Education and the State: Lessons in Legitimacy from the Post-Conflict Education Systems in Kosovo and Bosnia

• In Event: States in transition: education policy and politics in postconflict societies

Proposal

The connection between education, national identity, and state identity informs the internal legitimacy of the nation-state and is a constructive framework when analyzing the school’s role in identity construction in multi-ethnic or multi-identity contexts. As such, numerous studies have emphasized the distinct role of curriculum in the restructuring or reconceptualization of national identities across diverse contexts (Corcuff, 2005; Gashi, 2016; Korostelina, 2008; Wilson et al., 2005), showing that history curriculum and textbooks represent a particularly important mechanism used by the state to disseminate their preferred historical truths. Looking at the diffusion of global norms like human rights in post-conflict contexts, Russell (2020) finds that Rwanda’s national government had difficulty in marshaling these global discourses in support of its own national priorities, undermining the post-conflict peace process. However, there has been little literature examining how these processes of restructuring education and translating global discourses contributes to post-conflict countries’ development of internal and external legitimacy, necessary elements for nation-state sovereignty and stability.

Building on this literature, this proposal aims to fill the gap in understanding regarding the particular nature of contemporary, legitimated, global nation-state scripts by exploring in finer detail how international and domestic political and actors in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia) understand the nation-building project through education and what elements they see as contributing to state legitimacy. The post-conflict contexts of Kosovo and Bosnia are rich cases for comparative analysis because both are undergoing a concurrent internal and external struggle for legitimacy. Both countries recently emerged as newly constituted nation-states after devastating ethnic conflict, with Bosnia achieving independence through a UN-mediated peace accord in 1995 and Kosovo declaring independence in 2008 after a decade of UN-administrative governance. They have similar histories of conflict and international involvement and segregated school systems, but diverge on important characteristics, including diversity of languages, duration and intensity of international involvement, and formal representation of ethnic diversity in government institutions, which have been suggested by past research on the region as important considerations in cultivating state legitimacy. Hromadzic (2015, 2021) contends that the high level of international involvement in Bosnia has produced a state that is only formally sovereign while my prior research on Kosovo suggest that the education system is ineffective in establishing a unified national identity, therefore undermining the stability and internal legitimacy of Kosovo as a nation-state (Colic, 2020). Taken together, these shared characteristics of high international involvement and ethnically diverse populations with differences regarding the extent and duration of the involvement and the particular demographics of the diverse populations render Kosovo and Bosnia fruitful cases for comparative study.

Based on the theoretical and empirical literature outlined above, this study asks: (1) How do key domestic and international actors understand the role of education in the state building process in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina? And more specifically: (1a) What were the important education policies or priorities for domestic and international actors in post-war Kosovo and Bosnia and to what extent, if any, were they in contention?; and (1b) How did domestic and international actors see education as fostering internal and external legitimacy for the state?

Given that there has been limited research on the ways in which local and global actors negotiate global nation-state scripts in contested state contexts, the comparative case study of Kosovo and Bosnia is best suited for a qualitative research design (Creswell & Creswell, 2018; Merriam, 2002). For this study, I employ semi-structured interviews to create a holistic picture of the post-war environment of heavy international involvement in which Kosovo and Bosnia’s educational institutions and statehoods have been crafted. I conducted a total of 20 interviews, 10 with stakeholders who work in Kosovo and 10 with stakeholders who work in Bosnia. The purpose of the interviews is to understand how domestic and international actors themselves articulate education’s role in the nation-building process. Additionally, I aim to shed light on how these actors negotiate potentially conflicting cultural values and political priorities as they build Kosovo and Bosnia’s education systems with a specific focus on the question of state legitimacy.

The data corpus I am gathering will be qualitatively coded using NVivo software to analyze emerging understandings of the role of education in shoring up internal and external legitimacy for Kosovo and Bosnia. An emic codebook will be drafted iteratively during passes of the data, focusing on elements related to the research questions specified above. This project is the first step in a longer-term research project on education’s role in nation-state building in contested, post-conflict states. The particular focus of this phase is on institutions, transmission of norms, and establishment of legitimacy at the meso- and macro- levels rather than the micro. Later phases of research will be informed by the data collected in this stage and will address other stakeholders in the process like teachers and students, speaking more clearly to the ways in which these national and global discussions influence the lived experience of Kosovars and Bosnians. In addition to contributing to theoretical clarification, this research sheds light more broadly on the process of internationally driven state-building in contested states, reflecting on the impact of past practice and offering guidance for future such endeavors.

Author

• Arnela Colic, Columbia University Teachers College