This thesis focuses on the legal aspects of Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence. At first I describe the historical and political development in this region. Further follows the explanation of the instruments of international law, such as the definition of a state, the unilateral acts of states and the role of the International Court of Justice. As conclusion I descirbe the role of this instruments on the example of Kosovo and evaluate the impact of the Kosovo indendence on the legal sphere.

NATO is keen to improve technical interoperability between participating nations. However, according to certain scholars, technical interoperability has been overestimated within the field and other important factors related to organisational interoperability are neglected. The aim of this study is to examine the transformation of Sweden’s organisational interoperability within NATO the last decades. This will demonstrate how Sweden’s organisational interoperability has changed through a period of increased technical complications within military alliances. This dual case study compares Sweden’s contribution in Kosovo and Afghanistan by applying theorganisational interoperability agility model (OIAM). The Swedish Armed Forces have augmented their preparations prior to collaborations which improve their skill to adapt to certain nations. They have also improved their ability to adapt to other leadership styles and structures. However, issues associated with system compatibility have increased and seem to affect military leadership coordination. Sweden’s ability to adapt to other nations cultural differences are restricted between both cases. Technical differences seem to affect military leadership more than combat units whereas cultural differences have a greater impact on soldiers compared with officers.

The aim of this master's thesis is to describe the role of language and culture as ethnical identification factors and illustrate how these have been used as political weapons by the Serb regime in Kosovo during the last decade. The thesis discusses the concept of ethnicity, the relations between the politics of identity, nationalism, ethnic mobilization and the importance of language and culture. Kosovo has historically been characterized by severe ethnic antagonism between Serbs and Albanians. Different languages, cultures and religions beside political processes led to ethnic cleavages that paved the way for ethnocentrism, ethnonationalism, chauvinism, ethnic cleansing and civil war. Since 1989, the Serbian authorities have intervened in all important spheres of life, in an attempt to Serbianize Kosovo. In order to eliminate the Albanian cultural heritage Albanian mass media have been banned amongst other cultural and intellectual institutions. Schools have been partly closed for Albanian students and Albanian language and culture have played a marginal role in the school curriculum. Many Albanians were dismissed from their jobs due to their ethnical background, and the use of Albanian in the public domain and in state institutions was discriminated against. Order was maintained by a massive police and military presence, suppressing all forms of Albanian overt dissent. Several libraries and a lot of the Albanian book and magazine component was burned or destroyed by other means, partly because of the segregation politics in operation, partly because of the war events that took place in 1998-1999. / Uppsatsnivå: D

This thesis explores the Security Governance of the European Union (EU) by examining the relationship between the external dimension of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) and civilian crisis management missions. More specifically it tests the capacity of EU level actors to project the external dimension of JHA's goals, in a coordinated and coherent fashion, into the Union's near abroad. The research 'puzzle' lies in the multi-dimensional character of the external dimension of JHA. The fact that the domains tools and competencies are spread within and across all three pillars of the EU make its coordination with civilian crisis management missions far from straight-forward. The ambition to link the two policy domains has been expressed repeatedly by the EU in high profile strategic documents, such as the European Security Strategy of 2003, and the 2005 'A Strategy for the External Dimension of JHA: Global Freedom, Security and Justice'. This thesis endeavours to test the EU's performance in governing the external dimension of JHA and the need to link its goals with those of civilian crisis management missions. It does this by taking three civilian crisis management missions recently projected into the EU's milieu, with mandates related to security sector reform and JHA. The missions selected for comparison are: Proxima launched in 2003 in Macedonia; EU Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine launched in 2005; and finally, EULEX Kosovo launched in 2008. These missions are selected to serve as prime test cases for the interface between JHA and civilian crisis management missions, covering a time period that will allow for an examination of continuity and change in foreign and security policy at the EU level.

This thesis is an ethnography of the practice of property restitution in post-war Kosovo. The site of the largest European Union rule of law mission (EULEX) outside its member states, Kosovo is a paradigmatic case of liberal interventionism and state building under the banner of human rights. The thesis is based on 14 months (May 2012 to July 2013) of multi-sited, ethnographic fieldwork in and around the Kosovo Property Agency (KPA), the administrative, mass claims mechanism put in place by the UN to adjudicate war-related property claims between 2006 and 2016. Working with claimants and respondents, administrative clerks, national and international lawyers, commissioners and Supreme Court judges, this study presents novel insights into the everyday workings of the law from within an institution that remained largely closed to the public eye. I investigate the ways in which property, and property rights were reconfigured in post-war Kosovo through the processing of claims at the KPA. To understand how restitution worked, I probe the practices of technical-legal knowledge production by examining key moments of mass claims adjudication: the reframing of grievances in the language of the law, the making of institutional, legal knowledge, the legal analysis of files, and the implementation of decisions. Through this, I look at the consequences of the juridification of normative ideals (human rights and the rule of law) on the restitution process, its protagonists, and the law itself. My ethnographic material suggests rethinking the value of binary analyses of victims and perpetrators, the universal and the vernacularised, 'law of the books' and 'law in action', the extraordinary and the ordinary, and traces the everyday production of 'rough justice'. Building on current debates in anthropology of law on the bureaucratisation of human rights, transitional justice, and legal practice, my research reveals the tensions between the ideals of human rights that underpin the process of property restitution and the legal and political realities of transition.

