D Kostovicova
Biographic Data
| ID | 54253 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Kostovicova |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Kostovicova |
| SIGNATURE | KOSTOVICOVA D |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6243-4379 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 114 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Speaking Up
Children born of wartime rape have long been invisible, ostracized, and silenced. This predicament explains blind spots in transitional justice discussions and practice that have neglected, until recently, both their victimhood and agency. Explanations range from (the lack of) international protective norms, persistent stigma in their local societies and communities, and children’s de-agentification owing to them being perceived through their mot…
Vicarious denial
Enemy of Justice? Secrecy in Domestic War Crimes Trials in Serbia
Secrecy is an essential element in war crimes trials, as it protects vulnerable individuals and sensitive information, ensuring trials can proceed effectively. However, secrecy often conflicts with principles of public justice, undermining the legitimacy and societal acceptance of trial processes and judgements. This, in turn, can limit the transformative potential of war crimes trials for post-conflict societies. We examine this tension between …
Grandstanding Instead of Deliberative Policy-Making
Addressing the legacy of human rights violations in public can benefit victims, post-conflict societies and democracy building. But publicness of transitional justice (TJ) processes can also have opposite effects. We assess the relationship between publicness and TJ by leveraging the democratic deliberation theory concerned with the impact of publicness on the quality of policy-making. A comparative analysis of oral and written questions about TJ…
Discursive Interaction and Agency in Transitional Justice
The article presents discursive interaction as an analytical framework for capturing agency in transitional justice (TJ). Embedded in the paradigm of Conversation Analysis, which foregrounds the interactive nature of communication, the framework sets out how the exercise of agency is facilitated or constrained at the micro level of talk in conversational sequences. The article shifts attention to the mechanics of interactions in TJ, which are dem…
Interactions for Justice
Introducing the Special Issue, this article presents the concept of interaction as an analytical category and empirical strategy for transitional justice research. The case for centring interactions in the study of transitional justice is informed by an ontology that shifts the focus of analysis from actors to actors’ relations and their engagement with each other. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the contributions demonstrate how interacti…
Are domestic war crimes trials biased
Fairness of domestic war crimes trials matters for promoting justice and peace. Scholars have studied public perceptions of war crimes trials to assess their fairness, but little is known about whether post-conflict states conduct them fairly. Bias, as a matter of procedural fairness, can manifest as a tendency to favour certain groups over others. Leveraging the theories of judicial decisionmaking, this article investigates two types of bias. Th…
To Report or Not to Report on Research Ethics in Political Science and International Relations
The profession has been increasing efforts to ensure ethical research in politics and international relations (IR) with robust institutional review procedures. But this ethics turn has not been evaluated systematically to date. Drawing on two original datasets that record reporting on the ethical practices of research in key political science and IR journals (2000–18), we analyze how scholars report on ethics of research involving human participa…
Tested by the Covid-19 economic shock
Establishing economic collaboration between previously antagonistic groups during post-conflict business recovery advances peacebuilding by nurturing intergroup ties. However, we have a limited understanding of how post-conflict intergroup economic collaboration develops and how it is sustained. We address these gaps from the perspective of peace-positive entrepreneurship. Specifically, an ecosystem approach that we apply directs analysis to dyna…
Women’s discursive agency in transitional justice policy-making
Scholars have studied how women’s domestic and transnational civil society activism addresses the gendered nature of transitional justice. In contrast, they have paid scant attention to women’s impact on transitional justice policy-making in institutions. We leverage the feminist institutionalist perspective that makes visible gendered norms, rules, and discourses in institutions. Homing in on women’s influence in parliaments where women are outn…
The “Digital Turn” in Transitional Justice Research
The “digital turn” has transformed the landscape of transitional justice research. A wealth of data has been created through social media channels, and new digitisation tools have made existing data more easily accessible. This article discusses the ethical and methodological dimensions of using digital data and novel technologies in transitional justice research based on innovative research using digital archives, digitised transcripts, social m…
