Despite the constitutionally and legally enshrined promise of equality in Kosovo, differentiated citizenship together with a political context defined by an ethnic divide and past structural inequalities, as well as uneven external citizenship opportunities, contributed to the emergence of ‘hierarchical citizenship’, where some groups (communities), or ‘rights-and-duty-bearing units’, are ‘more equal than the others’. In other words, the formal equality of citizens and communities is contradicted by the socio-political reality where some communities are better off, thus leading to the emergence of a hierarchy of communities in Kosovo.
This is an extended summary of a longer paper that was originally published in the CITSEE Working Paper Series and is available for download here.