This study develops a panel data analysis over 27 transition and post transition economies for the period 2003-2010. Its intent is to investigate empirically the true effect of seven variables into foreign flows and takes later on the advantage of observed findings to conduct a comparative analysis between Kosovo and regional countries such: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. As the breakdown period (2008-2010) was included in the data set used to modelling the behaviour of FDI, both Chow test and the time dummies technique suggest the presence of structural break. Ultimately, empirical results show that FDI is positively related with one year lagged effect of real GDP growth, trade openness, labour force, low level of wages proxied by remittances, real interest rate and the low level of corruption. Besides, the corporate income tax is found to be significant and inversely related with foreign flows. The comparative analysis referring the growth rate of real GDP shows that Kosovo has the most stable macroeconomic environment in the region, but still it is continuously confronted by the high deficit of trade balance and high rate of unemployment. Appart, the key obstacle that has abolished efforts for foreign investment attraction is found to be the trade blockade of...

Following an interpretive sociological approach, the article analyses the rise and transformation of the UÇK in terms of social order and the resulting implications for a solution of the Kosovo status question. Combining Elias’ concept of society with Bourdieu’s categories of capital, the development of the UÇK can be “understood” from an interpretive point of view. In the social space of war, the UÇK rose as a result of increasing capital. As the war ended, the UÇK fell apart because it was unable to accomplish the indispensable functions of any social order.

Dopo aver delineato nel primo capitolo i necessari fondamenti teorici della disciplina relativa all’acquisto della sovranità e dunque della personalità giuridica internazionale anche nel caso di entità territoriali non statuali, è presentata una descrizione delle caratteristiche principali dell’amministrazione internazionale della Bosnia Erzegovina (capitolo 2) e del Kosovo (capitolo 3). Per fornire un quadro il più possibile chiaro, si rende anzitutto necessario indagare l’applicabilità della nozione di Stato a ciascuna delle due entità territoriali prese in esame le quali, sebbene sotto profili istituzionali differenti, sono state parte della Federazione delle Repubbliche socialiste iugoslave. Se per la Bosnia Erzegovina prassi e dottrina si sono dimostrate concordi nel riconoscere lo status di Stato indipendente, nel caso del Kosovo tale sintonia di posizioni non è ad oggi riscontrabile a causa del peculiare e incompiuto percorso di acquisizione della personalità giuridica internazionale. / Legal scholars have increasingly considered the phenomenon of international territorial administrations as a governance device which challenges some of the fundamental patterns of international law. Indeed, international territorial administrations have created normative problems by shaping both concepts of State and sovereignty. In several cases international administrators have exercised full legislative and executive authority in the administered territories, placing them in the role of governmental institutions of a State. This is the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo which have been ruled international administrations vested with the power to adopt acts with direct effect on the legal order of those territories. After briefly examining previous experiments in internationalized territories, this thesis applies this category to Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo and describes how sovereignty was dealt with by international actors.

This thesis tries to provide valuable insight and explain the role of identity perceptions on security as a means to avert conflicts and security threats. The aim is to provide an identity based explanation to security problems. Constructivism and „social identity theory‟ are its theoretical points of departure which help us understand how we construct social identities and have the tendency to be prejudicial towards others. Our prejudices and negative identity perceptions play a major role in security issues. We will use process tracing to find how identity perceptions are constructed and how they affect security. More explicitly we will trace the process of how identities were affected by historical events as well as the ethnocentric interpretation of these historical events. For thorough analysis, Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia are chosen as case studies. The findings will hopefully propose better solutions to security problems and built knowledge applicable to other similar security threats.

Before the United States Constitution was ratified there was much debate about what war powers the executive and legislative branches should hold. After much deliberation it was decided that the power to declare war would fall under the control of Congress. But as time passed, control over initiating military action began to shift from Congress to the President. This thesis examines the shift of power from the legislature to the President. The thesis explains the difference between a declaration of war, an authorization of force, as well as using the military as a police force. It examines the precedents set by Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, as well as the more recent methods used by Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. It also analyzes some of the major court cases that have dealt with the War Powers Clause and several War Powers Resolution. The information collected in this thesis comes from biographies, journal articles, and newspaper articles regarding the subject. This thesis shows that the executive has taken more power in initiating and continuing armed conflict and that the declaration of war, as defined in the Constitution, is obsolete.