visoka and Doyle, 2016). Other
research pays attention to local actors and how they bypass the implementation phase of
EU conditionality through utilizing a range of resistance narratives (Troncotă, 2018), or
it focuses on the interplay of local actors and the EU in the implementation process
(Beysoylu, 2018). Although some studies offer the under-researched bottom-up perspec-
tive of local actors (see Beysoylu, 2018; Troncotă, 2018; Zupančič, 2018), these studies
are still embedded within the larger frameworks of Europeanization, ‘normative power
Europe’ or EU integration (see e.g. Bieber, 2015; Economides and Ker-Lindsay, 2015;
Zupančič, 2018). While these are valuable frameworks, few studies focus on Kosovo’s
own statehood negotiations – with the exception of Visoka (2018, 2019) – because this
is a disputed issue within the international community, as Kosovo has not attained full
recognition as a state. I argue that the question of who has the right to claim statehood
over the area of Northern Kosovo – internally performed statehood1 – lies at the heart of
why so few agreements have been effectively implemented and why partition has become
a viable option.
Although Visoka (2018, 2019) gives notable agency to the local perspective of a state-
in-becoming, specifically focusing on Kosovo’s efforts to become a sovereign state by
exploring international recognition, his research does not focus on the performances of
statehood within Kosovo, but only considers externally performed/legitimized practices.
This article argues that internally negotiated statehood matters because both Serbia and
Kosovo are ‘competing’ for statehood and sovereignty in Northern Kosovo. It builds on
Risse’s (2015) notion of ‘limited statehood’ and conceptualizes Northern Kosovo as an
area of ‘overlapping’ limited statehood2 of both Serbia and Kosovo. However, his frame-
work takes certain categories, such as legitimacy (social acceptance), as a given and
pre-discursive (e.g. Börzel et al., 2018). This is not a study of contested legitimacy (e.g.
Baranyi, 2012; Gills, 1996; Sarbo, 2009), as legitimacy would require a certain govern-
ment to be accepted by the governed (Risse, 2018) as a set of ‘sedimented norms’ shared
by a number of subjects (see Butler, 1988). Legitimacy could be an effect of statehood-
making practices, which would also be discursively constructed. Even though the con-
tested legitimacy literature offers a valuable insight into what can be achieved through
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