In current moments of crisis what can we learn from wars? What is the role of feminists in such contexts? These questions were guiding our research in the war in Kosovo – and are still key. We had very different backgrounds, very different trajectories, and yet, we were asking very similar questions. Linda is a sociology professor at the University of Prishtina, Itziar was previously a journalist and a PhD student in the department of International Relations at the University of the Basque Country. Linda is Albanian, Itziar Basque. Linda lived through the systematic violence and explosion of war that she was looking at; she was part of the feminist movements that she was researching herself. Itziar was researching on the role of women’s and feminist organisations through the civil resistance process in the 1990s, the explosion of war and the postwar reconstruction and peacebuilding processes, and the knowledge she had about the war and feminist activism in Kosovo was that of having studied it and having interviewed key figures on both the feminist movement and politics. Yet, we both had a clear focus: the women’s movements and feminist activists in Kosovo during the 1980s and 1990s, a period of increasing systematic violence by the Serb government and armed forces.

Translating those experiences into theoretical argument and moving academically is never an easy process: knowledge becomes interpreted, reworked, compared to current moments and crises. Another point of contention is the question of whether it is possible to articulate a joint struggle for social justice that would bring together the concern for the problems caused by conflict. In doing so, we are learning and finding ways of comparing and understanding current social movements.

At the end of the last century, right after the end of the Cold War, the explosion of the wars that provoked the disintegration of the Former Yugoslavia was imminent. In the wake of Rwanda’s geocide and after the end of the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Milosevic regime, systematic violence was reaching to its peak in Kosovo. By 1995 27,000 people had been victims of police harassment and violence, and about 11,000 victims of torture. But the Dayton Accords (the accord that apparently brought peace to the Balkans) did not make any reference to what was happening there. However, in Kosovo, the nineties consisted of multiple moments of peaceful collective action and resistance that brought people from various political and ideological backgrounds together, shaping the emerging political movement. Although it was showing signals of failing by 1997, it enabled the survival of the Albanian population under constant systematic violence. Soon, the Kosova Liberation Army took most of the political space, and definitely a central role in combating the serb armed forces. After months of siege, and despite controversies, NATO launched in March 1999 the intervention in the name of human rights, halting the genocide in Kosovo. After a 78-day NATO air campaign, international military troops known as KFOR remained stationed in the country – and are still present after more than two decades and a half. Immediately after the war and the NATO intervention an international protectorate mandated by the  UN was  established: the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), which administered all facets of post war reconstruction, institution building, and privatization of state owned assets in between 1999–2008. As a result, the institutions that were constructed after the war were heavily shaped by external frameworks and actors, mainly UN institutions. Still after having unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in 2008, post-war state-building has been contested and proceeded under conditions of continuous international multilateral oversight.

As Cynthia Enloe tells us, asking where women are does not only tell us who is where - a minimum feminist curiosity makes us look at the entrenched power devices, networks and systems that provoke a gender-distortioned picture of reality, with racial and class structures maintaining their (re)production. The feminist movement was present in Kosovo through the peaceful resistance in the 1990s, was there in the explosion of the war, suffered the consequences of the NATO intervention and reconfigured after the war and in the midst of the reconstruction process, which were also featured and configured by a process of retraditionalization. However, academic research, studies and media were mostly focusing on the most visible and extraordinary: the human cost of war, the consequences of the NATO intervention, how women had been victims of sexual violence used as a weapon of war. However, the reality was also other, more nuanced, encompassing different interconnected forces that were shaping everyday life: the feminist movement began in the wake of the pre-war systemic state violence and as a response to it, and has been a constant through the different socio-political contexts in Kosovo. Yet, there were other stereotypes that we were encountering again and again: how women from Kosova are often described as ‘backward’ subjects under former Yugoslavia, and how, apparently, the feminist movement –also identified as women’s movement, or women’s groups– was a postwar product.

Still, there were further elements common in both research processes: the persistence of feminist solidarities in armed conflicts, wars and peacebuilding. By 2014, we both shared a question: how are feminist solidarities performed? After more than a decade of research, both together and separately, we have kept coming back to an initial departing point: the importance of feminist genealogies, and how these genealogies are affected by wars. It was –in part– the systemic violence that the population was living under what provoked the first public mobilizations by women. Initially mobilizing what has been identified as political motherhood, or the strategic mobilization of motherhood, women started organising different actions in order to reclaim what happened to their sons, as they were being brought back home in coffins after having left their houses to join the Yugoslav army. Some years later, by 1995, women were not only organising public mobilizations, they were also organising strategically, in order to respond to their collective needs, and simultaneously, creating what we see as spaces of feminist solidarity. An example is the Centre for the Protection of Women and Children, created by Sevdije Ahmeti and Vjosa Dobruna, and where besides offering medical services to women and children, broader mobilizations were also organised in the basement, as well as connections enabled with women internationally: not only activists from the rest of the yugoslav republics visited the basement of the centre, also internationally recognised figures such as Eve Ensler, and even, and mainly, feminist activists from Serbia. This feminist activism, we’ve seen in our individual and shared work, was featured by everyday survival and constant reproduction of networks of solidarity: the need to respond to everyday systematic violence and the effects it had on women, combined with the need to nurture relationships of friendship and solidarity with activists that had gone through a similar situation (in Bosnia, for instance), or that were living under the very same regime that were killing them (women from Belgrade). Such a mobilization of feminist solidarity has been a constant through the war and the postwar reconstruction and peacebuilding processes as well, despite major changes at the socio-political and economic arenas broadly speaking. Feminist solidarity has been – and is – spread in different networks and in different locations, and is continuous; the continuum of feminist resistance is still present – unfinished and continuous.