ABSTRACT
It is over ten years since the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) Civilian Police (CIVPOL) contingent began recruiting and training men and women to form the Kosovo Police Service (KPS). For this entire period the KPS has existed in a subservient position to the real providers of security in Kosovo – the Kosovo Protection Force (KFOR), UNMIK and the European Union. In passing UN Security Council Resolution 1244 the international community afforded itself executive authority over the territory of Kosovo, granting itself the monopoly over the use of force. In so doing, an assemblage of police officers from over forty-two different states assumed the power and practice of law enforcement in Kosovo. This power derives from the assumption by the UN of sovereign authority over the area (Decker 2006: 504). Backed by the military capacity of KFOR, the largest deployment of international police officers ever has, together with the KPS, successfully maintained the sovereign authority of the international community for over a decade. They have accomplished this by maintaining Kosovo in a state of exception, whereby the maintenance of order is given priority over the rule of law. It is within the international community’s tendency to position security as an elemental feature of liberal democracy in Kosovo that we find the structural causes of the KPS’s failure to be accepted as a legitimate and objective law enforcement institution; one that would have the capacity to police the multi-ethnic state devised by the international community.
