Brief n. 13/ January 2024 - Women in state building and

The state-building processes, initiated after the fall of Yugoslavia and of the communist regime in Albania, were an opportunity to build democracy anew and to deal with the atrocities of the war. [...] The paper focuses on the case of Kosovo as the newest state and democracy in the region, analyzing its path towards democratization and offering a key to understanding the present conundrum which affects the state both domestically and internationally, building on the post- independence development of women activists. [...] Indeed, the institutions of the country had started building even before the end of the war which saw the country separate from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. [...] In the 1990s, the parallel institutions of Kosovo had covered the institutional framework for the functioning of any state, only it had done so in the shadows of informality as a response to the ever increasingly oppressive regime of Slobodan Milošević. [...] The movement has been a precursor of the state building process started already in the 90s with the parallel system, and that followed after the war and had a decisive role in training the new political elite which would govern the state1.