When Skanderbeg Meets Clinton: Cultural Landscape and Commemorative Strategies in Postwar Kosovo

The paper is devoted to studying current strategies in the transformation of cultural landscape in postwar Kosovo. I regard cultural landscape, i.e. a piece of Earth’s surface deliberately shaped by man, as an extension of the so-called socially constructed reality (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). In some cases this symbolization is a strategic part of a nation-building project, or just a way to declare one’s own presence, identity, or affiliation. The creation of new heroes is one of the initial steps within the strategies of a nation-building process, as it forms an essential prerequisite for the feeling of a common and shared history. This article analyses the spectrum of personalities symbolically welcomed in Kosovo since the 1990s. The Republic of Kosovo is de jure a multiethnic society consisting of Albanian, Serbian, and other communities, and is presented as such to the international community. However, the current strategies of symbolic nation-building deeply contradict the declared aspirations to build a common state and national identity among all of the peoples living in Kosovo. My aim is to negotiate the strategies of memorialization in postwar Kosovo with a focus on this balancing between civic (as desired) and ethnic (as de facto realized) models of nation-building. The data for the study were collected during several fieldwork trips in Kosovo (2010-2014)