Montenegro and Macedonia recognized Kosovo yesterday. Coincidentally, this raises the number of countries recognizing to exactly 50.
Macedonia and Montenegro are small countries, but they have outsized importance because (1) they’re neighbors of both Serbia and Kosovo, (2) they’re EU-members-to-be, and (3) they’re former Yugoslav Republics. So while this is no surprise, it’s still [...]

We haven’t used the poll function for a while.
So okay: the Russians say that they’re only recognizing South Ossetia’s and Abkhazia’s independence because the wicked, lawless West set a precedent with Kosovo. And at first glance, this seems plausible! After all, the Georgia crisis came just six months after Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of [...]

I wanted to write a post comparing Kosovo and South Ossetia, but Dan Drezner has already written it. It’s a week old now, but still good:
It’s been more than a week since Russia recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states. The number of other countries that have followed Russia’s lead is…. well, [...]

(This story is a week old. Somehow, inexcusably, I missed it until now.)
Anyway: the Miss Universe pageant was held last weekend. It was in Vietnam this time, and a nice young lady from Venezuela won, but what’s interesting to your hardcore Balkanologist is that
1) the pageant accepted Kosovo as a [...]

Following up to my earlier post, some discussion of the international reaction to Kosovar independence.
At the moment, 43 countries have recognized Kosovo’s independence. (I’m defining “country” here as “member of the UN General Assembly. Sorry, Taiwan.) Since the UNGA has 192 members, that means that more than three quarters of the world’s [...]

Anybody who’s interested in Kosovo has long since bookmarked this incredibly useful page. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see that it lists every country that has recognized Kosovo (current tally: 43) plus the official statements of almost every country that hasn’t.
That’s plenty of fun reading by itself, but it gets even more interesting [...]

This analysis from Reuters of the dynamic between the EU and Serbia in the run-up to Serbia’s general election 3 weeks from now points to an extremely ham-handed attempt by some EU countries to influence the outcome, which seems like a strange way to handle an election in any country, let alone one with as [...]

So, the Albanosphere: about 7 million Albanians in Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Greece and Montenegro, plus another million or so recent emigrants and gastarbeitern scattered across Europe and the US.
I’m going to leave the diaspora mostly out of the picture. They’re very important, but I can’t spent all my days writing blog posts. I’m [...]

The Hague has acquitted former Kosovo PM Ramush Haradinaj of various horrible war crimes.
This is not much of a surprise. One, while the case against the KLA leadership generally is pretty strong, the case against Haradinaj personally wasn’t so much. Two, Haradinaj put up an aggressive and very competent defense. And three, [...]

…I’m getting rather worried about the normally reliable B92. Doug M expertly dissected the organ-legging story a week or so ago; I’ve just come across this article from 26 March reporting on a UN document describing Kosovo as the “heart of [the] Balkan drug route”. Alarming stuff - essentially confirms the rumours and prejudices of [...]