Abjection,materiality and ontological security: A study of the unfinished Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina

Abstract

Ontological security scholarship in International Relations (IR) has predominantly focused on the importance of social environments for the healthy sense of self. However, material environments can also provide an important source of ontological security. In my previous work I have argued that to assume this role of ‘ontic spaces’ material environments need to be discursively linked to states’ self-identity either through projection or introjection. In this article, I draw on the work of Julia Kristeva to argue that ontic spaces can also come about through abjection or the rejection of a material environment from the narrative of the self. I illustrate this theoretical point in the case study of the Serbian Orthodox Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina. Its construction began in 1992 during the rule of Slobodan Milošević but was never finished due to the Kosovo war in 1998/9. Over the years, as all proposed changes are considered to be a threat to a healthy sense of self of either Serbs or Albanians, the building has been turned into an abjected ontic space, an ambiguous symbol undermining the self/other and victim/oppressor boundaries and as such both repels and attracts, threatens and protects.

Keywords

Ontological security ontic space materiality abjection Kosovo/Serbia Church of Christ the Saviour

Introduction

Ontological security scholarship in International Relations (IR) has predominantly focused on the importance of social environments for self-identity of actors and their relationship with significant others. Occasionally, scholars have also discussed the relevance of materiality for ontological security processes (Ejdus, 2017; Kinnvall, 2004; Mitzen, 2018). My starting point is the assumption that material environments, once discursively linked to collective identity, become ‘ontic spaces’, spatial extensions of the collective self that render state identities to appear more firm, continuous and real. In my previous work, I discussed how material environments get linked to collective identity through projection and introjection (Ejdus, 2017, 2019). Building on these insights, I draw on the work of Julia Kristeva to argue that ontic spaces can also come about through abjection or the rejection of a material environment, natural or built, from the narrative of the self (Kristeva, 1982). In other words, through abjection of material environments, agents aim to stabilize their self-identity narratives by rejecting what was once internal to the self.

I illustrate this theoretical argument in the case study of the unfinished Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina, Kosovo. Twenty years since the end of the war, this unfinished structure remains to be one of the main disputes between Serb and Albanians in the field of cultural and religious heritage (Surlić and Novaković, 2020). To that end, I analyse how national master narratives of both sides in the conflict as well as their internal debates shape the emotional experiences of the unfinished church. Additionally, to better understand how the site is experienced on the individual level, I interviewed members of both communities who are engaged with the issue in one way or another. As the case study shows in detail, the construction of the Church began in 1992 during the rule of the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević but never finished due to war which broke out in Kosovo in 1998. Despite the end of the war in 1999, the arrival of international forces, declaration of Kosovo’s independence in 2008 and subsequent normalization of relationship with Serbia, the unfinished building still lingers on untouched. At the surface, this appears to be a mere property dispute. A deeper dive into the case reveals that the arrival at a negotiated solution has been so difficult because the parties see the disagreement as an ontological zero-sum game in which a gain for one side fundamentally challenges the self-identity of the other.

The completion of the church, a goal pursued by the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC) and the Kosovo Serbs, disturbs the healthy sense of self of the Kosovo Albanians. The latter see in the building a symbol of their oppression by the ruthless regime of Slobodan Milošević in the 1990s. On the other hand, the prospect of the destruction of the unfinished church or its deconsecration and transformation into something else, such as a museum, is seen by the Serbs as yet another affront to their collective dignity and existence in Kosovo. As a result of this ontological zero-sum game, the unfinished building has remained untouched for over 20 years. Over time, it has been abjected into an ontic space which stands as an in-between object, an unwanted symbol for both sides but also a source of their identity.

The rest of the article unfolds as follows. In the first section, I briefly introduce the recent material turn in the study of ontological security in world politics. The main contribution I make in this section is to theorize abjection as a previously overlooked form of constructing ontic spaces. In the second section, I illustrate this theoretical argument in the case study of the unfinished Serbian Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina, Kosovo.

