Kosovo – from State of Welfare Emergency to Welfare State?

Abstract

This article discusses Kosovo’s post-conflict welfare transformation. It builds upon Inglot’s concept of emergency welfare, which describes how incomplete states have historically been responding to diverse challenges, such as wars, crisis, regime changes, thus developing certain adjustment patterns, which have become their system’s blueprint. Despite the ‘path-departing’ elements of the new welfare structures, devised mainly as a product of international post-conflict intervention, Kosovo’s welfare system continued to display the weaknesses inherent to its emergency blueprint, typical of an unfinished state.

Keywords: Kosovo, welfare, post-conflict