I discuss how agents utilise rhetoric to alter their ties with other agents within social spaces from field research conducted in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, from June 2014 to July 2015. First, I flesh out the theoretical and methodological framework for the rest of the dissertation. The theoretical framework is based on a view of hegemony influenced by Green and Laclau, where hegemony is a process through which agents draw on rhetoric to alter their relationships. I appropriate a methodology combining ethnography with systematic Social Network Analysis (SNA) and cultural domain analysis in order to provide a complementary account of networks, agents and spaces in Pristina. Second, I review the anthropological work on rhetoric, considering rhetoric as a tool used by agents to alter their social relations which draws on discourses. Third, I explore how agents in Pristina conceptualise space through interpreting perspectives from ethnographic interviews and data from a pile sort exercise, showing that spaces shape how agents act through being discursive settings. Fourth, I delve into the concepts of nder (“honour”) and turp (“shame”) through interviews and the analysis of a free list, showing how the concepts play out in Pristina and their links with each other, including related concepts. Fifth, I explore, through a SNA, how agents organise networks of relationships and illustrate how agents make use of rhetoric drawing on cultural concepts such as nder and besa in the course of their activities. Sixth, I explore how people in Pristina conceptualise their identities and show that Albanian national identity has been constructed as a discursive formation linking agents together. I conclude that agents utilise rhetoric to alter their ties with other agents in social spaces by drawing on discourses, thereby shaping discourses, changing the agents' networks and resulting in the emergence of new circumstances.

The thesis examines the evolution of Russian policy towards the Yugoslav conflicts from the start of 1992, when the Russian Federation became an independent state, to the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian conflict in December 1995. In Part I, I discuss rival international relations theories in the post-Cold War world and apply them to the debate over foreign policy in Russia and Russian perceptions of the Yugoslav conflicts. Part II examines the evolution of Russian policy towards the Yugoslav conflicts until the end of 1993. January to autumn 1992 was the `liberal internationalist' phase of Russian policy, when the government promoted co-operation with the West in order to achieve a settlement of the Yugoslav conflicts, and a domestic backlash put pressure on the government to adjust its approach. A transitional phase followed, from autumn 1992 to the end of 1993, during which the government developed a more assertive great power policy based on relative domestic consensus. Part III shows this neo-realist policy in action. Russian policy makers used the Sarajevo crisis of February 1994 to demonstrate Russia's great power status. They also sought to prevent developments considered to be harmful to Russia's national interests, in particular military action by NATO against the Bosnian Serbs. For a period, other powers recognised that Russian opinions must be taken into account. But in summer 1995, Western policy makers ignored Russian objections and Russia played a secondary role in achieving a peace settlement. Russian policy makers attempted to use the Yugoslav conflict to demonstrate Russia's great power status and its independence from the West, but Russia lacked the power and influence for the policy to be effective. Russian policy contributed to the failure of the 'international community' to achieve a just settlement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and added to the divisions developing between Russia and the West.

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This dissertation makes an original contribution to knowledge of how irregular military actors operate in modern mass atrocity crises, providing an evidencebased multi-perspective analysis of the irregular military dynamics that accompanied the violent collapse of Yugoslavia (1991-1995). While it is broadly accepted that paramilitary or irregular units have been involved in practically every case of genocide in the modern world, detailed analysis of these dynamics is rare. A consequence of paramilitary participation in atrocity crises –which can be seen in academic literature, policy-making, and in popular understanding– has been to mask the continued dominance of the state in a number of violent crises where, instead of a vertically organised hierarchical structure of violence, irregular actors have comprised all or part of the military force. Here, analysis of structures of command and control, and of domestic and international networks, presents the webs of support that enable and encourage irregular military dynamics. The findings suggest that irregular combatants have participated to such an extent in the perpetration of atrocity crimes because political elites benefit by using unconventional forces to fulfil devastating socio-political ambitions, and because international policy responses are hindered by contexts where responsibility for violence is ambiguous. The research also reveals how grassroots armed resistance can be temporarily effective but, without the benefits of centralised capabilities, cannot be easily sustained. While the variety of irregular military activity that took place in former Yugoslavia was significant, it is clear that the irregular dynamics were more substantial and more effective when operating within, or in close coordination with, structures where the state retained greater powers of central command and control. Furthermore, the dissertation identifies substantial loopholes in current atrocity prevention architecture and suggests the utilisation by state authorities of irregular combatants as perpetrators in atrocity contexts will continue until these loopholes are addressed.

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The Serbian uprising in 1996/1997 was an attempt to overthrow the dictatorship of president Milosevic after he annulled elections because of the opposition party’s victory. Ashamed by the unsuccessful outcome of their protest, the people of the capital Belgrade, have never produced an archive of the photos, banners and graffiti, which emerged during these demonstrations. Scarce information on the Internet and the inability of the media to reveal the data gathered during the protest has left the public without a full account of the uprising. My project is that archive – the map of images, leaflets, badges, flags, vouchers, cartoons, crochets, poems etc., an online record of the elucidated protest available to the participants, scholars and the public. The narratives of this event have been locked within the community and there are only odd visual references hidden in people’s houses. My research has generated them through interviews and image elicitation that looks at the uprising by analysing these accumulated historic relics. Presented in sections on the website (timelines, artists, routes) and pages of art formats (poems, photos, badges), this overview of the geographical, political and social circumstances within which the protest’s artwork was produced demonstrates how it influenced the actions of the citizens. This urban spectacle was enthused by the creative participation exposed in the walks of the masses that became the force of the protest. The reflexive method of my practice, just like this communal approach at the uprising challenges dominant representations of culture, history and politics from the whole of the Balkans. My online package for capturing the past (hi)stories shifts the official narratives, predominantly from the West and saturated by the wars of the ‘90s into only one possibility among others. It maps the failed revolution in Serbia under Milosevic from its beginnings, revealing the accomplishment of academics, artists and citizens buried under the war stories.

This thesis is a case-study of Slobodan Milosevic as a prototype of the "criminal" leader. Challenging the existing consensus among Western liberals, for whom Milosevic is unquestionably criminal, it asks whether and to what extent Milosevic is a criminal leader. It approaches this by first dissecting the Western construction of Milosevic as a criminal leader into its key components -- his actions and intentions, his motivations, his personality and psychology, and his comparison with other "criminal" leaders. This normative-driven construction is then empirically tested, using two main sources. The speeches of Milosevic, fundamentally misrepresented by many Western commentators, are analyzed. The second primary source used is semi-structured interviews (supported by public opinion poll data). Strongly influenced by bottom-up studies of the Hitler and Stalin regimes, two leaders that can be seen as crucial cases of the criminal leader, this research is particularly concerned with exploring how ordinary people in Serbia - heavily neglected in the existing Western literature - view Milosevic. This allows us to ascertain whether and to what extent the Western, liberal construction of Milosevic as a criminal leader has domestic/field validity. What the interview data reveals is a sharp discrepancy between the external (Western) and domestic (Serbian) viewpoints. The Serbian interviewees overwhelmingly view Milosevic not as a criminal leader, but as a "bad" (unsuccessful) leader and/or as a victim. This discrepancy is translated into, and used to develop, a general concept of the criminal leader. This conceptualization emphasizes both the externally constructed nature of the criminal leader (policy dimension) and the importance of studying the criminal leader from below (domestic dimension).