Contesting Sovereignties in Northern Kosovo and the Åland Islands

This research seeks to understand how various conceptions of sovereignty are contested in liminal settings (Loh and Heiskanen 2020), i.e., in territories whose statehood is not acknowledged internally or externally (Visoka 2018). The chosen case studies are Northern Kosovo and the Åland Islands, neither of which can be considered as states per se, but both of which perform differing discourses on sovereignty and autonomy. Northern Kosovo is a case of overlapping statehood of both Serbia and Kosovo (Vulović 2020), and the Åland Islands is an autonomous region of Finland with close ties to Sweden. Northern Kosovo is examined as a case of performative sovereignty in non-democratic settings, while the Åland Islands can be considered a democracy. The aim is to answer how sovereignty discourses are performed in these contrasting settings and investigate the different actors who perform them. Looking at past referendums and formal and informal challenges to institutional routines in both contexts, as well as the erection of barricades by local elites with the support of organized crime in Northern Kosovo, the article also seeks to answer how an array of local actors challenge, contest and reinterpret hegemonic discourses on sovereignty. Theoretically, this article combines performative statehood theory (Grzybowski and Koskenniemi 2015; Neumann and Sending 2021; Visoka 2018; 2019; Vulović 2020) with sovereignty research that understands the body as the performative locus of sovereign power (Agamben 1998; Bernstein 2012; Hansen 2005; Hansen and Stepputat 2005; 2006; Jagannathan and Rai 2015). This can be termed performative sovereignty. Here, sovereignty is understood as “a tentative and always emergent form of authority grounded in violence that is performed and designed to generate loyalty, fear, and legitimacy from the neighborhood to the summit of the state” (Hansen and Stepputat 2006, 297). Relying on Agamben (1998), sovereignty is not just about violence, but also about the production of a political order based on practices of exclusion. With this in mind, the article’s empirical focus is on individual actors that embody sovereign authority, who cannot be considered state actors in the traditional sense: regional assemblies, local political and economic elites, shady businessmen, organized crime, as well as average citizens who, out of fear or political persuasion, support these elites and perform their discourses. By conducting ethnographic fieldwork in local communities in Northern Kosovo and the Åland Islands, as well as interviews with local elites, and media analysis, I aim to shed light onto sovereignty performances as everyday practices of authority through both violence and exclusion from the political order. These performances, in turn, have tangible effects on how contested territories are governed, reinforcing their position of liminality.