Building State Failure in Kosovo?
Two recent books on Kosovo offer some compelling insights and answers as to why international state-builders stumbled in Kosovo: Elton Skendaj’s, Creating Kosovo: International Oversight and the Making of Ethical Institutions and Andrea Lorenzo Capussela’s State-Building in Kosovo: Democracy, Corruption and the EU in the Balkans. Both books are welcome additions to the growing discourse on state-building and touch on some of the more important themes that have recently dominated the literature, including the principle of local ownership, the limitations of technocratic approaches to state-building, and the dilemmas of political corruption and state capture in postwar societies.
Joseph Coelho
Joseph Coelho is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Framingham State University in Framingham, Massachusetts. He received his PhD in International Relations at Northeastern University in Boston Massachusetts. His research interests are in state-building and democratization in the Western Balkans. He is currently a member of the International Advisory Board for the Balkans Free Press.