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Peace at Any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo (Crises in World Politics)

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In the past decade, Kosovo has only ever hit the headlines because of violence and tragedy. Ethnic cleansing, war crimes, NATO intervention: these events dominated the news agenda for the first six months of 1999 and defined Kosovo's international reputation. Sadly, destruction is more telegenic than construction, and the important attempts to steer Kosovo towards a better future have received far less attention.

The authors' task is to tell the story of the UN mission that has administered Kosovo from the early days after NATO intervention through to - presumably - its imminent independence (conditional, supervised or however formulated). This is the first significant study of UNMIK, and succeeds brilliantly in illuminating its challenges, dilemmas and limitations.

From its uncertain first steps, by 2001 UNMIK oversaw the largest per-capita investment in peacebuilding that the world has ever seen. Yet the returns on that investment have been unimpressive, yielding a host of lessons that the "international community" urgently needs to learn if it is to succeed in elsewhere.

Paying particular attention to the orchestrated ethnic violence of March 2004, the authors convincingly portray an international community consistently unwilling to confront hardliners in the Kosovo Albanian community. This timidity is the source of the failure identified in the title, and has long-term consequences for Kosovo and its population.

As a ground-breaking study, the book almost inevitably left me wanting more. What could UNMIK realistically have achieved, given the timeframe and resources available? How much influence could a short-term mission - however well-resourced - really exert over Kosovo's long-term development? Social and political change is a long-term process, yet western politics - under the scrutiny of the 24-hour media - demands rapid results. Do we really have the stomach for the necessary long-term engagement, or are we content simply with the illusion that something is being done?

Necessarily, the authors have been more conservative in their aims, but in exploring UNMIK's successes and failures, they have rendered a great service to those who must grapple with these problems. We can only hope that future Donald Rumsfelds will choose to listen, and be willing to learn.

Peace at any Price Peace at Any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo (Crises in World Politics)was recommended to me as probably the most authorative work on the UN work in Kosovo.

The authors were deeply involved on the ground there, and it shows in the depth and quality of the analysis.

The book contains an excellent description and chronology of overall events. It then moves into a deeper analysis and consideration of what happened, before a final (brilliant) conclusions section which is really what made this book so worthwhile for me.

Although Peace at any Price is a brilliant macro analysis of the Kosovo intervention, there are loads of examples and personal accounts which bring the analysis to life.

I read Peace at any Price alongside Joe Sacco's also excellent "Safe Area Gorazde" Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995 and found that Sacco's work added an additional level of human and emotional understanding, on top of Mason's analysis of the events.

Not to put too fine of a point on it but, I was in Kosovo for 7+ years (including the timeframe that this book addresses and was written in) and find the book to be a poor, if not rather salacious, portrait of the situation in Kosovo at that time (and even today). That is not to say, that things were not tense nor that the book has its basic facts wrong in respect to the events surrounding the 2004 riots but rather that its analysis of those events overstates, at least in my experience/observation, the severity of the situation.

One of the reasons that the UN has been criticized for not having been as successful as it should've/could've been in Kosovo has to do with how distant its employees were from the population. (Sadly, EULEX is even worse in this regard.) This book reads like it was written, as indeed it was, by so many of those UNMIX employees who spent their days writing overly dramatic reports to justify their jobs, spent their evenings in Prishtina's internal-friendly bars and restaurants, and their weekends in Greece or Macedonia socializing with anyone but Kosovars, and not written by those who actually took the time to learn the language, meet the people (Serbs and Albanians), and who didn't have as much of a financially motivated agenda to pursue.

Of authors who write about Kosovo, Noel Malcolm is probably the best (but not as focused on contemporary issues); however, Tim Judah, Robert Elsie, James Pettifer, and Antonia Young are all worth a look. Of course, Elizabeth Gowing, everyone's favorite expat beekeeper and all-round Albanophile, has a new book out which looks to be one of the few (perhaps only) books that provides a well-rounded look at things that are positive in Kosovo today.

I was disappointed after reading this book. I expected more, given that the authors were employees of the UN mission in Kosovo. Therefore I expected some insider information, but there are few and they not important. Anyone who knows essentials about Kosovo's (pre-1999) history (my absolute favourite book on this topic is Tim Judah's Kosovo: War and Revenge) and has been keeping informed with events after 1999 will not miss this book.