ABSTRACT
The recent war in Kosova raises questions about the nature of inter-human exchange and the viability of certain operational institutions that are central to our concept of modern governance. As with other conflicts, the war in Kosova has produced responsive discourses that utilized foundational principles that prove to be highly problematic. Unfortunately, scholars have rarely sought to understand the structural politics set behind such principles. These discourses are at their core rendered operational through the evocation of essentialist representations of the conflict, resulting in crude sociological models that help both the media and the academic community explain human tragedy to an audience disinterested in detail.1 While we should not lose touch with the operational value of reductionism in the production of knowledge, I want to use the case of the international administration of Kosova to demonstrate why citing such categories-especially ‘ethnicity’—fail to properly criticize a number of pre-determined ‘reforms’ which were expected to bring peace and prosperity and as a consequence, ‘democracy’ to Kosova.2 In the end, I suggest this process will fail because the indigenous civic mechanisms that constitute the very foundations of democracy have been actively destroyed by this international administration on the basis of the operational logic it adopts when using such categories.3