Ontological security studies and materiality

Ontological security is the ability of actors to maintain their biographical continuity and a healthy sense of self. It is a concept which originated within object relations theory, an approach to psychoanalysis concerned with the development of a child’s psyche in relations to its significant others (for an overview see Scharff, 1996). According to Ronald David Laing, an ontologically secure person has ‘a sense of his presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person’ (Laing, 1990 [1960]: 37). Ontological insecurity, on the other hand, is the inability to preserve this sense of wholeness and persistence in time of both self and others, hence generating debilitating anxieties and a loss of purposeful agency (Laing, 1990 [1960]: 43).

According to Giddens, who transferred the concept into sociology, ontological security is a ‘confidence that most human beings have in the continuity of their self-identity and in the constancy of the surrounding social and material environments of action’ (Giddens, 1991: 92). Habits of daily life and routinization of relationships with others emotionally inoculate actors from existential anxieties stemming from the indeterminacy of human existence. While anxiety is a perennial aspect of the human condition, ontological security is, according to Giddens, particularly challenged by the speed and breadth of change characteristic for high modernity (Giddens, 1990, 1991).

Giddens particularly stressed the importance of materiality and ‘settings of interaction’ for ontological security of individuals and their ‘sense of place’ (Giddens, 1984: 118). Other ontological security scholars across disciplines paid particular attention to home, as a secure and predictable space where individuals routinize their everyday relationships with their significant others (Dupuis and Thorns, 1998; Hiscock et al., 2001; Newton, 2008; Padgett, 2007; Skey, 2011). Taking the concept to urban conservation, Jane Grenville, for example, showed how cities draw their sense of ontological security from their built environment (Grenville, 2007, 2015).

Over the past two decades, a growing number IR scholars have also endorsed the concept of ontological security (Cupać, 2020; Huysmans, 1998; Kinnvall, 2004, 2006; Kinnvall and Mitzen, 2017; Krolikowski, 2008; Lupovici, 2012; McSweeney, 1999; Mitzen, 2006; Rumelili, 2014, 2015; Steele, 2007, 2008; Subotić, 2016; Zarakol, 2010). Although it is beyond the scope of this article to do justice to this quickly growing scholarship, it is important to note that it has mostly focused on the role of social environments, i.e. relationship with significant others, in the ontological security processes. This is, to a certain extent, understandable given the discursive nature of the theory, as well as the broader focus of constructivist and post-structural IR scholarship on self/other relationships.

Several IR scholars have, nevertheless, studied the role of material environments for the grounding of ontological security. Catarina Kinnvall was among the first to discuss the importance of the home as a ‘site of constancy in the social and material environment’ (2004: 747). In particular, she showed how in the face of globalization characterized by rapid change, nationalism and religion provide particularly compelling narratives of home and constancy and serve as a source of ontological security. These compelling ideological narratives, however, also construct the image of the outside of the home as a chaotic, impure and threatening realm, hence paving the way for conflict and ultimately physical insecurity.

Jennifer Mitzen expanded the discussion on the importance of material environments for ontological security by developing an alternative to a conception of a home as a bordered space of exclusion and stability. The home, she argues, can also be construed as a centred space of inclusion, experimentation and change (Mitzen, 2018). Although the exclusive conception of the home is dominant at the macropolitical level as exemplified by the discourses on ‘the homeland’, Mitzen uses the example of the EU to theorize a conception of the home as ‘the homespace’ which could lead to less regressive and more inclusive politics.

In her work, Charlotte Heath-Kelly has shown that terrorists target symbolic locations to generate ontological insecurity (Heath-Kelly, 2015). For example, by attacking the nightclubs in Bali that are popular with Western tourists, terrorists tried to undermine a sense of calm and routine which hold collective anxieties at bay. Similarly, violence can imbue previously nondescript sites with great symbolic meanings, hence becoming ‘sacred zones’ (Heath-Kelly, 2020). This was the case with the buildings in Oslo’s government quarter, which had attracted little interest before Anders Breivik staged his attack there in 2011, turning them into national lieux de mémoire.

