Project Kosovo: Disaster Colonialism in Kosovo Since 1999

In this paper, I explore the Kosovo 1999 War of Independence and its aftermath as a unique, contemporary case of what I refer to as “disaster colonialism.” The conflict between Kosovo and Serbia over the ownership of territory was seized by the international community as a “disaster,” catalyzing a self-justifying mechanism that foreclosed the expression of popular democratic will in post-conflict Kosovo. Without the watchword of “disaster,” I claim, the interventions in Kosovo, by NATO, the UN, and the European Union (EU) would not have been possible. Understood in this way, disaster colonialism is a programmatic, top-down method of post-crisis state-building that undemocratically implements techniques of governance imported by a colonizing power, bypassing the will or the consent of the populace. As I employ the concept in this paper, disaster colonialism attempts to diagnose the ways in which a foreign governing body was established, exercised, and multiplied in Kosovo's post-crisis situation by using universal norms of international human rights to justify the wide-scale modeling of a society to equate the interests of the governed with the interests of the global order.Bachelor of Art