The European Union’s Normalisation Policies for Kosovo: Contributing to a Durable Peace?

For more than a decade, the European Union (EU) has been pursuing normalisation in Kosovo-Serbia relations. However, the EU has not focused on tackling the core issues of the conflict. Instead, EU mediators prioritised a gradual normalisation of relations based on an expectation of genuine conflict resolution to follow in the future. We argue, though, that the relationship between normalisation and conflict resolution is not straightforward. Considering the Kosovo Serb perspective, we show that the EU efforts have created a situation of managed instability in Kosovo, adding in some cases new layers to the conflict instead of resolving it.