ABSTRACT
The threat of violence continues in Kosovo, even after its declaration of independence supported by the U.S. and much of the European Union, with renewed fighting in Mitrovica in March 2008. Just four years earlier, on 16 and 17March, major violence had erupted in Kosovowhich both international reports and academics described as “a flashing warning light” for Europe as a whole (Bideleux and Jeffries 2007: 579). A major resurgence of inter-ethnic unrest occurred after three young Albanian Kosovar children were drowned trying to swim across the river Ibar near the divided city of Mitrovica. There is a Serb Kosovar enclave north of the river; Albanian Kosovars inhabit the southern part of the city, and NATO KFOR (Kosovo Force) soldiers guard the bridge between them. The only surviving boy told television reporters that they had been chased into the water by hostile Serbs with savage dogs. Following closely on tensions surrounding the earlier shooting of two Serb
Kosovar youths, this event triggered the growing social, economic, demographic, religious, and ethnic discontent in Kosovo, with riots in many parts of the province on 17 and 18 March. Groups of up to 50,000 people-many of them school or university-age students-were reported looting Serb homes, burning Serb churches, and attacking UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo) vehicles. The riots left 19 dead, some 900 injured, and over 700 Serb, Ashkali, and Roma homes, up to ten public buildings and 30 Serbian churches and two monasteries damaged or destroyed. Roughly 4,500 people were displaced from their homes. This chapter examines the condition of violence, via a study of Kosovo
at a time of renewed violence five years after NATO air forces went to war in Serbia and Kosovo. It compares various academic theories with “administrative” reports from international bodies. In many academic quarters, especially in criminological and risk theory, “administrative” reports and associated research have a bad name. This, as Wilkinson explains, is especially when “the genuine voice of suffering people is effectively silenced by the translation of their experiences into the language of science and technical expertise. Through this process, politicians and policy makers find it easier to turn away from what suffering does to a person’s humanity” (Wilkinson, 2006: 4). However, in this chapter, the notion of
administrative research is given a different inflection, representing the opportunity to draw systematically on voices on the ground-from “below” so to speak. The chapter therefore moves through several phases. The first section cri-
tically examines the attempts by different theorists-notably Samuel Huntington and Benjamin Barber-to understand the nature of violence in the world today, and finds that such attempts seem to fail to grapple with the realities of Kosovo. The chapter then moves to a consideration of how such violence is analyzed, namely from the perspectives from “above” and from “below,” and the ramifications of analysis that is begun from each of these perspectives. The final stage of this chapter turns to the reports produced through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society actors, notably the International Crisis Group, as away of bringing together academic and on-the-ground “administrative” research in examining the Kosovo riots of March 2004.