Beyond the scholarship on ontological security, the centrality of material environments, either natural or built, for collective identity has been a theme profusely studied across social studies (Dayaratne, 2012; Halink, 2014; Heynen, 1999; Kaufmann and Zimmer, 1998; Koranyi and Cusack, 2014; Palmer, 1998; Silberman, 1995; Vale, 2014; Weiss, 2010) but also within IR (Coward, 2008; Neumann, 2018; Steele, 2013). One of the key insights of this vast and diverse scholarship has been that due to their capacity to represent abstract ideas materially and because of their impression of stability, material environments provide an essential framework for collective identities.

Abjection of ontic spaces

To further theorize the importance of materiality for ontological security of collective actors, in my previous works I developed the concept of ontic spaces, spatial extensions of the collective self that render collective identities to appear more firm, continuous and real (Ejdus, 2017, 2019). By anchoring their self-identity in their material environment, collective actors ‘bracket out’ contestations, plurality, dynamism and contingencies that inevitably undermine their project of the self. However, in contrast to individuals who draw their sense of constancy from ‘homely places’ through daily routines, collective actors need to link their self-identities into their material environments discursively.

Drawing on the work of Neil Leach, I theorized two distinct ways of creating this link. The first form is the projection, which involves an extrapolation of the self onto the material environment as if it were a screen (Leach, 2006: 85). An example of this is the One World Trade Center built at the Ground Zero in New York, where the national meta-narrative is subtly projected onto the structure through its 1776 feet tall Freedom Tower, clearly referring to the signing of the US Declaration of Independence (Jones, 2006: 558). The second way of creating ontic spaces is the introjection which involves the absorption of the material environment into the project of the self (Leach, 2006: 78). An example of this is the Zionists’ introjection into their national narrative of the city of Jerusalem and the Holy Land as the core space of the Jewish nation (Sand, 2010, 2012).

In this article, I build upon these ideas and theorize abjection as the third and previously overlooked form of construction of ontic spaces. An abject, in short, is that which has been cast off. According to Julia Kristeva, an abject is neither a subject nor an object but ‘something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object’ (Kristeva, 1982: 4). It is, therefore neither the self nor the other but something in-between. It does not disturb because it is filthy or unhealthy, but because it is ambiguous, liminal, and disrespects borders and rules, hence undermining our identity, system and order (Kristeva, 1982). Abjects are threatening as we cannot keep a safe distance from them, so their proximity is the key. For Kristeva, abjection is the human reaction (repulsion, disgust, horror, vomit, etc.) to the breakdown in meaning caused by the abject. They can be experienced in many ways, when seeing a corpse, open wound, bodily fluids, etc. One example of an abject is a corpse, which is neither representing life nor death, but something inconclusive. Upon seeing a corpse, Kristeva writes: ‘I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away’ (Kristeva, 1982: 4).

In developing the concept of an abject, Kristeva is primarily indebted to Jacques Lacan. In contrast to object relations theorists, for whom the default option is the experience of wholeness, for Lacan this fantasy can never be fulfilled (Lacan, 1977). Before acquiring speech, an infant is one with her mother. In the mirror stage (6–8 months), a child begins to separate the self from the other. Following that, children enter the symbolic world of language and culture and become subjects through identification with social signifiers, which are never entirely theirs. The ontological void hence created generates existential anxieties which can only temporarily be placated with fantasies of completion that turn the ontological lack into an empirical one for various objects of desire (Eberle, 2019).

