Did nonviolent resistance fail in Kosovo?

Abstract

Violent crimes by ethnic Albanians in the Balkans have been linked to an Albanian ‘culture of violence’ (Arsovska 2006; Arsovska and Craig 2006). We can trace the roots of certain violent practices in Albanian customary laws, such as the Code of Lekë Dukagjini (Kanun), which institutionalizes blood feuds. Criminological studies of ‘cultures of violence’—explaining violent assaultive crimes by viewing them through the lens of their historical, social and cultural context from which they spring—have been present in the literature since the 1960s. These studies suggest that violence can be culturally viewed as acceptable, appropriate and even obligatory reaction to certain challenges or transgressions (Wolfgang and Ferracuti 1967; Gastil 1971; Luckenbill and Doyle 1989; Cohen and Nisbett 1994; Anderson 1999; Rich and Grey 2005; Stewart and Simons 2010). Such studies are mainly focused on the cultural causes of violence, while they devote less attention to the cultural instruments against violence. A reciprocal approach to criminology integrates the analysis of both violent and nonviolent responses to crime through dialectical concepts of adversarialism and mutualism (Barak 2005). Every ‘culture of violence’ contains elements of a ‘culture of nonviolence’, and vice versa. We can find violent and nonviolent cultural patterns in all societies, but the level of violence depends on their proportions