Improving International Peacebuilding Efforts: The Example of Human Rights Culture in Kosovo.

I love Peace

here is nice article about improving the international peacebuilding efforts-Kosovo. I'm very sorry that i couldn't find the whole essay but it's worthy to read even a part of it...


Julie Mertus
Kosovo today is a house of cards. One false move and the house will fall down. Should the international troops--in particular the U.S. and British troops--pull out of Kosovo, it will collapse into communal violence. (1) The international security presence in Kosovo has generally succeeded in preventing the outbreak of another violent armed conflict but has accomplished little else beyond that. This is not surprising. Militaries can help prevent war, but they alone cannot build a sustainable peace. (2) The cessation of hostilities through the use of military force does not, in and of itself, resolve the strategic dilemmas, structural imbalances, and open wounds of unaddressed abuses and interpersonal hostilities. As David Lake and Donald Rothschild stress in their exhaustive study of ethnic conflict, a "stable peace can arise only as effective institutions of government are reestablished, the state begins again to mediate between distrustful ethnic groups, and the parties slowly gain confidence in the safeguards contained in the new ethnic contracts." (3) Peacebuilding requires the efforts of a host of civilian actors focused on institution building, interpersonal reconciliation, and social transformation over the long term. More than 250 well-intentioned nongovernmental and governmental organizations have flooded into Kosovo offering a range of resources and promises. (4) Elections have been held, (5) homes have been rebuilt, schools have reopened, and roads have been repaved. Police and judges have been trained, and the Ad Hoc Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is well under way in its investigations into war crimes committed in Kosovo. Nonetheless, not one of the larger international goals that brought the international community to Kosovo in the first place has been reached. Kosovo is decidedly not a multiethnic and secure society, and equal access to basic human rights protections remains illusory. (6) Local police and administrative and judicial systems are still unable to operate independent of international oversight and, instead of joining government, many of the "best and brightest" in Kosovo have withdrawn from participation altogether. That the citizenry of Kosovo--Serb and Albanian alike--perceive no legitimate governance structure and process only magnifies pervasive feelings of insecurity and unfairness. As the international community looks toward new nation-building challenges in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the struggle for "lessons learned" from Kosovo is acute. The experience of Kosovo suggests that there must be more and better attempts to incorporate local actors and experiences and to draw on them in building human rights cultures. I divide my argument into four parts: (1) an explanation of the use of the term human rights culture and the introduction of a framework for understanding and analyzing the local impact of human rights norms in post-conflict societies; (2) a discussion of the nature of the human rights culture in Kosovar society prior to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) bombing in 1999; (3) an exploration of the impact of postagreement civil intervention on human rights culture; and (4) suggestions for improvement, with specific attention to human rights education. Toward a Framework for Analyzing "Human Rights Culture" The notion of human rights refers to two fundamental precepts. The first of these precepts is the "dignity principle," or the notion that each human being should be treated with dignity solely because he or she is human and not because he or she belongs to a certain group or has achieved a certain stature. (7) Full acceptance of the "dignity principle" compels the embrace of the "equality principle." This is the idea that all people have dignity. One cannot claim to believe in the idea of human rights and also believe that these rights apply to only some individuals, or that only some states have a responsibility to respect human rights. (8) The disempowered turn to human rights discourse because it so "successfully manages to articulate (evolving) political claims." (9) In Jack Donnelly's words, "Human rights is the language of the victims and the dispossessed." (10) As the disempowered shape human rights ideology and use it for their own goals, they exercise their moral agency. Over time, the individuals and groups that adopt human rights language and thinking become a human rights people. The human rights framework becomes a taken-for-granted lens through which they can view and understand the world and their role in it. (11) Human rights cultures exist when human rights are one of "the forms through which people make sense of their lives." (12) In other words, a human rights culture is a way of seeing the world through the lens of human rights and consequent with the principles of human dignity and equality. It is through human rights culture that human rights norms take root in and influence a population. (13) However, the adoption of human rights culture is not one of simply embracing purely universal interpretations of human rights, but rather consists of the reconceptualization of culture itself through a struggle to interpret human rights norms in a cultural context. (14) Adopting human rights language is an essential step in building a human rights culture, (15) but language alone is insufficient. Human rights concepts enter culture slowly as a population develops its own shared (yet contested) understanding of the prominence and importance of the norms. Incrementally, they become part of the "frame in which people derive a sense of who they are and where they are going." (16) Central to this process is a population's own experiences of rights deprivation and rights affirmation, which often occur through storytelling. (17) Human rights storytelling serves several functions. Storytelling provides both a "sentimental education" (18) that generates the kind of sympathy necessary for the acceptance of human rights norms and for the validation of the experience of abuse and thus "represents the first step toward restoration of the person and the relationship." (19) Human rights activists in Belgrade, for example, exposed stories about abuses against Albanians in order to garner the Serbs' sympathy for Albanians and to garner the support of the international community against Slobodan Milosevic. (20) Kosovar Albanians and anti-Milosevic Serbs strongly believe that if not for the human rights storytelling, the NATO intervention never would have occurred. (21) Human rights storytelling also facilitates a common understanding of experience (22) and in so doing promotes group cohesion. In Kosovo, the informal telling of stories in Kosovar family living rooms and the more formalized collection of stories by human rights groups served to strengthen Albanian solidarity as a united, oppressed people. (23) Similarly, Serbian stories about Albanians solidified their identity as victims at the hands of Albanians. (24) In this way, within one society, human rights storytelling was both unifying and fragmenting. A useful framework for analyzing the impact of human rights institution building on violently divided postagreement societies is suggested by the work of Christine Bell, who examines the role of human rights in peace agreements, (25) and of John Paul Lederach, who emphasizes the importance of transforming social relationships and structures that institutionalize violence. From these works, we can identify three roles for human rights culture building: an instrumental role, a constitutive role, and a transformative role. Human rights norms, once institutionalized and internalized, play an instrumental role in that they are crucial for advancing some other good. The spread of a human rights culture can lead to increased participation of citizens...