Brown Bag: The Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue since 2012: From Community to Partition

Since the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) raised the Brussels dialogue from a technical to a “political” level in 2012, opportunities have opened up to discuss and question hegemonic narratives around Kosovo in Serbia. Kosovo has been articulated as the “heart of Serbia” within nationalist discourses, not only in territorial terms as the origin of Serbian statehood, but also symbolically as the anchoring signifier of Serbian nationhood throughout history. This research argues that the myth around Kosovo does not only concern the historical narrative with all its components, but that the proclamation of Kosovo’s independence in 2008 dislocated the discourse on Kosovo being the “heart of Serbia”. This resulted in the re-articulation of the familiar myth with new elements anchored around the territorial claim to and sovereignty over Kosovo, even though the structural conditions do not reflect this. In order to demonstrate this in practice, I look at the Brussels dialogue and how the re-articulation of the myth occurred through two defining moments: accommodating the dislocation through focusing on community (i.e. Community of Serb-majority municipalities) and partition (i.e. the idea of “razgraničenje”, correction of borders, exchange of territories). The theoretical framework of this research is based on post-foundational discourse theory, while the methodology combines a discourse-theoretical and performative approach. By focusing on hegemonic actors’ moves on a transcultural discursive field and taking into account the performative nature of every articulation, this research contributes to the growing body of literature on post-foundational discourse theory and offers a novel conception of the Kosovo myth based on performativity and articulation.