In her theory of abjection, Kristeva reworked Lacan (but also Freud) in that she located the formation of the subject in the abjection of the maternal body (Arya, 2014: 22–27). This happens in the process of feeding as a movement to and away from the mother’s breast, which establishes the first border between the self and other. The primal abject is mother, and the separation from the mother’s body is the primal repression (Kristeva, 1982: 15). This is the root of all other abjects which continue to hover on the boundaries of self/other and threaten the collapse of the subject throughout life. As an emotion, abjection is a reaction, such as disgust, vomit, or horror in the face of the potential breakdown of order and collapse of distinctions between self and other, subject and object, human and animal. The history of religions, in Kristeva’s view, is also a history of various attempts to purify the abject through taboos, exclusions and interdictions (Kristeva, 1982: 17). However, it remains part of the subject which can neither be integrated nor eliminated; it simultaneously endangers the subject and helps it maintain its autonomy.

Kristeva’s theory of abjection has been very influential across social studies and humanities, and the scope of this article does not allow space to deal with its various applications across disciplines (see Arya, 2014). IR scholars have also used the concept to understand how abjects are constitutive of state policies and world politics. As Catarina Kinnvall put it: ‘The construction of an abject-other becomes a means to securitize subjectivity as it reduces anxiety and increases ontological security’ (Kinnvall, 2004: 753). One case in point is how societies deal with the problem of a stranger, which is both inside and outside of the community. Due to their ambiguity and liminality, strangers are undermining not physical but first and foremost ontological security (Chan, 2020; Huysmans, 1998). To re-inscribe the border between self and other and manage anxiety stemming from indeterminacy, societies and states often securitize abject strangers and turn them into enemies, be it illegal immigrants (Auchter, 2013), women who fraternized with enemy soldiers during the war (Väyrynen, 2019), people with HIV (Frowd, 2014) or other.

I argue in this article that abject places, although despised, reviled and cast off from the self, can also serve as ontic spaces for collective actors and therefore ‘a major ingredient of collective identity formation’ (Kinnvall, 2004: 753). One example is the preservation of the German Nazi death and concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oświęcim (Poland). Julia Kristeva shares her experience of seeing a heap of children’s shoes symbolizing death. ‘The abjection of Nazi crimes reaches here its apex’ she writes, ‘when death interferes with childhood which is supposed to save us from death’ (Kristeva, 1982: 4). While this is an example of abjection as a personal experience, the camp is universally regarded across Europe and beyond as a symbol of Nazi terror. The site, it could be argued, has been turned through abjection into an ontic space of post-war Europe whose constitutive other, as Ole Wæver succinctly put, has been ‘Europe’s own past which should not be allowed to become its future’ (Wæver, 1998: 90).

Abjection of built environments is a phenomenon well known in the aftermaths of revolutions. As Maria Mälksoo points out, a good case in point is the Soviet-era monument of the Bronze Soldier in Tallinn memorializing the fallen ones in the victorious Great Patriotic War (Mälksoo, 2009). For the Estonians, the Bronze Soldier represents a symbol of the oppressed self during the Soviet regime but also a disturbing reminder of a marginalized and poorly integrated Russian-speaking minority. As Estonia embarked on the process of Euro-Atlantic integration, the monument became ‘a mnemonical abject’ (Mälksoo, 2009: 75). Other iconoclastic practices, from the Roman damnatio memoriae to the recent toppling of statues by the Black Lives Matter movement, all contain elements of abjection (Platt, 2020).

In the remainder of the article, I use the case of an unfinished Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina as an example of an ontic space created through abjection. To fully understand how this site became constitutive of the collective self by being construed as unwelcome and unwanted, it is important first to provide some background information about the context.

The interrupted construction of the Church of Christ the Saviour

In the Serbian nationalist imaginary, Kosovo is the Holy Land, the core ontic space of fundamental importance for national history and identity (Ejdus, 2019: 39–65). Most importantly, it is an area where the invading Turks defeated the medieval Serbian kingdom in a mythologized Kosovo Battle of 1389. From the 14^th century onwards, Kosovo was part of the Ottoman Empire until the Kingdom of Serbia annexed it during the Balkan Wars of 1912/1913. In the interwar period, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia tried to address the chronic insecurity, created by a low-intensity insurgency of the Albanian rebels, by colonizing the province with Serbs and Montenegrins (Jovanović, 2014).

