International Conference: Current Security Challenges for the Western Balkan Region Addressed by Means of Joint Responsibility and Cooperation 100 SITUATION IN KOSOVO Kosovo's consociation has been a creation of international diplomats in charge of its administration. Thus, international concerns dominated the choices for Kosovo's institutional evolution. This proposition implies that an international relations perspective could provide valid explanations about external intervention and the viability of consociationalism. For example, evidence in this thesis suggests that the evolution of Kosovo's institutional design and features reect international actors desire to avoid a possible regime change in Serbia after 2000, repartition and change of borders, resumption of large scale conict in the region, and also reect, in particular, a worry about the Serbian and Russian response to Kosovo's evolution towards full, independent statehood. It is worth noting that NATO's military intervention in Kosovo occurred at a very particular geopolitical moment when Russia was in the throes of yet another domestic crisis formed by their 1998 debt default, exhaustion after a second Chechnyan war, and the end of the Yeltsin regime and the rise of Putin. Russia was thus unable to protest or assert its opposition, other than a few dramatic gestures at the close of the conict, evidenced by the seizure of Prishtina airport. By the middle of the last decade Russia under Putin was, and remains, a much more assertive, active and belligerent great regional power in the vicinity, which includes the Balkans and her traditional allies such as Serbia. And as this thesis argues, the main aws in Kosovo's institutional design and its implementation stem from the problem of the lack of statehood and conict over Kosovo's status between Kosovo Albanian majority and Belgrade. In this regard, external concerns over Belgrade's stability had as much weight as the concerns about the stability of Kosovo. Belgrade's informal intervention was condoned by the international community, although it operated akin to de facto partition, in a way that has corroded Kosovo's evolution within a consociational framework. This intervention was never ofcially recognized, but in a way, as I describe here, it was facilitated by UNMIK itself and has arguably prevented a more workable form of consociationalism emerging. Whereas Kosovo is one of many cases of external interventions in the last decades, the difference between Kosovo and other recent cases lies in both its internal and external context; albeit similar to BiH, Afghanistan and Iraq, Kosovo continues to be under heavy international supervision, while its consociational governance has not yielded the results desired. Second, consociationalism in Kosovo was imposed and enforced by UNMIK in the context of an unaddressed self­determination dispute between Kosovo's majority Albanian population and Belgrade as a former sovereign, whose inuence in the region continues to be decisive for the stability of Kosovo. Third, as of the end of 2012, Kosovo continues to be under international control with deeply divided polities and the partitionist presence of its former sovereign.