‘Postcards from Kosovo’

by Jon Thompson on January 15, 2009

Postcards from Kosovo

I just came across Postcards from Kosovo and since it has a great name (like Congolese Dawn) I thought it deserved a post.  It’s a fascinating mix of language, photography, anthropology and observations by an individual named (I’m guessing) Nando Sigona who is evidently studying minorities in Kosovo.  The showpiece is his paper titled, ‘Towards the social inclusion of RAE minorities in Kosovo‘.  Here’s an excerpt:

During the 1999 war, Kosovo came to the fore as a conflict-ridden and divided society where two parallel societies had been living over the centuries. The war and the growing ethnic tension of the 1990s provided the interpretative framework through which the past of the region was recollected and narrated. This led many commentators to consider the separation between Serbs and Albanians as inevitable. Kosovo, to put it in Mertus’ terms (1999: 4), “exemplifies a society in which the identities of two competing groups have long been tied to Truths about the other”.

Read on…

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