peaceofkosovo

 

By Birte Kajamaa

 

This month I went from knowing next to nothing about Kosovo to being able to explain the timeline of Kosovo’s history and to really starting to understand the situation there. Though we didn’t travel to Kosovo in person, I feel that we were still able to meet and connect with wonderful people from there. I only hope to tag along during next year’s Peace Lab so that I can meet some of these people in person, see Kosovo’s cultural sites in their 3D form, and have a taste of the apparently-delicious coffee that so many people have told us about.

 

Throughout the course, my understanding of what is necessary to create sustainable peace shifted quite a bit. Like most people probably believe, I went into this course thinking that the key actors in creating peace are organizations such as the United Nations or EULEX. While these do play a significant role, I have come to learn that they often only manage to create negative peace rather than positive peace. To create a positive peace, the participation of everyday people is vital, which means that grassroots initiatives play an important part in building long-lasting peace. During our meetings with people from Kosovo, we have heard stories where people have been excluded from partaking in peace developments, which has turned out to be very counterproductive. The personal human element is key in creating peace, where we often only focus on the formal business-like peace negotiations between leaders.

 

In an effort to provide a platform for the voices of the people of Kosovo, Liza Pol and I created an Instagram page named @PeaceOfKosovo, where the idea was to imitate the format of the well-known ‘Humans of New York’ (@humansofny) Instagram page. This consisted of us having conversations with people from different backgrounds, where we learned about their stories, how they see ‘the other’, how they’re active in Kosovo’s development, and what their hopes for the future are. With the permission of our interviewees, we then wrote up the things they told us into an Instagram post. With this, we wanted to create a platform where we could really let people speak for themselves, rather than to speak on their behalf. As a result, we learned about the opinions of people from different backgrounds, where we saw that even though everyone has their own unique story, there is a lot of overlap between peoples’ perceptions of and wishes for Kosovo.

 

We thought that Instagram would work well with the aim of the project, which was to raise awareness in some way, as it is a platform with many users meaning that practically anybody can stumble upon the content. I think we were quite successful with this, as our Instagram analytics shows us that we reached 381 accounts during the month-long project. The page will also stay up and running so people can always still come across our posts. We also have a few more posts coming out in the next days, so go have a look!

The link to our Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peaceofkosovo/

 

I want to finish by say a big thank you to our lecturer, Dr Anne De Graaf, and coordinator Nini Pieters for all the effort they have put into organizing a truly valuable and memorable course for us. I also look forward to (hopefully) meeting the Peace Lab class outside of the Zoom screen during our reunion in September!