After the Second World War, Kosovo became a province of the Federal Republic of Serbia, which was one of six republics comprising the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. Until 1966 the province was administered heavy-handedly from Belgrade, often through repression of the majority Albanian population. From 1966 until the late 1980s, the Albanians gained the upper hand by gradually increasing their autonomy, especially after the Yugoslav 1974 constitution. During this period, the tables turned, and the province came under the rule of the Albanians-dominated League of Communists of Kosovo. From the late 1970s onwards, the Kosovo Serbs increasingly complained that discrimination and intimidation led to their gradual emigration mostly to other parts of Serbia. Serbian nationalists both in Kosovo and across Serbia mobilized against this process, as in their eyes it was leading to the gradual Albanization of the historic Serbian province and ultimately to its secession (Vladisavljević, 2008).

The authorities in Belgrade long ignored these grievances until the ascent to power of Slobodan Milošević who, despite being a communist, effectively used the rising Serbian nationalism for his power grab. In 1989 he introduced the state of emergency in the province, effectively abolished Kosovo’s autonomy, and introduced a campaign of terror against disloyal Kosovo Albanians (Human Rights Watch, 1999: xi). The Albanian media were shut, and some 150,000 Kosovo Albanians lost their jobs (Pula, 2004: 811). In 1990, Serbian authorities purged Albanian teachers and students from the University of Pristina, turning it into an exclusively Serbian institution. This led to the creation of the parallel university system organized in private houses for some 20,000 Albanian students (Pula, 2004: 814). It was in this context that the construction of the Church of Christ the Saviour began.

The initiative to build a new church in Kosovo’s capital came from the local Serbian community in Pristina, numbering around 40,000 people at the time. On 27 and 28 August 1990, some 2,000 Kosovo Serbs gathered in Grachanitza, a village near Pristina, and signed a petition in which they requested a new church (Jevtić, 1992). They based their request on the fact that their only other church in the city was a small 19^th century St. Nicholas Church outside the city’s outskirts. In response to this, in September 1990 the Municipality of Pristina changed the urbanistic plan to allow construction of a Serbian Orthodox temple on a site within the campus of the University of Pristina (Municipality of Prishtina, 1990). In November 1991, the Milošević-controlled National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia took a parcel of land from the University of Pristina’s downtown campus and gave it to the SOC (National Assembly, 1991).

On December 1992, the foundation stone for the church was laid during a public ceremony while the SOC officials consecrated it (YouTube, 2015). This was small compensation for much bigger land, which had been taken from the SOC by the communist regime through the nationalization programme after World War Two. As most other properties could not be returned, such as the parcels where the Kosovo Parliament and the Kosovo National Theatre were built after the war, the gift to the SOC was also a sign of goodwill after the fall of communism.¹

The construction of the church halted in 1998 when the civil war broke out between the Yugoslav and Serbian security forces on the one side and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) on the other (see Figure 1). The ensuing humanitarian crisis led to the NATO intervention lasting from March to June 1999. After 78 days of aerial bombardment, the war ended with the signing of the Kumanovo Treaty on 9 June 1999 which foresaw the withdrawal of the Yugoslav and Serbian security forces from the province. One day later the United Nations Security Council issued the Resolution 1244 creating the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) to take over the civilian authority in the province and authorizing NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) to move in.

Figure 1.

The unfinished Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina in 2013 (author Arild Vågen). Published under CC BY-SA licence.

