'A milestone in the history of the EU': Kosovo and the EU's international role

The Kosovo war was a decisive catalyst in the development of the EU's international security role. The escalating crisis in Kosovo confirmed that the EU was still unable to prevent, contain or end violent conflict along its own borders. This led the EU to augment both its hard and soft power through the launch of the European Security and Defence Policy and the Stabilisation and Association Process. These initiatives endowed the EU with the potential to make a distinct contribution to international conflict management. Unsurprisingly, this continuing transformation has encountered significant obstacles relating to capabilities, political will and coordination. Concerns have also been raised about how the development of a military dimension has changed the nature of EU power. However, the EU has not abandoned the core principle upon which its international role was founded, namely the need to transcend conflict. Ten years after its failings in Kosovo, the EU is assuming increasing responsibility for conflict management and becoming a more capable international security actor.     

Why protect civilians? Innocence,immunity and enmity in war

The issue of civilians in war has risen to new heights in international political consciousness in recent years. The principle of civilian protection has been at once the justification for war and the main guide to the conduct of such wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan ands most recently in Iraq. The so-called new wars of the 1990s have seen a consistent pattern of massive civilian atrocity and the new policies of massive global terrorism are similarly intent on civilian attack. It remains to be seen how well those pursuing the war against terror will hold to the civilian ethic. In truth, the idea of the civilian is a deeply contested one and has more usually been rejected than embraced by those who pursue war, political violence and terror. The simple power of the idea itself and the humanitarian sentiment that accompanies it to produce the notion of 'innocent civilians' cannot be relied upon to make a reality of civilian protection. Instead, the case for civilian identity and civilian protection must be determinedly and continuously argued in war. This means recognizing the main sources of political, passionate and practical objection to the civilian idea and taking them on one by one as they arise. Repeatedly arguing the case for civilian rights must be at the very heart of political, military, humanitarian and religious endeavour. Arguments of prudence and self-interest must be made alongside much deeper and more difficult moral arguments about people's innocence, their identity and their relationship to war. Holding fast to the civilian ethic in the face of terror and war requires significant moral argument and moral leadership from politicians, military commanders and ordinary people alike.     

Shrine diplomacy: Turkey’s quest for a post-Kemalist identity

ABSTRACT

Shrines are many things to different people: war memorials, places of pilgrimage and even venues for shared festivities. The Sultan Murad shrine complex in Kosovo was raised to commemorate the strategic Ottoman victory at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Over the past decade, however, it has assumed significance for Turkey as at no other time in the Republic’s history. Not only is it a key part of state visit itineraries, it also hosts dignitaries of various kinds, tourists and even schoolchildren from Turkey. Taking inspiration from historical and anthropological studies on shrines and memory, this paper dissects the significance of the Sultan Murad I shrine complex in Kosovo to contemporary Turkish foreign policy imaginaries. The shrine allows us to explore the wider motifs and symbols used in presenting the state’s attachment to physical spaces outside of its borders.     

The Atlantic burden‐sharing debate—widening or fragmenting?

The Atlantic burden‐sharing debate during the early part of the twenty‐first century is shaping up to be very different from those of NATO’s first fifty years. The resources needed for direct defence of western Europe have fallen sharply, and further cuts are possible. The gradual strengthening of European cooperation means that the EU is becoming an actor in its own right in many international regimes. Debates about which countries are pulling their weight internationally are also taking into account contributions to non‐military international public goods–financing EU enlargement, aiding the Third World, reducing emissions of climate‐damaging pollutants. In this new multidimensional debate, it becomes more apparent that states that contribute more to one regime often do less than most in another. Germany, for example, is concerned about its excessive contribution to the costs of EU enlargement, but it spends considerably less than France and the UK on defence. European countries contribute three times as much as the United States to Third World aid, and will soon pay almost twice as much into the UN budget. Yet they were dependent on the US to provide most of the military forces in the 1999 Kosovo conflict, and would be even more dependent in the event of a future Gulf war. This widening of the burden‐sharing debate contains both dangers and opportunities. It could lead to a fragmentation of the Atlantic dialogue, with each side talking past the other on an increasing number of issues, ranging from global warming to Balkan peacekeeping. In order to avoid such a dangerous situation, the US and European states should maintain the principle that all must make a contribution to efforts to tackle common problems, whether it be through troops in Kosovo or commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Yet there should also be some flexibility in defining who does how much. The preparedness of some countries to lead, by doing more, will be essential if international cooperation is to have a chance to work.     

