The Politics of Memory and the Reconstruction of Albanian National Identity in Postwar Kosovo

The article deals with the reconstruction of Kosovar Albanian political identities in postwar Kosovo, focusing on the tension between two strands of Kosovar Albanian nationalism—one based on a nineteenth-century modernist discourse and the other on supranational identification with "Euro-Atlantic" structures. It analyzes the political power contests over the memory of the struggle against Serbian hegemony as symbolized by the nonviolent legacy of the late President Ibrahim Rugova and by the armed resistance of the Kosovo Liberation Army. It argues that the unwillingness of the "international community" to tackle Kosovo's final status from 1999 to 2005 reinforced Kosovar Albanians' determination, based on memories of repression and war, to achieve statehood and thwarted external attempts to change their self-conception through "forgetting."