Crafting Exclusive Nations? The Role of Education in Post-war Kosovo

This study identifies discontinuities and continuities in the relation between education and state (formation) as a result of competing local and international visions and agendas of education reform. In particular, we analyse the changing relationship between state and education following externally driven education reforms that clash with domestic actors’ vision(s) of education. Despite attempts by international actors to promote integration and multiculturalism, difference and segregation still prevail. The main research question is: how are international and local actors competing to define the role of education in post-war Kosovo and with what results? Therefore, the analysis genealogically focuses on those critical historical junctures in which education’s role and its nexus to the state have changed. While specifically focusing on the post-conflict period – when the governance of education was internationalized, and its reform strategically negotiated between local and international actors – the chapter starts by examin- ing the role of education before the war and proceds by analyzing ways and reasons behind the re-definition of its fuctions in its aftermath. This is done with the purpose of setting education’s intertwinement with conflict causes and processes of state formation and nation-building with- in an historical perspective.