Innovation and precedent in the Kosovo war: the impact of Operation Allied Force on US foreign policy

The 1990s was a period of strategic innovation in US foreign policy. Operation Allied Force in particular represented an important step in the contorted evolution of America's attitude towards the use of force in the post-Cold War period. That operation demonstrated the growing influence of humanitarian concerns and the extent to which America was willing to reconsider Cold War criteria on the prudence and utility of force in support of its foreign policy. In its decision to intervene in Kosovo, the Clinton administration also divided opinion among the military. This, in effect, reduced the premium placed on the counsels of the armed forces and made it easier for the Bush administration subsequently to ignore their advice. Furthermore, having fought the war multilaterally through NATO, Operation Allied Force made America more wary of doing so again. In other words, the intervention set a number of precedents and left a significant legacy for the way in which US foreign policy was pursued in the decade that followed. This legacy is considered in two parts: the first analyses those issues associated with the use of force debate; the second considers how the Kosovo experience affected US attitudes to coalition warfare.     

Interpreting the Syria vote: parliament and British foreign policy

This article presents three distinct interpretations of how parliamentary war powers affect British foreign policy more generally, based on a detailed analysis of the debate preceding the vote in parliament in August 2013 on whether Britain should intervene in the Syrian civil war. The first interpretation treats parliament as a site for domestic role contestation. From this perspective, parliamentary war powers matter because they raise the significance of MPs' doubts about Britain's proper global ‘role’. The second interpretation treats parliament as a forum for policy debate. There is nothing new about MPs discussing international initiatives. But now they do more than debate, they decide, at least where military action is involved. From this perspective, parliamentary war powers matter because they make British foreign policy more cautious and less consistent, even if they also make it more transparent and (potentially) more democratic in turn. The final interpretation treats parliament as an arena for political competition. From this perspective, parliamentary involvement exposes major foreign policy decisions to the vagaries of partisan politicking, a potent development in an era of weak or coalition governments, and a recipe for unpredictability. Together these developments made parliament's war powers highly significant, not just where military action is concerned, but for British foreign policy overall.     

NATO's Triple Challenge

NATO's future is again the subject of speculation and debate despite its having fought a recent and apparently successful war in Kosovo. This article proposes that there are three aspects to this challenge. First, NATO is facing a series of dilemmas in its relations with non‐members: how should it manage relations with Russia, and with the applicants for membership? The authors argue that NATO should seek to develop a consolidationist posture. The second challenge is that of developing an EU–NATO partnership in the light of the Helsinki Headline Goals. This, it is proposed, can be developed through a division of labour. The third task, that of military restructuring, is overshadowed by the complexities of processing a working European military structure. In conclusion, the authors suggest that a strategy for the alliance, a key component of the Cold War, but subsequently lost, can be refashioned from the above elements.     

Why did we bomb Belgrade?

We are told that Kosovo marks a new era of humanitarian intervention, when promoting and protecting values will be reason enough for coercive military action. However, a review of the evidence, as outlined in this article, suggests that it was Western interests, rather than values, that led to the largely unintended bombing campaign. One can identify two objectives underlying NATO policy—one substantive and the other relating to image. It was the latter that determined the timing of NATO's response to the Kosovo crisis, which had such damaging consequences, many yet to be fully realized. Kosovo shared several characteristics with the Suez crisis that turned out to have been a watershed in the post-Second World War world; so, too, may Kosovo turn out to have been a watershed in the post-Cold War world.     

