Contested states and the politics of sport: the case of Kosovo – division, development, and recognition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides the first detailed analysis of the politics of sport in the small, post-conflict, contested state of Kosovo, located in the Western Balkan region of Europe. A former province of Yugoslavia, Kosovo endured a bloody civil war in the late 1990s between Serbian-led Yugoslav forces and Kosovo Liberation Army. In the post-conflict context, Kosovo has undergone a long period of reconstruction with major Western support; has been partially recognised by the international community since declaring independence from Serbia in 2008; and, has experienced significant regional ethno-national divisions and tensions, primarily between the Albanian majority and Serbian minority. We examine how sport in Kosovo influences and is influenced by these wider political processes. Our discussion is organised into three main parts. First, we set out our analytical approach, and then outline the main historical, social, and political features of Kosovo. Second, we examine the key political aspects of sport in Kosovo, with respect to development, the struggle for recognition, and social conflicts and divisions. Third, we address the cultural politics of sport in Kosovo with reference to issues of national and transnational identification, symbolic conflicts involving different national groups, and the role of the sport for development and peace (SDP) sector in building better cross-community ties. Our analysis is underpinned by international relations theories, notably a mix of critical and constructivist approaches; and draws on fieldwork and many interviews with key stakeholders in the sport, development, government, and education sectors in Kosovo.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".