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.

Depuis la signature de l’Accord de paix du Vendredi Saint, l’Irlande du Nord a entamé son processus de transition après trente ans d’un conflit communément appelé les Troubles. Parmi les questions relatives à son cheminement se pose celle du Bloody Sunday. Lors de cet évènement tristement célèbre des Troubles, quatorze civils furent tués par des soldats britanniques, alors qu’ils prenaient part à une manifestation pour les droits civiques. Les soldats n’ont pas eu à faire face au processus judiciaire, malgré la volonté des familles des victimes d’obtenir justice. Une amnistie visant les soldats responsables fut proposée en mars 2014, à titre de mécanisme de justice transitionnelle pour accompagner la société nord- irlandaise dans sa démarche vers un état de paix. Entre droit et politique, plusieurs questions se posent relativement à un tel projet. La présente étude vise à examiner la validité de cette proposition d’amnistie eu égard aux valeurs de l’État de droit. / Since the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, the Northern Irish society has embarked on its transitional process towards peace, attempting to leave behind thirty years of a conflict commonly known as the Troubles. This outcome brings to light many different issues, amongst which is that of the Bloody Sunday. This infamous event of the Troubles saw fourteen civilians killed by British soldiers as they were taking part in a civil rights demonstration. The soldiers were spared the judicial process despite the efforts deployed by the victims’ families to bring them to justice. In 2014, an amnesty was suggested as a transitional justice mechanism to further the society’s transition to the post-conflict era. This study examines the validity of such an amnesty in light of the underlying values of the Rule of Law.