Harm, change and unpredictability
Conceiving of interviews as relationships of knowledge creation involving a researcher and a research participant, we engage with the ethical implications of the unpredictabilities of this relationship when conducting research in conflict and post-conflict contexts. Through a conservative application of the precautionary principle that prohibits change of all involved in the research process, presuming change (always) implies harm, scholars to da…
Persistence of informal networks and liberal peace-building
Gender, Justice and Deliberation
Scholars have pinpointed that women's underrepresentation in peacemaking results in gendered outcomes that do not address women's needs and interests. Despite recent increased representation at the negotiating table, women still have a limited influence on peacemaking outcomes. We propose that differences in female and male speeches reflected in the gendered patterns in discourse during peacemaking explain how women's influence is curtailed. We e…
Drawing on the continuum
Current understandings of why and how gender-based violence continues beyond the end of conflict remain siloed along theoretical and disciplinary lines. Recent scholarship has addressed the neglected structural dimension when examining the incidence and variation of post-conflict gender-based violence. In particular, continuum of violence and feminist political economy perspectives have offered accounts of gender-based violence during and after c…
Introduction
This themed section brings together the scholarship on everyday nationalism and everyday peacebuilding to better understand national identity production and reproduction in post-conflict societies. It elucidates the role of power hierarchies in these processes through the empirical analysis of actors, agency, and action at the intergroup and intragroup levels. The articles lie at the intersection of bottom–up and top–down approaches, which enable…
Skirts as Flags
Wartime rape is ubiquitous in contemporary conflicts. Its commission is deeply implicated in the gendered notions of a nation: a woman's body is constructed as a target in a conflict that involves different identity groups and as an object of protection within a nation. Addressing past wrongs in view of repairing relationships after human rights violations across the identity divide is an integral part of post-conflict recovery (Murphy, 2017, pp.…
Transitional Justice and Conflict Studies
This article identifies three aspects of conflict studies that are largely ignored in the transitional justice literature: debates over the causes of armed conflict, the transnational nature of contemporary violence, and the persistence of wartime actors and structures. It analyzes scholarly attempts that begin to bridge the divide between transitional justice and conflict studies. Those efforts demonstrate how engagement with conflict studies ca…
Norm contestation and reconciliation
We have limited understanding of how ethnic groups can achieve an agreement on tackling the legacy of war crimes, because transitional justice scholars have been focused primarily on challenges to post-conflict reconciliation. Addressing this gap, we investigate whether contestation over the norm of transitional justice prevents inter-ethnic reconciliation, operationalized by us as reconciliatory discourse. Empirical evidence is drawn from the st…
Introduction
The concepts of reconciliation and transitional justice are the foundations for a new body of connected normative meta-theories that address conflict transformation and peace building. The articles in this special issue provide a comparative perspective on the concepts and their implementation. The articles are primarily focused on intra-state conflicts. A range of cases involving different types of conflict are included, including those driven b…
Seeking Justice in a Divided Region
Contemporary conflicts are seldom contained within nation states. The cross-border nature of violence has prompted scholars to call for a regional approach to transitional justice (TJ). This article furthers our understanding of the regional dimension of postconflict justice by addressing the puzzle of whether discourse in regional-level debates is different from that in national- or local-level debates. It applies a communicative deliberation pe…
Organised crime and international aid subversion
Scholarly attempts to explain aid subversion in post-conflict contexts frame the challenge in terms of corrupt practices and transactions disconnected from local power struggles. Also, they assume a distinction between organised crime and the state. This comparative analysis of aid subversion in Colombia and Afghanistan reveals the limits of such an approach. Focusing on relations that anchor organised crime within local political, social and eco…
Transnationalism in the Balkans
