Astral Codex Ten

Kosovo

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Kosovo

Article

Kosovo is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 04, 2021 and June 24, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “to justify imperialist interventions in Kosovo”; “terms such as “Kosovo population”, “people of Kosovo””; “terms such as “Kosovo population”, “people of Kosovo”, “all people in Kosovo”, “all inhabitants in Kosovo”“. It most often appears alongside China, Russia, US.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: May 04, 2021
  • Last seen: June 24, 2022

Appears In

None.

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
May 04, 2021 · Original source
This appeal to the universalism of rights is a double-edged sword. It may and can be used with progressive aims in mind. The tradition that is most spectacularly represented by Amnesty International, Médecins sans Frontières, and others cannot be dismissed as a mere adjunct of neoliberal thinking. The whole history of humanism (both of the Western—classically liberal—and various non-Western versions) is too complicated for that. But the limited objectives of many rights discourses (in Amnesty’s case the exclusive focus, until recently, on civil and political as opposed to economic rights) makes it all too easy to absorb them within the neoliberal frame. Universalism seems to work particularly well with global issues such as climate change, the ozone hole, loss of biodiversity through habitat destruction, and the like. But its results in the human rights field are more problematic, given the diversity of political-economic circumstances and cultural practices to be found in the world. Furthermore, it has been all too easy to co-opt human rights issues as ‘swords of empire’ (to use Bartholomew and Breakspear’s trenchant characterization). So-called ‘liberal hawks’ in the US, for example, have appealed to them to justify imperialist interventions in Kosovo, East Timor, Haiti, and, above all, in Afghanistan and Iraq. They justify military humanism ‘in the name of protecting freedom, human rights and democracy even when it is pursued unilaterally by a self-appointed imperialist power’ such as the US.
Who Gets Self-Determination?
March 30, 2022 · Original source
An International Court Of Justice judge, ruling on Kosovo, said:
[The definition of a “people”] is a point which has admittedly been defying international legal doctrine to date. In the context of the present subject-matter, it has been pointed out, for example, that terms such as “Kosovo population”, “people of Kosovo”, “all people in Kosovo”, “all inhabitants in Kosovo”, appear indistinctly in Security Council resolution 1244 (1999) itself. There is in fact no terminological precision as to what constitutes a “people” in international law, despite the large experience on the matter. What is clear to me is that, for its configuration, there is conjugation of factors, of an objective as well as subjective character, such as traditions and culture, ethnicity, historical ties and heritage, language, religion, sense of identity or kinship, the will to constitute a people; these are all factual, not legal, elements, which usually overlap each other.
This matches my intuitive ethical conception of self-determination. Suppose Putin’s historians found an old document in a file cabinet somewhere proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Ukraine’s culture and history were not very glorious. My opinions about the moral status of this war would remain unchanged. Nothing I could learn about the Ukrainian language, religion, sense of kinship, ethnicity, or any of the other things that the judge in the Kosovo case mentioned, would make me feel good about Ukraine getting conquered by Russia
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
June 24, 2022 · Original source
Yugoslavia Humanitarian Intervention (1995, 1999): UNSC sanctioned NATO’s intervention against ethnic Serbs’ massacre of ethnic Bosnians in Srebrenica and Sarajevo in 1995, but not the so-called “illegal but legitimate” 1999 bombing of Kosovo to stop the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing of Bosnians as NATO would have been vetoed by Russia and China.