Kosovo in political science is studied with perspectives that pass through Belgrade

In international relations and political science, Kosovo, according to researcher Vjosa Musliu, is studied from two perspectives: that of Belgrade and that of the West. She concludes that the Western perspective also often passes through Belgrade. Kosovo is now studied more, but it is not understood that much. And this is where the concept of invisible visibility comes into play. And Musliu does not see this as a coincidence, but as a deliberate structure from both the Belgrade and the Western perspectives. And she considers that there should be not only the production of knowledge, in this case about Kosovo, but also the cultivation of knowledge

Vjosa Musliu is not one of those researchers with an international career who, when dealing with specific topics, simply immerses herself in theory and quotes and describes a few archival or field facts. Or that when dealing with the political history of Kosovo, she simply beats out two versions, that of Pristina and that of Belgrade, just to be politically correct with that “both sides” norm. It is not enough for her to add “both sides” to her studies, even a paragraph of the completely technical international reports on the history of how the war, liberation, statehood and progress came about.

Associate professor of international relations at the Free University of Brussels, Vjosa Musliu, goes further. As usual, in the case of Kosovo, she puts the theories of world thinkers, international technical reports on the study table, looks at the perspective of both local parties and comes to the conclusion that in international relations and political science, Kosovo is studied from two perspectives: that of Belgrade and that of the West. And it turns out that the West perspective also often passes through Belgrade. The West reports are a little more superficial. Kosovo is now studied more, but it is not understood that much. And this is where the concept of invisible visibility comes into play. And Musliu does not see this as a coincidence, but as a deliberate structure. And she considers that there should be not only the production of knowledge, in this case about Kosovo, but the cultivation of knowledge.

Kosovo occupies a strange position in the archives

On Friday, as part of the International Seminar on Albanian Language, Literature and Culture, Musliu delivered a lecture, which according to the program, is titled "The Gaze and Its Silences: How Kosovo is (not) Studied in Political Sciences". But in the lecture it was presented with a slightly longer title "Spectra of Imperial Gazes: How Kosovo is (not) Studied in International Relations and Political Sciences".

According to her, the way Kosovo has been discussed in these disciplines, in international relations and political science, since the 20th century is very much conditioned by what Musliu calls the Belgrade perspective and the Western perspective, which is more of a contemporary format.

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“In my speech, I will explain how these views are problematic and what they do to Kosovo as a case study. And I want to end with a way forward, perhaps on a more positive note, if we would call it that, a move away from knowledge production towards knowledge cultivation,” Musliu said. She revealed that Kosovo occupies a strange position in the archive of political science and international relations. She said that there are many reports on Kosovo after the Cold War and it remains at the same time, in her opinion, perhaps paradoxically, less readable or only recently more readable.

“I want to argue today that this is not a paradox, this is a structure,” she said. She revealed that there are technical reports from a UN administration, then the silence of critical Serbian theorists on Kosovo, a journal measuring progress in Kosovo, and all of these begin to look like symptoms of the same underlying condition. She divided the structure into three scholarly periods: Yugoslav socialism, the post-war or international administration and state-building era after 1999, and the ongoing period of EU-conditioned progress. In her view, everything that has been published about Kosovo in these periods is a series of observations organized around the categories of a metropolitan center and not about Kosovo itself. And this archive, she said, she critically examines in this lecture through the works of a number of decolonial thinkers such as: Frantz Fanon, Ranjana Khanna, Olivia Rutazibwa and Robbie Shilliam.

“My broader goal today is to hold together two things that are usually kept separate. Kosovo as a historical colonial project folded into the structure of the Yugoslav state and Kosovo as a postcolonial colony still in recovery,” she said. In this case, she addressed the audience by saying that she was not suggesting that they accept that socialist Yugoslavia was a colonial power in the same sense as if a state like Belgium came to these parts. She asked to think about some of the analytical vocabularies in political science and international relations that provide explanations for colonialism, the rationalized hierarchy of information extraction, and the epistemic control over what counts as legitimate knowledge.