Secessions,interventions, and the case of Kosovo

Abstract

This paper examines the question of secession – what causes it, when it is justified, whether force can be used, and what can be done to make secession unnecessary. It goes on to explore the question of intervention in terms of precedents and the UN charter. In the case of Kosovo it attempts an ethical evaluation of Operation Allied Force, making use of the ‘just war’ criteria as a framework. Conclusions are drawn, on the whole favourable to NATO.     

Producing the military urban(s): Interoperability,space-making,and epistemic distinctions between military services in urban operations

Urban wars represent one – perhaps the – phenomenon in which war and cities take particular form in and through each other. With the epistemics of this reciprocal relationship being less studied, this article brings together the discourses on urban war and military interoperability respectively. Both discourses emphasise the question of knowledge. A shared geographic knowledge held by the service branches involved in a joint operation is considered key for interoperability to arise. In the urban wars discourse, the need and difficulty of ‘knowing’ the urban are stressed. However, we know less about whether military services involved in a joint urban operation produce distinct geographic knowledges and, if so, with what effects. With inspiration from critical scholarship on military geographies and from works on the history and geography of knowledge, this article develops a conceptual framework to target the mutually constitutive relationship between military epistemics and urban space in urban war. In it, I make a twofold argument, illustrated with the help of empirical examples from two Israeli joint urban military operations. First, the type of geographic knowledge that military ground and air forces produce as they seek to ‘make known’ particular urban spaces differs due to the services' distinct situatedness and relative distance to the urban environment. The produced types of military geographic knowledge, moreover, do not imply different perspectives on the urban as a pre-existing entity as much as they bring – in distinct fashions – the urban into being.     

The Legendary Commander: the construction of an Albanian master‐narrative in post‐war Kosovo*

ABSTRACT. The ongoing, post‐war construction of Albanian martyrs, memory and the nation in Kosovo has produced iconic tropes of militant resistance, unity and national independence. This critical interpretive account, based on years of the authors' ethnographic and political engagement with Albanians in post‐war Kosovo, focuses on the making of a master narrative that is centred on the ‘sublime sacrifice’ of the insurgent KLA leader Adem Jashari, known as the ‘Legendary Commander’. It also aims to trace voices of discord with this master narrative, testing contestations in terms of the rural–urban, political and gender divides in Kosovo‐Albanian society. It concludes that the narrow international view of Albanians as either ‘victims’ or ‘perpetrators’ has contributed to the consolidation of this powerful narrative, its celebration of Albanian agency in militant resistance and the closing of public debate within Albanian society.     

The Rambouillet Conference on Kosovo

The Rambouillet process sought to re-establish autonomous governance andhuman rights for Kosovo, under the protection of the international community. However, the Kosovo authorities had committed themselves to outright independence while the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia consistently rejected any international interest in the affairs of Kosovo, which it considered an entirely domestic matter. To reconcile these irreconcilable views, an initial attempt was made to establish self-governance for Kosovo for an interim period, without touching upon the issue of the status of that territory.
As the Rambouillet conference progressed, the Contact Group moved significantly towards the FRY/Serb demand of expressly confirming its continued sovereignty and territorial integrity over Kosovo. While this and other concessions did not help to engage the FRY in the negotiating process, itjeopardized the acceptance of the agreement by Kosovo. The negotiations werebacked by the threat of the use of force, which could only be innovatively justified by reference to the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, inasmuch as there existed no formal Security Council mandate. However, the credibility of that threat was initially undermined by splits within the Contact Group during the actual negotiations, which also extended to implementation of the agreementupon acceptance by NATO. Moreover, the negotiations were hampered by thefact that one of the three principal international negotiators openly sided withone of the parties and essentially represented it. Encouraged by these divisions, Belgrade manoeuvred itself into a position of direct confrontation with NATO, which could now genuinely argue that the grave humanitarian emergency in Kosovo could only be addressed through acceptance of the Rambouilletaccord by Yugoslavia, even if sustained military attacks were required to achieve that end.     

