Faire frontière dans la paix : le Kosovo et la décentralisation de la concurrence ethno-politique

Peaceful resolution of the Kosovo-Serbia conflict has remained elusive for two decades. Numerous proposals have attempted to settle the question of Kosovo’s status to create a polity at peace internally and with its neighbors, and ready for integration into an enlarged Europe. Since the declaration of Kosovo’s independence in 2008, the primary means of resolving Serbia’s territorial claim has been through the process of decentralization: devolving political authority onto newly drawn Serb majority municipalities. The result of EU-sponsored Belgrade-Prishtina dialogues were the April 2013 and August 2015 Agreements, which would allow a Community of Serb-majority municipalities to create a new governmental entity, segregating Kosovo along internal ethnoterritorial borders. This article uses the concept of ethnopolitical territoriality to critically examine (a) the historical origins of local borders to govern Kosovo’s multi-ethnic space and (b) the new borders drawn by the strategy of decentralization