Kosovo's history: a country whose existence is still a legal question

Who was here first

The territory formed the core of Dardania, an Illyrian kingdom attested in classical sources from the fourth century BCE, with its centre near present-day Lipjan.

It was later a political, cultural and religious centre of the medieval Serbian Kingdom. In the late thirteenth century the seat of the Serbian Archbishopric moved to Peja, and rulers based themselves between Prizren and Skopje.

Both of those sentences are true and both are used as arguments. The site records them as history and takes no position on what either implies about the present, which is the only defensible thing a reference work can do with a territory where the past is an active claim.

The name itself is South Slavic: Kosovo is the possessive of kos, blackbird, shortened from Kosovo Polje, the Field of Blackbirds, a karst plain in the east of the territory.

What happened on the Field of Blackbirds

In 1389 Ottoman forces under Sultan Murad I met a Christian coalition led by Moravian Serbia under Prince Lazar. Both sides took heavy losses, the battle was a stalemate, and both commanders died.

What the Battle of Kosovo became afterwards matters more than what it was. It is the founding event of Serbian national memory, and it happened on ground that is now a separate state. No modern territorial dispute in Europe carries a comparable weight of symbolism, and that weight is a fact about the dispute. It is not evidence in it.

The Ottomans completed the conquest after the Second Battle of Kosovo and ruled for nearly five centuries, until 1912. Islam was introduced during that period, and the Ottoman approach to conversion appears to have been applied more deliberately to the Roman Catholic population, mostly Albanians, than to the Orthodox Serbs. In 1690 Pjetër Bogdani led a revolt, with sources of that year recording 20,000 Albanians in arms; after the Great Turkish War a number of Serbs migrated north into Habsburg territory.

By the nineteenth century Kosovo was the centre of the Albanian national awakening, and the League of Prizren was founded there in 1878. The timing is worth holding onto: an Albanian national movement organised itself in Kosovo more than three decades before any Albanian state existed, and the territory it organised in was about to be transferred to Serbia rather than to that state. Every subsequent claim on both sides runs through that gap.

How the territory changed hands

In the spring of 1912 Albanians under Hasan Prishtina revolted against the Ottomans, joined by Albanian deserters from the Ottoman army, and won.

What followed was not independence. After the Ottoman defeat in the First Balkan War, the Treaty of London in 1913 ceded Metohija to Montenegro and eastern Kosovo to Serbia. During the Balkan Wars over 100,000 Albanians left Kosovo and about 50,000 were killed in massacres. Serbian authorities then promoted new Serb settlements and the assimilation of Albanians, producing a further exodus whose scale is disputed: estimates of Albanians forcibly expelled run between 60,000 and 239,807.

Administrative reorganisation followed the politics. On 26 April 1922 the territory was split among three districts of the Kingdom, and in 1929 the Kingdom of Yugoslavia redistributed it again among three banates. Kosovo spent the twentieth century as a subdivision whose boundaries and status were decided elsewhere.

What autonomy was given and taken away

Yugoslavia's 1974 constitution gave Kosovo a substantially autonomous status inside Serbia, and Albanian national feeling rose with it: the centenary of the League of Prizren was widely celebrated in 1978, and Albanians resented a formal status as a minority that they felt made them second-class in a federation where other nations had republics.

Tensions worsened through the 1980s. In 1989 the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, using a combination of intimidation and political manoeuvre, drastically reduced Kosovo's autonomous status and began cultural repression of the Albanian population.

The response was a parallel state. In July 1990 Kosovo Albanian politicians proclaimed the Republic of Kosova, declared it sovereign and independent in September 1992, and elected Ibrahim Rugova president in May 1992. It was recognised by exactly one country, Albania, and it functioned for most of a decade as an unrecognised administration running its own schools and clinics alongside the Serbian ones.

How the war ended and what replaced it

Fighting between Kosovo Albanians and Yugoslav security forces produced a humanitarian crisis, and in 1999 it produced an international intervention.

On 10 June 1999 the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1244, which placed Kosovo under a transitional United Nations administration, UNMIK, and authorised a NATO-led peacekeeping force, KFOR, which entered on 12 June. The resolution is the pivot of everything that followed, and its wording is the reason:

A settlement that suspends a question works while everyone expects an answer later. Status talks led by the United Nations special envoy Martti Ahtisaari began in February 2006. Progress was made on technical matters and none on the central one.

What the declaration settled

On 16 February 2008 the prime minister announced that the Assembly would declare independence the following day, and on 17 February 2008 at 17:00 it did.

