From Liberalization to ‘Expropriation’: Post-Conflict Privatization of Socially-Owned Enterprises in Kosovo

Please join the Njegos Endowment for Serbian Language and Culture at Columbia University’s East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Sandra Davidovic, doctoral candidate in International and European Studies at the University of Belgrade, accompanied by esteemed professor Susan Woodward (CUNY) as a discussant.

The process of privatizing socially owned enterprises in Kosovo, conducted under the auspices of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), represents a unique case given the status of an internationalized territory, the system of agencies that have administered the process, and the fact that the process has unfolded in a post-conflict environment, within the area of operation of one of the largest and most comprehensive UN peacebuilding missions. Pursuant to the request of UNSC Resolution 1244 to engage in the economic reconstruction of Kosovo, the UNMIK administration resorted to privatization as a tool to attract investments, build up the private sector, and jumpstart a free market. However, UNMIK encountered difficulties in grasping the concept of socially-owned property, a unique feature of the Yugoslav economic system, and in identifying the structure of owners and creditors, thereby opening the floodgates to the problems caused by the transformation of ownership rights, ethnic discrimination, and poor economic results. The selection of a spin-off privatization model has, in particular, raised the question of the legal right of UNMIK to interfere with the property ownership structure, which has also highlighted a major disagreement among international actors involved in the process on the UNMIK jurisdiction in administering Kosovo’s property. Thus, the case opened numerous legal and political issues, deeply intertwined with the political process of resolving the dispute over Kosovo. Sandra’s analysis represents a multidisciplinary attempt to disentangle the political and economic tenets of the idea of liberal peace manifested in Kosovo’s internationally-led privatization. She argues for the importance of examining the phenomenon within the framework of post-conflict peacebuilding and state-building analysis since the conceptual foundation of the privatization in Kosovo agenda has been based in the ideas of liberal peace and state-building interventionism.