Abstract
On 17 February 2008, the Kosovo Assembly declared its independence from Serbia. Nevertheless, Kosovo's political status is highly contested, and Kosovar Albanian as well as Western politicians and academics employ political as well as intellectual sources in an attempt to free the country from its historical chains and to provide it with an authentic historical past. However, their wide sweeping arguments need to be handled with caution. In the following, I will delineate how various external power regimes impacted on local Kosovar culture and how the latter was continuously adapted as well as transformed by the local population throughout history. I will mainly focus on the influence exerted by political and legal institutions prior to the arrival of the Ottomans; during the Ottoman Empire; the conflictual periods during the Balkan Wars as well as First and Second World Wars; the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY); the war in Kosovo in 1998/1999; and UNMIK's governance since the war.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | N/A |
| Pages (from-to) | 499-517 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | ANTHROPOS |
| Volume | 104 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Publication status | Published - 2009 |