“Second, think about how this vocabulary relates to Kosovo’s position within Yugoslavia and then ask why this vocabulary was applied so harshly in the case of Kosovo,” she said. She explained the colonial gaze from socialist Yugoslavia towards Kosovo during the 20th century as an internal federal asymmetry, as a colonial project in most of its structural features with demographic administration, epistemic control and rationalized civilizational hierarchy. According to her, this colonial relationship left its mark on contemporary Serbian and Yugoslav critical and postcolonial studies, a mark that, according to her, continues to this day to exclude Kosovo from its frameworks. He said that it was a metropolitan center, in this case Belgrade, that controlled the institutions of what was considered legitimate knowledge, such as universities, archives, publishing houses, academic canons, and everything that was produced outside of these institutions in seemingly peripheral or less important languages ​​simply did not count as knowledge in the same register.

"Within this perspective, within this framework, the Albanians of Kosovo were rationalized as Muslims, non-Europeans... In Fanon's terms, they were held in a zone of non-being, a space from which full political subjectivity is forever forbidden. Not because it is being actively denied at any given moment, but because the entire apparatus of cognition is structured in such a way that it never comes to light," she said. She then elaborated on her statement with a long series of examples from what happened in Kosovo under Belgrade's control: the fact that Kosovo did not receive the status of a republic at that time, the suppression of autonomy, the exclusion of Albanians from institutions, and so on. And in this case, she also supported colonization with the theories of thinkers.

Visibility and comprehensibility that do not correspond

She then moved on to the second era, arguing that Kosovo only became internationally visible towards the end of the 20th century, but that the repression was systematic long before international cameras arrived. What changed, she argued, was that this repression gained international legitimacy as an object of concern amid Serbia’s role in the Yugoslav wars and the increasing police and military violence directed against a largely civilian population in Kosovo, violence that was met with a loosely organized guerrilla movement, the Kosovo Liberation Army.

“Setting this against the geopolitical backdrop of the moment, the fall of communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of liberal democracy and the enthusiasm that democracy has prevailed all over the world, the Western allies, as you know very well, moved towards a comprehensive intervention with NATO air strikes...”, she said. According to her, the interventions continued until the last one, which is the European Union Rule of Law Mission that is currently present in Kosovo. She said that the international community came first with air strikes against Serbian military bases, then with administrators, with researchers, NGOs and workers writing reports.

“And the cumulative effect of this sequence is a new regime of knowledge, a regime that, I would argue, is no less hierarchical than the one it replaced. Kosovo now becomes visible, but not legible in its own terms, which is where the concept of invisible visibility comes in. Visibility and intelligibility are not the same thing,” she said, continuing to elaborate on this gap. In the second era, she listed the period from 1999 to 2008 as the first phase, which was also the time of direct international administration. She said that in this case, in the literature, Kosovo is mainly an object of governance with reports, assessments, standards, and so on, reports from institutions such as the UN, the EU, the OSCE, the IMF, the World Bank, which, according to her, each produced knowledge about Kosovo as a by-product of administrative gates.

“And this material, in fact, becomes the raw empirical foundation for academic studies. This is not a study in the traditional sense, because it is written in a technical, depersonalized language. But these reports occupy a structural place in thinking about Kosovo...”, she said. She described them as technocratic reports that included the rule of law, institutional capacity, protection of minorities and economic development.

“And with these categories, the people of Kosovo appear as beneficiaries, but rarely, if ever, as political agents with a legitimate interpretation of their history, their situation, their wars,” said Musliu, who is the author of two books: “Europeanization and Statebuilding as Everyday Practices: Performing Europe in the Western Balkans Routledge” and “Girlhood at War: Interpreting War and Liberation in Kosovo.” In the second, she made an academic intervention by presenting the war as a person who experienced it. It is to some extent a certain dose of academic rebellion against the principle that a third party should deal with a war or conflict that has occurred somewhere. Musliu is the author of several scholarly articles and co-author of several books.  

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The lecture then moved on to another time period. He said that the Kosovo Declaration of Independence in 2008 generated a large volume of studies on international relations and international law, including serious legal arguments produced throughout the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice.

