Session 9(b): Violence, Sovereignty and Rhetoric

Session 9B: Violence, Sovereignty and Rhetoric
Chair: Rob Fisher

Civil Society, Inter-Ethnic Reconciliation, and Violence in the Context of International Aid in Kosovo
Ana Devic
Department of Political Science, University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark

The paper is based on a 2003 fieldwork in Kosovo that sought to investigate local attitudes toward the priorities, implementation and effectiveness of international aid. The background of this objective was a strong sense that indigenous civil society groups were not involved in the planning of the policies of reconciliation and refugee return that followed the 1999 NATO military intervention in Serbia and Montenegro and the subsequent establishment of the UN administration in Kosovo. This study was unique since it involved collaboration between two local survey teams, one in the Kosovo Albanian part and one in the northern (Serb) segment of Kosovo.
The study raises the following question: How reasonable and realistic was it to charge relatively powerless civil society groups with the task of building an ethnically tolerant and politically pluralistic society, while the Kosovo Force (KFOR) and prominent bilateral donors appeared to be comfortable dealing with and lending legitimacy to ethno-nationalist strongmen and their paramilitary organizations? When public expressions of ethnic tolerance are seen locally as a challenge to the dominant political paradigm of ethno-nationalism, the weak, identified with the former sentiment, are then seen to have pitted themselves against the strong, with all of the risks that are associated with a political zero-sum game of sovereignty and ethnocentric citizenship.
In the Kosovan political space the grievances of ordinary people are mounting in the proportion directly opposite of the range of repertoires of political participation made available by the legitimate (or “legitimate”) actors. Ordinary people then can be pushed to accept violence not because of their latent propensity to interethnic hatred, but because of the absence of any alternative public actions save for those offered by the militants, i.e., those best organized and most interested in the absence of accountability. While the very existence of certain politically marginal civil society groups, such as those advocating safe return of the Roma and Serb refugees, is fraught with danger because of their commitment to ethnic tolerance, many other “civil society” groups operate under the patronage of militant strongmen and within an ethnocentric paradigm. This political arena has done little to dissolve that “other” civil society. Under such conditions, it is not surprising that the peace-building NGOs would prefer to think and act “apolitical,” as the striking findings of this study have documented.
That “civil society” is deeply politicized and polarized is not unusual, but it is surprising how uncritically it appears to be approached by the international aid system. This study points to a number of crucial policy issues arising from the risks and moral hazards contingent upon the instrumentalization of “civil society” for the pursuit of violence and “peaceful coexistence” alike.

This paper will examine post-war (1992-1995) notions of terrorism in Bosnian political life and evaluate their relevance to ethnic belonging and state and regional security. This will be accomplished in several stages. First, “terrorism” will be located within the complex and treacherous matrix of domestic identity politics, and the attendant historical and contemporary pressures to identify existential threats to communal survival. Second, Bosnia ’s status as a terrorist sanctuary will be discussed, putting in physical and cultural context wartime and contemporary manifestations of extremist behaviour. Third, by interrogating the interstice between rhetoric and reality, past and present, Bosnia ’s terrorist paradox will be explained as an evolving domestic response to global counter-insurgency that plays on the legacies of past conflicts and existing social, religious and economic divisions. Ethnic nationalists attempt to portray themselves as committed anti-terrorists, but contradict themselves by limiting official expressions of power to parochial frameworks of identity, undermining the viability of post-war reforms, contributing to state dysfunction, and perpetuating the very conditions that facilitate terrorist activity. Does this make latter-day terrorism more or less real? How do public discourses on terrorism influence efforts to build and enhance multi-ethnic accommodation? Can nationalists once committed to ethnic cleansing be trusted to deal constructively with local and foreign terrorist phenomena? Answers to these questions indicate that Bosnia ’s prospects for long-term recovery and post-intervention survival rest at the interface between indigenous and exogenous cultures of violence.

In recent years, sovereignty has received much attention in debates on humanitarian intervention and state re-construction. Although the notion of sovereignty remained very prominent in these debates, the actually significance of the term has received somewhat limited attention. Yet with the apparent changes to the general conditions for interventions on humanitarian grounds over the years, the need for a re-fined understanding of the notion of sovereignty seems essential. The necessity for such a widening of the notion of sovereignty is accentuated further given that its usage reflects a European understanding of governance to non-Western situations. Such an imposition poses problems on an empirical as well as on an ethical level.
This paper proposes to tackle this conceptual issue by focusing on the notion of divisible sovereignty as applied to post-Saddam Iraq. It will be argued that while much of the literature assumes that notions of negative sovereignty have characterized international politics in the post-Westphalian international order, the reality was somewhat less absolute, highlighting that elements of divisible sovereignty more adequately describe international politics. By demonstrating the link between sovereignty, the state of emergency, and the dialectic of auctoritas and potestas, this paper will seek to refine our understanding of the current political impasse in Iraq. The argument formulated posits that the situation can only adequately be analysed through the lens of divisible sovereignty, and that such a perspective will aid in judging future developments in Iraq and in forecasting the political success or failure of post-war reconstruction there.