Albanian Personal Narratives of the Kosovo War and the Struggle for a National Narrative

This paper looks at the “war of memories” taking place in postwar Kosovo through a close reading of diaries and memoirs written by the protagonists of the war - both fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army and civil-ians. It argues that the two narratives emerging from this literature correspond to gendered variants of the Albanian national self-identification fixated in the early nineteenth century</p

Introduction: Kosovo’s Symbolic Importance

This introduction to the special section argues that Kosovo is important to the West because it is considered to symbolise Western power and efficacy. The intervention, and subsequent statebuilding project, were less about Kosovo, and more about a determination to project a particular image of the West as both benevolent and powerful. Over the past twenty years, the clash between the motivations of the external actors and the aspirations of Kosovo’s citizens have become more apparent catalysing a tension between the official Western narrative which presents Kosovo as a “success” and the reality on the ground

Winning the post-war: norm localisation and small arms control in Kosovo and Cambodia

This article asks how domestic elites contest and localise global norms in contentious post-war contexts. Engaging with critical norm research, it develops a ‘two-step localisation’ framework in order to explain how seemingly technical security governance programmes depend on active congruence making with constitutive state-society narratives – both by international practitioners and domestic elites. The first step consists of the adaptation that practitioners working in the field make in order to tune their message to local contexts, and the second step constitutes the locally driven processes of contestation through narrative construction. The article thus brings in deeply political negotiations over state-society narratives in order to unpack how local agents contest and reframe global norms. Applying the two-step localisation framework to a comparative case study of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) Control programmes in Kosovo and Cambodia, the article illustrates how the relationship between arms and state-society narratives is key to understanding the outcome of security governance processes