Why the Peaceful Resistance Movement in Kosovo Failed, In: After Yugoslavia: Identities and Politics within the Successor States, ed. Robert Hudson Glenn Bowman, Palgrave, 2012, pp. 43-76.

It is generally accepted by most scholars of the Western Balkans that at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s the crisis of the former Yugoslav federation revolved around the Kosovo question.¹ Of course the real cause of the federation’s disintegration lay not in Kosovo itself, but rather in a complex process that was rooted in inherited antagonisms. Yugoslavia, since its creation in 1918, had always been a ‘fragile state’ because of the ‘contradictions between the Serbian and the Croatian understanding of the term Yugoslavia’,² and throughout the 1980s Kosovo served as a ‘catalyst’ and generator of Serbian irredentism (Maliqi 1989: 69, 178).³

Keywords Security Council Ethnic Conflict Security Council Resolution Resistance Movement Root Movement