Volume 70, Issue 2

The special issue revisits the NATO intervention in the 1998–1999 Kosovo War by bringing together comparative perspectives from the war-affected states of the former Yugoslavia, on the one hand, and countries that supported or opposed NATO, on the other. The authors in this special issue look at the mediatization of the NATO intervention and its ambivalent legacies in and beyond the Yugoslav region. They provide insights into contested processes of mobilization for or against a military intervention in the Kosovo War, focusing on the case studies of Greece, Germany, and China. Moreover, they analyze the political legacies and mnemonic practices in the aftermath of this military intervention by highlighting the opposing narratives of memory politics in Kosovo and Serbia.

This article examines the reporting by China’s most important newspaper, People’s Daily , on the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The 1999 intervention was significant in China, as its embassy in Belgrade was bombed. The author looks at the newspaper’s bombardment-related reports of and commentaries on Yugoslavia, NATO, Russia, and China, as well as other countries, and its reporting on the embassy bombing itself. The author shows that there was clear sympathy for Yugoslavia and “the Yugoslav people”, a term used synonymously with Serbs. The 1999 conflict was portrayed as a struggle between good (peace and independence) and evil (hegemonism and power politics). Contrary to most Western societies, the image of Yugoslavia/Serbia in China was largely positive. This image informed the build-up of a narrative of a shared victimhood between China and Yugoslavia/Serbia, which has remained a topos in their bilateral relations until today.

The notion of a Greek–Serbian friendship as a traditional bond evolved in the public discourse of both Greece and Serbia during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Based on alleged commonalities, feelings of threat and experiences of marginalisation, the sentiment of a special kind of solidarity and proximity between the two nations gained traction, especially in Greece. This holds particularly true during the 1999 NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. The Greek public vehemently opposed the bombing, which was interpreted as an unjustified war against the Serbian people. Both Greece and Serbia were perceived as “underdogs” in the “machinations of the Great Powers”. The article investigates the phenomenon of Greek–Serbian friendship against the background of the 1999 NATO intervention, focussing particularly on the strong anti-Western sentiments that mobilised the Greek public at the end of the 1990s.

Germany’s involvement in the Kosovo War marked its first active participation in combat operations since the Second World War. For many observers at the time, the intervention represented a fundamental policy shift in the West, and in Germany in particular. Mass atrocities, no longer to be observed from the sidelines, were now to be actively prevented. Twenty years later, this stance seems rather puzzling. Mass atrocities continued to be committed; Germany has neither championed efforts to prevent such acts, nor has it been proactive in this regard. In this article, the authors develop three proxies that serve to indicate whether mass atrocities were highly politicised: the existence of parliamentary debates, media coverage, and church statements. They show that Kosovo is an outlier within an otherwise clear continuity of German political silencing in the face of mass atrocities. To prove this claim, they turn to German domestic debates on twelve mass atrocity cases abroad since the country’s unification in 1990.

In this article, the author argues that political actors in Kosovo and Serbia, together with international actors from the UN, NATO, and the EU, have developed strategies of political communication in which the threat or promise of external intervention in Southeast European processes of state-building and state consolidation have been deeply inscribed. Based on a critical security studies theoretical framework, especially pragmatist securitisation, the author illustrates such “securitised state-building” with speech acts on interethnic violence, the Kosovo army, and NATO intervention commemorations. While securitised language does not necessarily lead to violence, actors with communicative strategies of segregation, confrontation, and even violence have proven more likely to be favoured by the governing mode of “securitised state-building”. Such a mode thereby may shape regional processes of de- and re-territorialisation in the future, too.

The author takes the 20th anniversary of the NATO intervention as a starting point to reflect on the commemorations of 24 March 1999, distinguishing three phases of memory politics: First, the Making of 24 March (1999–2000) by Slobodan Milošević, which initiated a hegemonic narrative of Serbian martyrdom; second, the Long Period of Ambiguity (2001–2014) shaped by the former democratic governments, who pursued a policy of reconciliation without questioning the one-sided memory in relation to the war in Kosovo; and third, the Return of 24 March with Aleksandar Vučić’s rise to power, which describes the 78 days of air raids as a collective trauma of Serbian society, from which, however, strength and defiance can be derived. The author shows that memory politics in Serbia today continue to focus almost exclusively on Serbian sacrifices made due to the bombing, while the war in Kosovo remains silenced.

This study deals with sexual violence in the Kosovo conflict. Adopting a broad timeframe from 1998/99 to 2019 it analyses the discourse about sexual violence and considers the actors involved, focussing on practices of silencing and “un-silencing”. In 1998/99 international actors, particularly NATO member states, brought sexual violence into their narrative to justify military intervention. It was not until 2012, after more than a decade of silence, that conflict-related sexual violence began to be integrated into the narrative of heroism and victory in Kosovo itself. The author highlights particular turning points of the breaking of silence about wartime sexual violence when for the sake of certain political interests it came to be presented as a threat to the nation. Finally, she shows that aspects of gender hierarchization were hidden, which contributed once again to the reimposition of silence on individual survivors of sexual violence.

This article examines the memory of the Battle of Košare/Koshare fought between the Yugoslav Army and Kosovo Albanian forces during the NATO intervention of 1999. The analysis is based on articles from the daily press published in Belgrade and Pristina on the anniversaries of the battle during the last two decades. The author focuses on how the narratives of the same event have been generated in the respective media, as well as their main characteristics and functions. Finally, she addresses the tensions among different memory actors who engaged in reshaping the narratives of the battle, generating both exclusive and intersectional traits in the diverging narratives of the Battle of Košare/Koshare. Thereby she sheds a comparative light on commemorative practices and memory politics of Kosovo and Serbia, while also bringing new insights into the transitional justice process.

This conference report combines the latest theoretical developments within the areas of corruption and informality research in Southeastern Europe from the eighteenth until the twenty-first century with a presentation of the ongoing research conducted by the Regensburg Corruption Cluster and the inputs of some of the leading experts within these fields. The authors outline a practical interdisciplinary framework for developing a historical anthropology of corruption, by integrating knowledge and methods from various disciplines, such as history, linguistics and business studies. In doing so, they show how the ideological–normativistic approaches of the so-called “anticorruption consensus” can be overcome: by lowering the analytical scale to the level of informal practices and following their evolution through historical circumstances. This report also shows the persistent difficulties in establishing “ethical universalism” in Southeastern Europe with examples ranging from eighteenth-century Phanariot rule in Wallachia to twenty-first-century corruption scandals in Serbia and Croatia.