Gëzim Visoka at Summer School as School 2019
13 August, 2019, 19:00
Venue: Boxing Club
Summer School as School
5 - 21 August, 2019
Stacion - Center Contemporary Art Prishtina has the pleasure to announce "What Shaped Peace in Kosovo? The Paradoxes of Peacebuilding and Statebuilding" by Gëzim Visoka, part of the Public Program of Summer School as School 2019.
Since the end of conflict in 1999, Kosovo has struggled to build a stable peace and create a new state under international tutelage. The main contention after the conflict was between Kosovo Albanian claims for statehood and Serbian opposition of an independent Kosovo. As a conflict management strategy, the international community has deployed multiple fluid missions which have utilised ambiguously peacebuilding to appease Serb minority while statebuilding to satisfy Albanian majoritarian quest for statehood. This talk examines the fluid nature of intervention and peacebuilding, the para-politics and after-politics of ethnic power-sharing, and the dubious forms of local resistance, the role of civil society for peace formation, and the prospects for an emancipatory peace in Kosovo.It offers a critical account of the international missions in Kosovo and traces the effectiveness of administrative, supervisory and diplomatic forms of interventionism. The talk also explores the co-optation of peace by ethno-nationalist groups and explores how their contradictory perception of peace produced an ungovernable peace, which has been manifested with intractable ethnic antagonisms, state capture, and ignorance of the root causes, drivers, and consequences of the conflict.
Dr Gëzim Visoka is Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Dublin City University (Ireland). Dr Visoka’s research focuses on post-conflict peacebuilding, state recognition, and critical international theory. He is author and editor of numerous books, including: The Oxford Handbook of Peacebuilding, Statebuilding, and Peace Formation (with Oliver P. Richmond, Oxford University Press 2020); Normalisation in World Politics (with Nicolas Lemay-Hébert, The University of Michigan Press, 2020); Routledge Handbook of State Recognition (with John Doyle and Edward Newman, Routledge 2019); Acting Like a State: Kosovo and the Everyday Making of Statehood (Routledge, 2018); Shaping Peace in Kosovo: The Politics of Peacebuilding and Statehood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Peace Figuration after International Intervention (Routledge, 2016). Dr Visoka has published his work in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Review of International Studies, Foreign Policy Analysis, International Studies Review, International Peacekeeping, Civil Wars, and Journal of Human Rights Practice, among others.