Introduction Natalija Basic, Free University, Germany Europeanising the Balkans: Rethinking the Post-Communist and Post-Conflict Transition Denisa Kostovicova & Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic Civil Society in the Focus of Foreign Aid in Kosovo: Exports of Peace and Multiculuralism to Nation-Building Sites Ana Devic, University of Aarhus, Denmark On the Edges of Empires Aida A. Hozic, University of Florida 'Friends, Balkans, Statesment lend us your ears…
When Enlargement Meets Common Foreign and Security Policy
During the process of visa liberalisation Serbia made significant and unexpected adjustments in its Kosovo policy, which demonstrate the European Union's leverage. Serbia's compliance on Kosovo cannot be explained either by rational institutionalism, which accounts for domestic change based on cost–benefit calculations, or sociological institutionalism, which predicts domestic adaptation based on convergence of norms and identities. Applying disc…
Europeanisation and conflict networks
Focusing on conflict legacy, this article contributes to the study of domestic mediating conditions as an explanation of "shallow Europeanisation" in the Western Balkans, defined as a disconnect between European rules and local practices. It critiques the prevalent neo-Weberian understanding of state capacity, which highlights rule-enforcement capability of state institutions, but reduces conflict legacy to a question of resources. The article ar…
Drawing on the continuum
Current understandings of why and how gender-based violence continues beyond the end of conflict remain siloed along theoretical and disciplinary lines. Recent scholarship has addressed the neglected structural dimension when examining the incidence and variation of post-conflict gender-based violence. In particular, continuum of violence and feminist political economy perspectives have offered accounts of gender-based violence during and after c…
Skirts as Flags
Wartime rape is ubiquitous in contemporary conflicts. Its commission is deeply implicated in the gendered notions of a nation: a woman's body is constructed as a target in a conflict that involves different identity groups and as an object of protection within a nation. Addressing past wrongs in view of repairing relationships after human rights violations across the identity divide is an integral part of post-conflict recovery (Murphy, 2017, pp.…
Harm, change and unpredictability
Conceiving of interviews as relationships of knowledge creation involving a researcher and a research participant, we engage with the ethical implications of the unpredictabilities of this relationship when conducting research in conflict and post-conflict contexts. Through a conservative application of the precautionary principle that prohibits change of all involved in the research process, presuming change (always) implies harm, scholars to da…
Gender, Justice and Deliberation
Scholars have pinpointed that women's underrepresentation in peacemaking results in gendered outcomes that do not address women's needs and interests. Despite recent increased representation at the negotiating table, women still have a limited influence on peacemaking outcomes. We propose that differences in female and male speeches reflected in the gendered patterns in discourse during peacemaking explain how women's influence is curtailed. We e…
Europeanisation and conflict networks
Focusing on conflict legacy, this article contributes to the study of domestic mediating conditions as an explanation of "shallow Europeanisation" in the Western Balkans, defined as a disconnect between European rules and local practices. It critiques the prevalent neo-Weberian understanding of state capacity, which highlights rule-enforcement capability of state institutions, but reduces conflict legacy to a question of resources. The article ar…
Legitimacy and International Administration
Legitimacy is recognized as critical to the success of international administrations in their efforts to build and promote peace, stability and welfare in post-conflict territories. Nonetheless, scholarship on statebuilding is dominated by the 'managerial' approach, which offers a top-down analysis of policies by international actors and their impact on local constituencies. With its focus on the grass roots, the individual and a multiplicity of …
The missing link in human security research
The concept of human security continues to defy definitional clarity at the same time as it is being embraced by policymakers. This article proposes a practice-grounded approach that focuses on investigative method as a way of linking conceptual understanding of human security to the research process. Probing the ‘actorness’ of individuals in volatile contexts, a study of insecurity in Kosovo shows how dialogue can be applied as a research tool t…
Republika Srpska and its Boundaries in Bosnian Serb Geographical Narratives in the Post‐Dayton Period
Territory has been a key physical and symbolic resource in post‐socialist national mobilisation as well‐defined nations have sought to confirm or create nation‐states and their boundaries. This paper analyses geographical narratives accompanying the Bosnian Serb attempt to impose and retain control over territory in Bosnia–Herzegovina. Bosnian Serb failure to create a sovereign nation‐state was followed by a portrayal of the Dayton‐based entity o…
Civil society and post-communist democratization
