On September 4th, 2020, the long-clashing Serbia and Kosovo signed a normalization agreement at the Oval Office in Washington D.C., declaring a mutual desire for better diplomatic and economic relations. This agreement, championed by the Donald Trump administration, has been contradictorily referred to as a historical achievement on the one hand, and has been deemed to have little influence on the resolution of the conflict between the two parties on the other. Unpacking its contents and context may therefore provide some more clarity on why such differing views arose. The seemingly intractable conflict between Serbia and Kosovo serves as one of the best examples for how, often, crises cannot be contained to a singular moment in time, and spill over onto decades of during strifes that need to be managed.
The Serbia-Kosovo Normalization Deal: Everything We Should Know by Lior Hamovitz is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0