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Abstract
In Liberal Multiculturalism in Kosovo: The Cracks and Limits of Recognition, I investigate
how liberal multiculturalism in Kosovo masquerades as a form of national inclusion,
facilitating the good feelings of the country while rendering racialized violence accidental–
rather than generated by it. In conversation with activists and NGO workers for minority
rights in Kosovo, I argue that discourses of tolerance and political racelessness converge to
posit racialized violence as merely spectacular, a state of exception, and a matter of
individual prejudice that depoliticize social inequality and divert energies from political
solutions. I further highlight how liberal multiculturalism, in a context of promised but
withheld whiteness, produces yearning and longing as affects of belonging, and actively
perpetuates Western tutelage in Kosovo. Importantly, I borrow from Critical European
Studies, Balkan Studies, and Transnational Feminist and Queer Theory to examine the
fissures and cracks of multicultural governmentality to render visible certain kinds of
racialized violence and join the call for cross-racial alliances as opposed to consolidation with
axes of privilege– however tenuous these endeavors may be.