“Peace is Our Only Shelter”: Questioning Domesticities of Militarization and White Privilege

Abstract: This paper traces how Los Angeles peace activists tried to make visible the grave domestic effects of Cold War militarization. Women Strike for Peace went beyond a focus on the productive relations between the state, military and industry captured by the term “military–industrial complex” to analyze how reproductive spaces were part of this complex. In opposing war, they challenged what I am calling militarized domesticities: how war‐making shapes the ‘home front’ and home as the spaces national security states claim to protect. I build on feminist antiracist intersectionality theories to situate the military–industrial complex per se within broader processes of the militarization of society and daily life. The questions become how do gendered processes of militarization—that work in conjunction with relations of white privilege—produce and connect differently situated “private” spaces or home places? How might strategies for dismantling the military–industrial complex emerge from the contradictions of these processes?     

Afghanada,or How to be a Good (Canadian) Soldier

The CBC radio show Afghanada, a “grunt’s-eye” view of the Canadian Forces’ deployment in Afghanistan (2006–2011), is one of the few fictionalized engagements with the conduct and consequences of the war. Despite its significance, Afghanada has only received limited critical attention and was usually interpreted as a symptom of the “militarization” of Canadian culture. This article argues that Afghanada is more adequately conceptualized as a cultural site where the most important issues brought up by war were negotiated and new boundaries of legitimacy and acceptability drawn. Afghanada tackles the question of combat versus peacekeeping as the primary task of the Canadian military, cooperation with the United States, and national unity. While the show extends the boundaries of societal acceptability by portraying combat as necessary, it also negotiates new limits within which combat is legitimate and enables multiple interpretations regarding the desirability and costs of the evolution of Canada’s military.     

抗美援朝战争与中国建设大后方国防战略思想的形成

一个国家战略后方物质和精神力量的强弱程度对战争的胜负产生着决定性的影响。本文主要阐述了中国在抗美援朝战争中认识到加强战略后方建设的重大意义 ,并通过战争实践及战后形成的军事战略态势逐步形成了独具特色的中国建设大后方国防战略思想。     

The political geography of war's end: Territorialisation,circulation, and moral anxiety in Trincomalee,Sri Lanka

This article argues that territorialisation and circulation are centrally important to the transition that takes place at the end of a war. It does so with a case study of Trincomalee, a multiethnic region on Sri Lanka's east coast, after the end of the ethno-separatist war in 2009. Post-war territorialisation comprises the consolidation of the government's military victory through the establishment of military zones and sacred sites, the construction of strategic roads and shifts in the ethnic settlement patterns. There are, however, a number of contingent counter-forces that unsettle the common interpretation that this is orchestrated 'Sinhala colonisation'. The angle of circulation directs us to flows and influences that become manifest when the curtailment of war (checkpoints, frontlines, collapsed infrastructure, surveillance) comes to an end. This propels a peace dividend - access, security, mobility - but also incites concerns among all ethnic communities about exposure to the moral decay of a globalised world. While territorialisation and circulation may appear to be opposites, they are in fact a conceptual pair. The two terms expose a field of tension that has much to contribute to the geographical literature on war endings, which has neglected the significance of postwar shifts in circulation thus far.     

Summary Executions in Italy During the First World War: Findings and Implications

This article has two related aims. First, it examines the most up-to-date studies relative to Italian military justice during the First World War, and seeks to set them in the context of the historical debate since the late 1960s. Secondly, and more specifically, it focuses on recently uncovered evidence regarding staggeringly high numbers of previously unknown summary executions in the Italian army. It explores the significance of these findings for understanding the character of the Italian military justice system as well as that of the war conducted by Italy's ruling élites between 1915 and 1918.     

