(iPoster) Alternative Political Orders and Conflict Stabilization after State Collapse

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Religion and Politics & Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries (Post-Soviet)
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries (Post-Soviet)

Abstract

Alternative Political Orders and Conflict Stabilization After State Collapse: The Case of North Kosovo, 1999–2023

This paper examines the emergence, consolidation, and transformation of North Kosovo as an alternative political order from 1999 to 2023. Following the collapse of Yugoslav state structures and the contested establishment of new institutions under UNMIK and the Kosovo state, the northern Kosovo municipalities developed a set of parallel institutions that assumed core state functions while operating outside the authority of Pristina. The paper argues that these institutions constituted a coherent non-state political order that enabled local actors to channel resistance to unfavorable political settlements into institutionalized governance. In this sense, North Kosovo challenges dominant assumptions in the state-building literature that alternative political orders necessarily undermine stability; instead, I show that this order stabilized the post-conflict environment by transforming violent resistance into institutionalized, rule-bound forms of contestation. The paper situates North Kosovo’s institutional evolution within a broader framework of competitive state formation following state collapse. It traces how unresolved claims over political authority created the conditions under which non-state actors constructed durable governance arrangements. Rather than viewing these arrangements as obstacles to Kosovo’s consolidation, the paper interprets them as mechanisms for stabilizing conflict under conditions of unresolved sovereignty claims and ongoing competitive state-building.
A central section of the paper analyzes the impact of the 2013 Brussels Agreement, which sought to integrate the northern municipalities into Kosovo’s legal and administrative framework. The analysis shows how the Agreement destabilized the pre-existing alternative political order by dismantling key institutions, empowering new actors, and shifting the incentives of local elites. It also demonstrates how the weakening of parallel institutions inadvertently opened space for new forms of coercive politics, reduced local accountability, and reconfigured relations between Belgrade, Pristina, and northern municipalities. These dynamics help explain the post-2021 re-escalation of Kosovo’s security environment. The project intervenes in state formation literature by foregrounding non-state actors as producers of political order. At the same time, it engages the policy-focused international state-building literature, urging policymakers to reassess the role of non-state political orders in peacebuilding, particularly in settings where sovereignty remains contested and state-building remains incomplete.

Author

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