Cistas-forsker Maj Grasten deltog ved Global Civil Society - and the Coloniality of Global Constitutionalism

"The Coloniality of Global Constitutionalism? The Case of Constitution-Making in Post-Conflict Kosovo"

Abstract: In June 1999, the United Nations (UN) deployed one of the largest peacebuilding missions in the history of the organization, the UN interim mission to Kosovo (UNMIK). Only a few months into UNMIK’s mandate, the UN Secretary General vested all executive, legislative and judicial powers in its head of mission. The boundary between international law and constitutional law in post-intervention Kosovo effectively collapsed. The UN administration in Kosovo at the time of deployment was anticipated to be terminated within three years. In the end, the UNMIK would serve as the ultimate authority in Kosovo until the passing of the unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) by Kosovo’s assembly in 2008 and the adoption of a new constitution in the same year. The Security Council, however, failed to adopt a new resolution to change the mandate of UNMIK and in consequence the mission would still be in place after Kosovo’s independence. Constitutional law established through the UDI and international authority established through the UN mandate in consequence clashed. This seminar revisits the collapsed boundary between international and constitutional law from the end of NATO’s intervention in the conflict until today where two legal orders – one grounded in international law, the other in Kosovo’s constitution – are in place, initiating a conflict over the hierarchy of laws and, ultimately, sovereignty. Drawing on extended fieldwork in Kosovo, I reconstruct failed attempts to enact the separation of international and constitutional law and contests over this boundary in the name of constructing a domestic polity and placing international actors outside and beyond the domestic constitutional order. I show how Kosovo’s constitution in 2008 came to reflect earlier international ‘constitutional’ regulations adopted by the UN mission and ultimately became a constitution by international decree. Retrieving lesser-known stories about international involvement in constitutional transformation serves to redress an often positive and positivist account of the role of international law in constitution-making in a peacebuilding context.