Over the next two decades, the fate of the unfinished building turned out to be one of the most complicated disputes poisoning inter-ethnic relations and undermining peacebuilding in Kosovo. The immediate post-war period was characterized by KLA-led violence against the Serbian community, including murder, kidnapping, arson, assaults, evictions, intimidation, looting and theft. This violence was only partly revenge but partly strategic reprisals aimed at the expulsion of the remaining Serbs from Kosovo. By November 1999, this led to the exodus of approximately 100,000 Kosovo Serbs, reducing their total number by 50 % (Boyle, 2010: 199).² Between June 1999 and May 2001, 107 Serbian churches were desecrated and destroyed under the watch of KFOR and the international community (Folić, 2001: 3). Some authors have labelled this revanchism against the Serbs after the arrival of the international forces as ‘reverse ethnic cleansing’ (Boyle, 2010: 207).

The unfinished church in Pristina was not spared from this wave of violence and destruction as Albanian extremists unsuccessfully attempted to destroy the building with explosives and fire (Delaney et al., 2017: 140). The building was then put under the protection of KFOR, and in many years to come there was very little progress made with regard to its status. The Municipality of Pristina tried to revoke the decision and give the land back to the University of Pristina in December 2003. Still, UNMIK annulled this while the Kosovo courts later also upheld the Serbian claim to the property. In March 2004, following two minor incidents, a massive outburst of violence against the Serbian community erupted, leaving behind 19 dead and over 900 injured (De Vrieze, 2004). During the violence which destroyed over 100 Serbian churches, the small St. Nicholas church in Pristina was also burnt to the ground, and some 300–400 remaining Serbs were expelled or left the city, whose Serbian population shrank to a mere two dozen.³ The unfinished church in Pristina, however, was not affected and continued to linger in a state of limbo.

In 2007, the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General on Kosovo’s future status Martti Ahtisaari issued the Comprehensive Proposal for the Kosovo Status Settlement. In addition to proposing supervised independence for Kosovo, one of the main provisions of the Plan was also to guarantee the property of the SOC (UN, 2007: 7). As Belgrade opposed the Plan, Kosovo issued a unilateral declaration of independence on 17 February 2008. The Republic of Serbia, Kosovo Serbs and the SOC all vigorously rejected this as an illegal and dangerous act against the territorial integrity, sovereignty and identity of Serbia (Ejdus, 2018). In 2011 Belgrade and Pristina started normalizing their relationships and signed the Brussels Agreement, negotiated under the supervision of the EU, in April 2013.

Despite these developments accompanied by active efforts to find a solution to the unfinished building, the site continues to be an apple of discord between the Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. The vast majority of the Kosovo Albanians oppose the completion of what they see as ‘the Milošević church’ and prefer either its destruction or transformation into a museum.⁴ The University of Pristina questioned the property claim of the SOC and in 2012 requested the reversal of the decision to give the property to the SOC. In 2015, the Basic Court in Pristina ruled in favour of the SOC, and this ruling was confirmed by the Kosovo Appeals Court on 27 September 2017 (Blic, 2017b). Since then, the University of Pristina and Kosovo institutions have been obstructing any construction works or even clean-up inside or outside the building. In 2016, for example, the SOC officials entered the object and started cleaning the trash and removing abusive graffiti inside the church. However, the clean-up was prevented by the city’s construction inspectors as the SOC did not have a permit for it, even though permits are not required for activities inside buildings (Radio KIM, 2016).⁵ Any changes to the status of the site, despite being aspired to by both Serbs, Albanians and the international community, have therefore been stuck in a legal–political deadlock between these different domestic and international stakeholders.

Ontological zero-sum game and abjection of the unfinished church

While there is no doubt that the above-described legal–political impasse hinders the resolution of this dispute, a closer look reveals that the deeper cause of the dispute is the fact that it impinges on the healthy sense of self of all parties concerned. To be more precise, I contend that both Albanians and Serbs have construed the dispute over the unfinished church as an ontological zero-sum game or a strategic interaction driven by their mutually exclusive self-identity needs. Proposals preferred by the Kosovo Albanian community, to destroy the building or turn it into a museum, are unacceptable to the Kosovo Serbs as not only an attack on SOC’s property but an affront to their collective dignity and identity. The intention of the Kosovo Serb community to complete the construction, on the other hand, is seen by the Kosovo Albanians as an insulting vindication of the Milošević-era repression and discrimination.

