ABSTRACT
This essay attempts to describe local strategies and rationales of coping with crises. These crises are characterised through situations of a vacuum of state power in different local Albanian settings at different periods during the 1990s. In these crises, ‘tradition’ became a resource for information on alternative local social order shaped by indigenous perceptions of diverse precommunist and communist histories.1 In some settings, such ‘tradition’ is effectively used to justify, excuse and direct violence. In others, local ‘traditionalisation’ may not provide arguments for violence, as though violent acts may nevertheless happen – without reference to local ‘tradition’. While, in this essay, local socio-political processes will be set into context with central ones, the main objective is to show that Albanian actors have reason and rationale to revitalise ‘tradition’, and that this is strategically adapted to circumstances. ‘Tradition’ proves a particularly useful ideological resource in negotiating control of scarce economic resources, such as land, and in determining social inclusion and exclusion. The use of violence in these processes can provide an effective means to an end. Recourse to violence is particularly powerful, because not morally contestable, where local constructions of identity and history explain it as legitimate in terms of ‘tradition’. It will therefore be argued that the ‘enactment of tradition’ constitutes an effective strategy for establishing power in different local contexts. With such politics ‘traditionalist’ actors not only promote themselves, they may also create public and social coercion in an attempt to install local (and group-internal) peace and order, while – with more or less success – violence is fenced in and directed according to a re-invented ‘traditional’ logic.