Thinking about Kosovo under a new metropolitan perspective

And the third era has said that this time period began in 2015 and continues to this day. Here it has introduced the aspirations of Kosovo's membership in the EU and the ongoing dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia mediated, facilitated or, according to some perspectives, dictated by Brussels. The terminology, according to it, changes in this case, depending on who is asked to produce a literature organized entirely around the metaphor of progress. It is about progress towards European standards, European norms, European integration.

“I want you to notice what this metaphor does analytically. The idea of ​​a distance that has not yet been crossed is built directly into this framework before a single empirical observation is made. And in doing so, it reproduces the same time that Fanon identified in colonialism, not yet ready, not European enough, not modernized enough, not civilized enough…”, she said. According to Musliu, the leading journals in this field publish serious, careful, and empirically rich papers on Kosovo. She said that the work in these cases is organized around questions generated in metropolitan centers about how Kosovo ranks in the Freedom House index and many other questions.

“These are not trivial questions. These are purely political questions. But notice what each of them assumes before the research begins. The validity of the measuring instrument, the universality of the reference point, and the desirability of the destination. Europe is our final destination. These are two strong points that overlap with international relations studies that help explain how this model consolidates,” she said. She explained that first, thinking about Kosovo begins to operate under a new metropolitan gaze.

“This is technocratic, developmental, where Kosovo functions as a case study forever coded as incapable of catching up. And with the political economy of academic and political knowledge production, these microtropes were progressively internalized and internalized. And that is the uncomfortable part by international, legal and domestic scholars alike,” she said. According to her, political, economic and social progress in Kosovo was measured and compared to the standards set in Brussels and Washington with Kosovo as a test bed, as a laboratory for liberal intervention, instead of engaging with a perspective that deserves analysis on its own terms. She said that in other words, for a scholar trying to escape the Serbian nationalist historiography that completely erases the political thought of Kosovo Albanians, alignment with the European Euro-Atlantic framework may seem like the only available way out.

“The dangers and politics of blurring the line between the one who produces knowledge about Kosovo and the one who cultivates it are part of my argument, which brings me to the final point from knowledge production to knowledge cultivation,” she said. In this case, she added that everything she has described, the Belgrade perspective, the technical reports of governance, the comparative literature, the metaphor of progress, belongs to what others before her have called knowledge production. She said that this is a modern disciplinary apparatus, through which claims about the world are generated, validated and circulated in the economy of knowledge production. According to her, Fanon shows that this apparatus is inseparable from colonial violence, because under it, the colonized subject is presented as an object of knowledge and not as its subject or author.

“Kosovo in these two seemingly opposite cases has been produced, reproduced and materialized as a federal problem, as a case of governance, as a candidate for membership, without ever becoming the author of its own analytical categories,” she said. According to Musliu, decolonial scholars like Rutazibwa are sensitive to political risks and she considered that her intervention is what the field of international relations should listen to more now.

"She insists that decolonization cannot be accomplished simply by adding other knowledge to the existing circle of epistemic spheres. Inclusion, diversification, the multicultural conference panel...", are what Musliu has described as a way out, referring to researcher Rutazibwa. She said that cultivation for Shilliam is knowledge transmitted from generation to generation within the community, oriented towards the responsibility of the people who hold it.

“Production, by contrast, is knowledge extracted, standardized, and made portable to institutions that owe nothing to the places or people from whom it was taken. The move from production to cultivation is not simply a methodological choice, a matter of the method section you write, it is an ethical and political choice,” she said. According to her, simple questions need to be asked about any piece of knowledge about Kosovo or any other country.

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“Is this knowledge drawn from care, obligation and accountability to the people in question? Or is it gathered as a resource for a system that is built to respond to those in the studies? Finally, this is what I mean by invisible visibility, the phrase with which I want to leave this room. It is true that Kosovo is studied more, reported more, assessed more, compared more, becomes a case study of more disciplines and sub-disciplines. But, as I hope to show today, this is not invisibility in the form of not seeing. The frameworks, metrics, institutions, positions from which knowledge about Kosovo is produced ensure that what is seen from a distance and by the European norm is never its political subjectivity or almost never its political subjectivity,” Musliu concluded.

In addition to her lecture, during the day, lectures were held at the Seminar, language courses at three levels, as well as a lecture by Aleksandër Pavlović on the topic "Understanding Serbian and Albanian Protests".