Competing Sovereignties: Parallel States, Public Services, and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Kosovo (Routledge Studies in Nationalism and Ethnicity)

Competing Sovereignties: Parallel States, Public Services, and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Kosovo examines thirty years of parallel state competition in Kosovo, exploring how ordinary people navigate between rival authorities when multiple states compete for their loyalty through the provision of essential public services. In Kosovo's remote villages, children attend separate classrooms under different flags, representing competing educational systems from two states that deny each other's existence.Drawing on extensive fieldwork and over 100 interviews, the book examines this parallel state competition in Kosovo.First during the 1990s Albanian resistance movement operating underground beneath Serbian rule, then after 1999 when ethnic Serbs established their own parallel institutions alongside the emerging Kosovo state.The book reveals how different services, such as education, healthcare, and justice, carry distinct political profiles that shape citizen choices in fundamentally dif