Government Vs. Party Efforts to Expand to Diasporas Abroad: Kosovo As a Case of Contested Sovereignty

During the past decade scholarship studying how sending states engage their diasporas abroad has grown on importance. Several case studies such as India, Mexico, Israel have dominated the discussion (Kapur 2010, Varadarajan 2010, Naujouks 2013, Delano 2014). More recently other cases have been discussed as well: Korea (Mylonas 2013), Egypt (Tsourapas 2014) and Kosovo (Koinova 2014). Also, two quantitative studies Gamlen (2013) and Ragazzi (2014) have started opening our understanding about how sending states engage diasporas abroad – mainly through utilitarian, identity-building, and governability logics – but have not reached a consensus. In previous work (2014) I have demonstrated that a positionality logic for expansion to diasporas abroad needs to be factored in, a socio-spatial dimension that has different properties in different contexts. With this paper I take this discussion further by unpacking the central state, and looking into how the government on the one side and different parties in opposition on the other approach their diasporas abroad. Field work with over 60 interviews in Kosovo in 2013 elucidates this discussion. I argue that parties which have been engaged in the institutionalized efforts of Kosovo’s state-building since NATO’s Intervention in 1999 have less elaborate strategies towards their diasporas than those that have not. Especially interesting is the role of the party Vetevendosje, which has been quite vocal about its diaspora orientation, including Pan-Albanianism. The paper extrapolates the findings from this case to the Palestinian case and compares how rivaling organizations in the latter have sought to engage their sympathizers abroad.