Civil society literature attributes the weakness of post-communist civil society to the communist heritage. It is structurally weak, the argument goes, because post-communist citizens are averse to voluntary organizations and because of ethnic nationalism. This article goes beyond the heritage argument and contends that post-communist civil society is weakened by democratization itself. Post-communist democratizing states are fragmented structura…
To Report or Not to Report on Research Ethics in Political Science and International Relations
The profession has been increasing efforts to ensure ethical research in politics and international relations (IR) with robust institutional review procedures. But this ethics turn has not been evaluated systematically to date. Drawing on two original datasets that record reporting on the ethical practices of research in key political science and IR journals (2000–18), we analyze how scholars report on ethics of research involving human participa…
Norm contestation and reconciliation
We have limited understanding of how ethnic groups can achieve an agreement on tackling the legacy of war crimes, because transitional justice scholars have been focused primarily on challenges to post-conflict reconciliation. Addressing this gap, we investigate whether contestation over the norm of transitional justice prevents inter-ethnic reconciliation, operationalized by us as reconciliatory discourse. Empirical evidence is drawn from the st…
Interactions for Justice
Introducing the Special Issue, this article presents the concept of interaction as an analytical category and empirical strategy for transitional justice research. The case for centring interactions in the study of transitional justice is informed by an ontology that shifts the focus of analysis from actors to actors’ relations and their engagement with each other. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the contributions demonstrate how interacti…
Introduction
The concepts of reconciliation and transitional justice are the foundations for a new body of connected normative meta-theories that address conflict transformation and peace building. The articles in this special issue provide a comparative perspective on the concepts and their implementation. The articles are primarily focused on intra-state conflicts. A range of cases involving different types of conflict are included, including those driven b…
Seeking Justice in a Divided Region
Contemporary conflicts are seldom contained within nation states. The cross-border nature of violence has prompted scholars to call for a regional approach to transitional justice (TJ). This article furthers our understanding of the regional dimension of postconflict justice by addressing the puzzle of whether discourse in regional-level debates is different from that in national- or local-level debates. It applies a communicative deliberation pe…
When Enlargement Meets Common Foreign and Security Policy
During the process of visa liberalisation Serbia made significant and unexpected adjustments in its Kosovo policy, which demonstrate the European Union's leverage. Serbia's compliance on Kosovo cannot be explained either by rational institutionalism, which accounts for domestic change based on cost–benefit calculations, or sociological institutionalism, which predicts domestic adaptation based on convergence of norms and identities. Applying disc…
Europeanizing the Balkans
This paper argues that the post-communist and post-conflict transition of the Balkans requires a methodological shift in line with globalization, which shapes political and economic transformation from within through transnational networks. As a specially tailored mechanism leading to the accession of the Balkans into the European Union, the Stabilization and Association Process (SAp) sets the framework for political and economic transformation o…
Education, gender and religion
This paper explores identity transformations of the Kosovo Albanian diaspora in the United Kingdom by focusing on the dimensions of education, gender and religion. Taking into account both the structural factors of the adopted country and the impact of a strong sense of nationhood based on traditional beliefs and mores, the analysis traces the emergence of internal lines of identity differentiation within the Albanian community in a diasporic con…
Introduction
This themed section brings together the scholarship on everyday nationalism and everyday peacebuilding to better understand national identity production and reproduction in post-conflict societies. It elucidates the role of power hierarchies in these processes through the empirical analysis of actors, agency, and action at the intergroup and intragroup levels. The articles lie at the intersection of bottom–up and top–down approaches, which enable…
Post-socialist identity, territoriality and European integration
Vicarious denial
Grandstanding Instead of Deliberative Policy-Making
Addressing the legacy of human rights violations in public can benefit victims, post-conflict societies and democracy building. But publicness of transitional justice (TJ) processes can also have opposite effects. We assess the relationship between publicness and TJ by leveraging the democratic deliberation theory concerned with the impact of publicness on the quality of policy-making. A comparative analysis of oral and written questions about TJ…
