From Pararepublic to Parastate: International Leverage in Shaping Kosovo’s Secession

Abstract

AbstractThe Kosovo Albanian political movement in the 1990s contained three fluctuating factions with distinct strategies: boycotting Serbian institutions, participating in elections, and resorting to an armed insurgency. This article shows how expectations of external assistance, primarily from the Clinton administration, influenced which strategy was to dominate the movement at certain periods. It also shows how the movement successfully conflated the issues of human rights and the ethnonationalist secessionist agenda, even though the secessionist agenda predated the claims of human rights violations following the rise of Slobodan Milošević to power in Serbia. In the end, the article discusses how the Clinton administration’s failure in the Rambouillet peace talks, the diplomatic result of the NATO attack on Serbia, and the fall of Slobodan Milošević set the foundations for freezing the conflict and turning Kosovo into a parastate.