Gender,race, militarism and remembrance: the everyday geopolitics of the poppy

This article offers a feminist analysis of how British military violence and war are, in part, made possible through everyday embodied and emotional practices of remembrance and forgetting. Focusing on recent iterations of the Royal British Legion’s Annual Poppy Appeal, I explore how the emotionality, and gendered and racial politics of collective mourning provide opportunities for the emergence of ‘communities of feeling’, through which differently gendered and racialised individuals can find their ‘place’ in the national story. I aim to show that in relying on such gendered and racial logics of emotion, the Poppy Appeal invites communities of feeling to remember military sacrifice, whilst forgetting the violence and bloodiness of actual warfare. In so doing, the poppy serves to reinstitute war as an activity in which masculinised, muscular ‘protectors’ necessarily make sacrifices for the feminised ‘protected’. The poppy is thus not only a site for examining the everyday politics of contemporary collective mourning, but its emotional, gendered and racialised foundations and how these work together to animate the geopolitics of war.     

The Kosovo war in perspective

In historical perspective, the Kosovo war stands as a significant turning point. Within the Balkan region, Operation Allied Force marked the end of the nationalist wars of the 1990s and the beginning of a new phase of partnership and integration with the EU and NATO. In terms of the wider European security order, its repercussions were contradictory. NATO reasserted its role as Europe's leading security institution, yet Operation Allied Force also gave significant momentum to the EU's development as a quasi military body. Further afield, an immediate crisis erupted in Russo-western relations followed by renewed cooperation on the ground; the longer-term impact, however, was a lingering resentment in Moscow at NATO action. At the global level, meanwhile, Operation Allied Force appeared to symbolize the primacy of both American-led western power and of the liberal norms and values that underpinned the intervention. But this was arguably a high point: future global security crises would be managed in the context of the rising power of the non-western world, a more fragmented West and greater contestation over the norms that should underpin international society.     

Was Iraq an unjust war? A debate on the Iraq war and reflections on Libya*

This article is based on a debate held on 22 March 2011 at Chatham House on ‘Was Iraq an unjust war?’ David Fisher argues that the war fully failed to meet any of the just war criteria. The war was undertaken to disarm Iraq of its WMD but the evidence that it had such weapons was inadequate. There were concerns about the justice of the cause, reinforced by doubts that those initiating military action avowedly on behalf of the UN had the requisite competent authority to do so, given the absence of any international consensus in favour of military action. The doubts were further reinforced by concern that action was being undertaken too soon and not as a last resort. Crucially, no adequate assessment was undertaken before military action was authorized to seek to ensure that the harm likely to result would not outweigh the good achieved. The individual failures mutually reinforced each other, so building up cumulatively to support the conclusion that the war was undertaken without sufficient just cause and without adequate planning how to achieve a just outcome following military action to impose regime change. It thus failed the two key tests that have to be met before a war can be justly undertaken, designed to ensure that military action is only initiated if more good than harm is likely to result. By contrast, current coalition operations in Libya are, so far, just. This is a humanitarian operation undertaken to halt a humanitarian catastrophe that is taking place, with wide international support, including authorization by the UN Security Council. Nigel Biggar argues that the fact that the invasion and occupation of Iraq suffered from grave errors, some of them morally culpable, does not yet establish its overall injustice. All wars are morally flawed, even just ones. Further, even if the invasion were illegal, that need not make it immoral. The authority of moral law trumps that of international law, and where the politics of the Security Council prevent the UN from enforcing the law, unauthorized enforcement could be morally justified. Further still, massive civilian casualties do not by themselves make an unjust war. The decisive considerations are those of just cause, last resort and right intention. Proportionality is not among them, because estimating it is far too uncertain. The persistently atrocious nature of the Saddam Hussein regime satisfies just cause; evidence of collapsing containment grounds last resort; and the Coalition's costly correction of early errors proved the seriousness of its good intentions. In sum the invasion and occupation of Iraq was, despite grave errors, justified. Regarding Libya, Biggar notes the recurrence of conflict over the interpretation of international law. He wonders how those who distinguish sharply between protecting civilians and regime change imagine that dissident civilians are to be ‘kept’ safe while Qadhafi remains in power. Against those who clamour for a clear exit‐strategy, he counsels agility, while urging sensitivity to the limits of our power. What was right to begin may become imprudent to continue.