Women’s discursive agency in transitional justice policy-making
Scholars have studied how women’s domestic and transnational civil society activism addresses the gendered nature of transitional justice. In contrast, they have paid scant attention to women’s impact on transitional justice policy-making in institutions. We leverage the feminist institutionalist perspective that makes visible gendered norms, rules, and discourses in institutions. Homing in on women’s influence in parliaments where women are outn…
Organised crime and international aid subversion
Scholarly attempts to explain aid subversion in post-conflict contexts frame the challenge in terms of corrupt practices and transactions disconnected from local power struggles. Also, they assume a distinction between organised crime and the state. This comparative analysis of aid subversion in Colombia and Afghanistan reveals the limits of such an approach. Focusing on relations that anchor organised crime within local political, social and eco…
The Albanians in Great Britain
2003). The Albanians in Great Britain: Diasporic identity and experience in the educational perspective since 1990. Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 53-69
The Albanians in Great Britain
2003). The Albanians in Great Britain: Diasporic identity and experience in the educational perspective since 1990. Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 53-69
Education, gender and religion
This paper explores identity transformations of the Kosovo Albanian diaspora in the United Kingdom by focusing on the dimensions of education, gender and religion. Taking into account both the structural factors of the adopted country and the impact of a strong sense of nationhood based on traditional beliefs and mores, the analysis traces the emergence of internal lines of identity differentiation within the Albanian community in a diasporic con…
Republika Srpska and its Boundaries in Bosnian Serb Geographical Narratives in the Post‐Dayton Period
Territory has been a key physical and symbolic resource in post‐socialist national mobilisation as well‐defined nations have sought to confirm or create nation‐states and their boundaries. This paper analyses geographical narratives accompanying the Bosnian Serb attempt to impose and retain control over territory in Bosnia–Herzegovina. Bosnian Serb failure to create a sovereign nation‐state was followed by a portrayal of the Dayton‐based entity o…
Post-socialist identity, territoriality and European integration
Post-socialist identity, territoriality and European integration
Kosovo
Kosovo: The Politics of Identity and Space explores the Albanian-Serbian confrontation after Slobodan Milosevic's rise to power and the policy of repression in Kosovo through the lens of the Kosovo education system. The argument is woven around the story of imposed ethnic segregation in Kosovo's education, and its impact on the emergence of exclusive notions of nation and homeland among the Serbian and Albanian youth in the 1990s. The book also c…
Conference Report Transnationalism in the Balkans
In response to the pull of prospective membership of the European Union (EU), the states, societies and economies of the Balkan countries are undergoing unprecedented change. Their transformation has been shaped by a double legacy of communism and ethnic conflict, distinguishing their efforts from the transitional experience of their counterparts in east central Europe. How do these legacies interact with the goal of becoming a part of the EU? Is…
Europeanizing the Balkans
This paper argues that the post-communist and post-conflict transition of the Balkans requires a methodological shift in line with globalization, which shapes political and economic transformation from within through transnational networks. As a specially tailored mechanism leading to the accession of the Balkans into the European Union, the Stabilization and Association Process (SAp) sets the framework for political and economic transformation o…
Civil society and post-communist democratization
Civil society literature attributes the weakness of post-communist civil society to the communist heritage. It is structurally weak, the argument goes, because post-communist citizens are averse to voluntary organizations and because of ethnic nationalism. This article goes beyond the heritage argument and contends that post-communist civil society is weakened by democratization itself. Post-communist democratizing states are fragmented structura…
Legitimacy and International Administration
Legitimacy is recognized as critical to the success of international administrations in their efforts to build and promote peace, stability and welfare in post-conflict territories. Nonetheless, scholarship on statebuilding is dominated by the 'managerial' approach, which offers a top-down analysis of policies by international actors and their impact on local constituencies. With its focus on the grass roots, the individual and a multiplicity of …
The European Union as a State-Builder
