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Kosovo’s Competing Nationalisms: Theorizing an Internal Challenge to Rebel Victor Legitimacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2023

Isaac Toman Grief Open the ORCID record for Isaac Toman Grief [Opens in a new window]
Isaac Toman Grief*
Affiliation:
University of York, UK
*
Email: isaac@toman.me.uk
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Abstract

This article highlights the significance of Lëvizja Vetëvendosje’s (LVV) left-wing Kosovar Albanian nationalist challenge to the authoritarian and patrimonial nationalist system of Kosovo’s rebel victors. LVV used the political settlement’s own legitimizing metanarrative – that of Kosovar Albanian nationalism – to bolster their own legitimacy while undermining that of post-war elites drawn from organizations active in the conflict of the 1990s. A methodology based on Discursive Institutionalism makes sense of LVV’s position as both a challenger of rebel victors but also as a representative of the same ideological culture that underpins Kosovo’s political culture. There are two key contributions here. Empirically, this study characterizes LVV as a nationalist challenge to the rebel victor parties rather than as a distinctively nationalist or a protest party. The second contribution is theoretical: peacebuilding and political settlements theories must take a more dynamic and agency-sensitive view of legitimacy creation than they have hitherto.

Keywords

NationalismKosovopolitical settlementsnation-buildinglegitimacy
Type
Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , May 2024 , pp. 573 - 587
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for the Study of Nationalities

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