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“Suddenly Everyone Started to Love Our Anthem, Our Flag”: Identity Construction, Crisis, and Change in (Almost) Sovereign Kosovo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2019

Alissa Boguslaw
Alissa Boguslaw*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, The New School for Social Research, New York, New York, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: bogua624@newschool.edu
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Abstract

How, amidst a crisis of sovereignty and identity, did once-rejected national symbols become meaningful to Kosovo’s Albanians? Having declared independence in 2008, a 2014 study found that less than one-third of Kosovo’s citizens identified with their newly adopted state symbols. As meanings are always shifting, depending on the contexts in which their forms appear and the actors involved, theories of social construction have focused on the representational aspects of meaning-making: the ways in which the forms stabilize (or destabilize) the constructs they depict. Instead of focusing on the representational—the determinable, measurable, and rational aspects, this article investigates the discursive mechanisms that mobilize meanings and configure contexts, extending Robin Wagner-Pacifici’s alternative theory of events. Through discourse and semiotic analysis, it tracks Kosovo’s new flag and anthem through the construction, crisis, and transformation of three social realities: political independence, national identity, and the world of international competitive judo, illuminating how changing meanings change, shifting contexts shift, and how to interpret actors’ fleeting emotions. In the Kosovo case, the construction is the crisis, as well as the change.

Keywords

identitycrisis of sovereigntysocial constructionsocial changepost-conflict Kosovo
Type
Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 48 , Special Issue 4: Special Issue on Migrant Rights, Agency, and Vulnerability , July 2020 , pp. 721 - 736
Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2019

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