Violence and State-Building After the Great War: Italian, Yugoslav and Endemic Challenges to Albanian Projections

This paper investigates the relation between violence and state-building in the aftermath of the Great War. In particular I analyse the way in which the experience of violence conditioned Albanians’ positioning toward their national identity and their state-building endeavours. In analogy to many studies published on the topic of violence and statebuilding, the research shows that violence against Italians and Yugoslavs who threatened the integrity of Albanian territorial claims and Albanian individuals or groups who were considered a menace to the national cause, contributed to consolidate the feelings of national solidarity and to legitimate Albanian claims for self-determination. However, differently from most of current recent research, the analysis of the events displays that violence for state-building purposes had complex ethical and political implications which hindered the coherence of the Albanian national discourse and the state-building projections that it entailed. The employment of coercive means exposed Albanians’ vulnerability to the violence of internal and external actors who instead exploited violence to delegitimise Albanian self-determination claims. State-building violence created dissidence between Albanian political circles, generated contestation against the authority of the government and led political actors to question the overall value and function of their nation-state-building endeavours