This article analyses the European Unions state-building policies with reference to two ailing states: Serbia and Sri Lanka. After an introduction on the evolution of the European Unions foreign policy, we discuss commonalities between the Serbian and Sri Lankan polity: their boundaries are contested; the governmental machineries are ineffective and corrupt, and state capacity wanting; there is a lack of social cohesion that goes beyond ethnic di…
Civil Society Theory
Community, Types of
Bottom-Up Politics
Bottom-Up Politics
Jahresinhaltsverzeichnis
The missing link in human security research
The concept of human security continues to defy definitional clarity at the same time as it is being embraced by policymakers. This article proposes a practice-grounded approach that focuses on investigative method as a way of linking conceptual understanding of human security to the research process. Probing the ‘actorness’ of individuals in volatile contexts, a study of insecurity in Kosovo shows how dialogue can be applied as a research tool t…
Locating Power in State-Building
State-building scholarship distinguishes analytically between the outside and inside realms of the nation-state. Accordingly, obstacles to the external project of reconstructing local political authority are attributed to the relationship between outsiders and insiders which is reflected in studies of legitimacy, ownership and accountability. This paper adopts a war economy perspective to illustrate "regressive globalization". It elaborates a net…
Introduction
The academic literature on state-building has focused largely on actual policies and practices and how to understand its challenges and improve on practice. Particularly salient recently is the relation between external actors and local resistance. In its course, this literature and its practitioners are implicitly developing a field of scholarly study, as a community of researchers focusing on post-conflict countries and asking a set of question…
Transnationalism in the Balkans
Introduction Natalija Basic, Free University, Germany Europeanising the Balkans: Rethinking the Post-Communist and Post-Conflict Transition Denisa Kostovicova & Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic Civil Society in the Focus of Foreign Aid in Kosovo: Exports of Peace and Multiculuralism to Nation-Building Sites Ana Devic, University of Aarhus, Denmark On the Edges of Empires Aida A. Hozic, University of Florida 'Friends, Balkans, Statesment lend us your ears…
When Enlargement Meets Common Foreign and Security Policy
During the process of visa liberalisation Serbia made significant and unexpected adjustments in its Kosovo policy, which demonstrate the European Union's leverage. Serbia's compliance on Kosovo cannot be explained either by rational institutionalism, which accounts for domestic change based on cost–benefit calculations, or sociological institutionalism, which predicts domestic adaptation based on convergence of norms and identities. Applying disc…
Europeanisation and conflict networks
Focusing on conflict legacy, this article contributes to the study of domestic mediating conditions as an explanation of "shallow Europeanisation" in the Western Balkans, defined as a disconnect between European rules and local practices. It critiques the prevalent neo-Weberian understanding of state capacity, which highlights rule-enforcement capability of state institutions, but reduces conflict legacy to a question of resources. The article ar…
Organised crime and international aid subversion
Scholarly attempts to explain aid subversion in post-conflict contexts frame the challenge in terms of corrupt practices and transactions disconnected from local power struggles. Also, they assume a distinction between organised crime and the state. This comparative analysis of aid subversion in Colombia and Afghanistan reveals the limits of such an approach. Focusing on relations that anchor organised crime within local political, social and eco…
Seeking Justice in a Divided Region
Contemporary conflicts are seldom contained within nation states. The cross-border nature of violence has prompted scholars to call for a regional approach to transitional justice (TJ). This article furthers our understanding of the regional dimension of postconflict justice by addressing the puzzle of whether discourse in regional-level debates is different from that in national- or local-level debates. It applies a communicative deliberation pe…
Norm contestation and reconciliation
We have limited understanding of how ethnic groups can achieve an agreement on tackling the legacy of war crimes, because transitional justice scholars have been focused primarily on challenges to post-conflict reconciliation. Addressing this gap, we investigate whether contestation over the norm of transitional justice prevents inter-ethnic reconciliation, operationalized by us as reconciliatory discourse. Empirical evidence is drawn from the st…
Political science (38 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Law (31 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (25 works) · Peacebuilding and International Security (14 works) · Political economy (14 works) · Balkans: History, Politics, Society (12 works) · Economic Justice (12 works) · State (computer science (11 works)