The declaration was not a surprise and the reaction to it was not uniform. Kosovo is landlocked, bordered by Albania to the southwest, Montenegro to the west, Serbia to the north and east, and North Macedonia to the southeast, and every one of those neighbours had a position. Recognitions began arriving within days from states that had supported the intervention, and refusals came as promptly from states with separatist questions of their own, for whom a successful unilateral declaration anywhere is a precedent everywhere.

Serbia proposed that the United Nations General Assembly ask the International Court of Justice whether the declaration was lawful, and on 8 October 2008 the Assembly did so. The Court delivered its advisory opinion on 22 July 2010, concluding that the declaration did not violate international law: not general principles, which do not prohibit unilateral declarations of independence, and not Resolution 1244, which had defined neither the final status process nor reserved the outcome to the Security Council.

The opinion changed less than either side hoped. It was advisory and not binding, and it did not oblige any state to recognise Kosovo, because recognition is a political act each government performs for itself. The Court answered the question it was asked, which was about the legality of a declaration, and not the question everyone cared about, which was whether Kosovo is a state.

As of 2025, 110 of the 193 United Nations member states recognise the Republic of Kosovo, and within the European Union it is recognised by 22 of the 27 members and is a potential candidate for accession. Under an arrangement agreed with Belgrade through European Union mediation, Kosovo participates in some international forums under a different title from the one its constitution uses.

What the resistance became

The decade between 1990 and 1999 shaped the politics that followed independence, and the clearest evidence for that is the party system.

The Democratic League of Kosovo, the largest political party in Kosovo, has its origins in the non-violent resistance movement against Milošević's rule in the 1990s, and Rugova led it until his death in 2006. The two next largest parties have their roots in the Kosovo Liberation Army, the armed movement that emerged when the non-violent strategy had not changed the territory's status.

That is an unusual inheritance for a party system to carry: the governing choice a voter makes is also a choice between two answers to a question settled a generation ago, about whether the 1990s should have been fought or waited out. The two answers are not reconciled and both are represented.

Rugova's own trajectory closes the loop. Elected president of an unrecognised republic in May 1992, he was elected president again in November 2001, this time of an Assembly chosen in elections supervised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, under a United Nations administration, in a territory whose status was still undetermined.

What the buildings record

The hardest single fact in this history is architectural, and it is on a United Nations list.

Medieval Monuments in Kosovo is a UNESCO World Heritage Site comprising four Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries, at Deçan, Peja, Prizren and Gračanica, founded by members of the Nemanjić dynasty. They stand in a state whose population is overwhelmingly not Orthodox, they are the built record of the medieval Serbian church, and they are inside Kosovo's borders.

The documentary record around them is equally double-edged. In 1330 the Serbian king Stefan Dečanski explicitly recorded the presence of Albanians and Albanian village names in Kosovo, particularly in the districts of Prizren and Skopje. Toponymic evidence suggests Slav settlement in Kosovo may have been comparatively weak in its first century or two, unlike other parts of the Balkans.

Both facts are used as arguments. The catalogue records both and endorses neither. What the monuments demonstrate is not who the territory belongs to but why the question cannot be closed by appeal to the past: the past holds material for both cases, in the same places, at the same time.

Where the argument stands now

The two governments have been negotiating the practical consequences ever since, and the pattern is that agreements are reached and implementation lags.

The Brussels Agreement of 19 April 2013, brokered by the European Union, allowed the Serb minority in Kosovo its own police force and court of appeals, and has not been ratified by either parliament. Presidents met in Brussels on 27 February 2023 and at Ohrid on 18 March 2023 and agreed an eleven-point plan for implementing a European Union-backed normalisation deal, including recognising each other's documents such as passports and vehicle registration plates.

Between 2021 and 2023 protests and demonstrations recurred, some armed, with deaths on both sides and thirty NATO peacekeepers among the injured. The immediate cause ended on 1 January 2024, when each side recognised the other's vehicle plates.

That is the shape of the thing. A territory whose past is claimed by two national narratives, whose autonomy was granted and withdrawn inside a single generation, whose independence was declared unilaterally and found lawful by a court that could not make anyone accept it, and whose most recent breakthrough was an agreement about number plates. Seventeen years after the declaration, the practical business of statehood is still being negotiated item by item.

Under the Brussels Agreement, North Kosovo had in practice been controlled largely by institutions of Serbia and not by those of Pristina. That is the same problem in miniature. A state is asking for recognition from governments that point at the part of its own territory it does not administer, and the part it does not administer is administered by the state refusing to recognise it.