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holidays. Its inaccessibility, however, is less due to challenging topographical features than a political geography characterised by disorder and violence that has made this corner of South East Europe, in periods of its history, a place best avoided. As Ger Duijzings has observed, ‘Kosovo is an example of a poor, peripheral and conflict-ridden society, where the central authority of the state has been
enlarge the geographical scope of European integration as at best futile, at worst a process that may weaken Western civilisation. ‘Europe’, he claims, can not be (and therefore should not be) redefined by politics, since politics has to be based on the ‘fact’ that Europe’s (geographical) west is part of a different civilisation than Europe’s east. The enlargement of NATO and
Kosovo problems, discussing which rationales and motives can, in the absence of any convincing Realist interests, best explain NATO’s and Russia’s decision to go to war. In the final section, I show how Chechnya and Kosovo are linked, both by Realpolitik and, perhaps more directly, by each being the focal point of an on-going war of interpretation. The outcome of each of these wars of interpretation
Freud who observed (in 1917) that ‘it is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them’. 19 This ‘narcissism of minor differences’, as Freud labelled it, is a discursive mechanism which frames the meaning of European security. Michael Ignatieff has argued rightly that these ‘differences’ (be they between the
draft law that would constrain NGO independence and hamper their activities. In addition, several independent security agencies obstruct democratic practices. As well, the despotic tendencies of Arafat and the PA have hampered the effectiveness of Palestinian civil society. Women’s groups, for instance, are very well organized in the Palestinian areas. Yet the PA has been ambivalent at best towards them
was the institutional embodiment of a broad Atlantic Community seemed to be the best means of waylaying this negative possibility. One of the first arguments along these lines appeared in The Economist in February 1955. Its editorial comments offered an early definition of what actually constituted the community: It is a group of countries that share certain
called by a name turns us into subjects (and indeed objects) within an ideology, then naming is related to the assigning of power positions. For example, ‘Albanians’ in ‘Kosovo’ are unlikely to be as powerful as they are in ‘Kosova’ because the names already imply that the best they can hope for is autonomy, rather than independence. Tim Judah argues that there has been a transition from ‘Kosovo’ to
preventing the military from striking more widely at targets in Serbia from the start of the campaign (phase one of Operation Allied Force was restricted specifically to the suppression of enemy air defences). He also criticised their general refusal to countenance ground force options at the beginning. 3 The first criticism echoed comments made by US Air Force (USAF) Lieutenant General Michael Short. As
ethnic cleansing of towns and villages in Kosovo, and NATO aircraft were completing the orderly and meticulous destruction of Serbia’s infrastructure. NATO was running short of targets and, at times, hitting the same site two or three times; meanwhile, it did almost nothing on the ground to stop the ethnic cleansing. At best, one can say that the two campaigns were carried out relatively independently
work of the Copenhagen School to the outbreak of war, it may be useful to differentiate the concept of securitisation, reserving that concept for those acts of speech which perform the tasks Barry Buzan, Wæver and others have assigned to it, and subsequently adding a new category for cases where large-scale violence is actually in evidence. We can best apply the Copenhagen School’s framework