Beyond the pitch

By Ben Kiem

We are now back from Kosovo for a while, and have finished up our projects. My group focused on football as a peacebuilding tool, with special attention to the Euros currently ongoing. In hindsight, we learned a lot, but actually little of it had all that much to do with football. Many of our interviews quickly diverged from football in itself and instead turned into conversations about identity, symbolism and politics. And these conversations, oh boy, are complicated in Kosovo. 
 
Kosovo is a unique place where the capital displays more flags of another country than its own, and many people identify as something other than Kosovar. Asking directly about identity can be tricky - "How do you identify?" is no easy question. A productive way to receive an answer to this question, if only expressed implicitly, is to talk about support of international football teams. This approach almost always led to conversations about identity and, to our surprise, revealed the emergence of a distinct Kosovar national identity--really not where we thought we were going with this project. 
 
As we refined our questions along the interviews, it turned out that the question as to who our interviewee would support in a game between Kosovo and Albania produced the most engaging conversations. The older generations were unwavering in their support for Albania, showing little connection to or sympathy for a Kosovar identity. The younger generations, on the other hand, had a harder time answering the questions, while most of them opted, when pressured for an answer, to support Kosovo. 

Once this question was answered, most participants drew their own unprompted conclusions from their responses. Older interviewees were quick to contextualize why they did not identify with Kosovo while emphasising that the new generations growing up were more and more ‘Kosovar’. Our tour guide in Prizren elaborated on how he associated being Albanian with the Albanian flag - not the flag of the country of Albania, but the flag representing the Albanian ethnicity, which coincidentally is also the country's flag. He concluded that he did not feel a sense of belonging to any specific nation but rather to a group of people across borders. We had asked him about which team he would support if they played each other. Turns out, a shared passion for football can be a great starting point for us to talk about belonging to our very own imagined communities.

Arber, third from the left, is Kosovo-Albanian. When Serbia was mentioned in the context of football, it prompted him to set aside the topic and instead discuss his political opinions and trauma from the war.