As an unintended consequence of this stalemate, the unfinished building has been turned into an abject ontic space, i.e. an unwanted material extension of collective selves of both parties in the conflict. It is an abandoned and aesthetically ridiculed site, used as a toilet, dark tourist attraction and a setting for eerie videos, but also loathed for what it symbolizes. In the rest of the section, I unpack how the unfinished church serves as an abject ontic space for both communities.

The abject from the Kosovo Albanian point of view

The Kosovo Albanians abjected the site as a symbol of the repressive Serbian rule in the 1990s, and of the collective humiliation that the Kosovo Albanians had to endure. As such they see the unfinished church differently from other much older religious sites belonging to the SOC in Kosovo. For the vast majority of Kosovo Albanians, especially those old enough to remember the atrocities committed by the Serbian regime in the 1990s, the completion of the church’s construction is therefore utterly unacceptable.⁶ As put by one Kosovo Albanian cultural heritage expert, who was a student of architecture in one of the private universities at the time:

That very building is different from all other structures of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo. It comes from the time of Slobodan Milošević who stole it from the campus of the University of Pristina. During that time, Albanian students weren’t even able to enter the campus of the university.⁷

Another reason why the unfinished church is creating a deep unease among the Kosovo Albanians is that it unsettles one of the master narratives of Kosovo Albanians as the sole victims of the war. In particular, the unfinished church stands as a reminder of the exodus of virtually the entire population of approximately 40,000 Serbs. They had once lived in Pristina, and made up 39 per cent of the city’s population in 1999 (Boyle, 2010: 200). In the words of Živojin Rakočević, a Serbian novelist and journalist from Grachanitza, which is today one of the few remaining Serbian enclaves near Pristina, the unfinished church’s ‘big golden cross is, despite everything, a symbol of one city and an invitation for the expulsed ones to return’ (Rakočević, 2019).

The Kosovo Albanians have attempted time and again to rewrite the symbolism of the site and transform it from the site of Serbian victimization into a symbol of Kosovo Albanian suffering. Unconfirmed stories of Kosovo Albanians being tortured or killed inside the unfinished church have circulated since the 1990s. Over the past years, it has been rumoured that Albanians were buried next to the church, even buried into the foundation stone.⁸ Hence, the site next to the church has been twice excavated, first in 2016 and then in 2019, by the Kosovo authorities for alleged mass graves of Kosovo Albanians supposedly executed by the Serbs during the 1998/1999 war (Danas, 2019; Ristić, 2016). Nonetheless, on both occasions, nothing was found.⁹

While there seems to be a consensus among the Kosovo Albanians that the completion of the church in Pristina is utterly unacceptable, they disagree on what should be done with the site. Several calls have been made to demolish the building. In 2003, the Municipality of Pristina officially proposed this as one among several options for the building (Delaney et al., 2017: 140). The prospect of destruction was discussed again in 2013 when the Assembly of Kosovo adopted the Legalisation Law which foresaw a possibility of legalizing illegally built structures, estimated to be around 30,000 in Pristina alone. The SOC did not submit in due course its legalization application for the unfinished Church of Christ the Saviour which, as a result, became eligible for removal. In 2016, another attempt was made to destroy the building by setting it on fire (YouTube, 2016). In the same year, students of the University of Pristina demonstrated against the plans of the SOC to complete the Church of Christ the Saviour and demanded its demolition (Morina, 2016).

The destruction of the church, although preferred by hard-liners among the Kosovo Albanians, is also creating a deep unease among more progressive segments of the Kosovar society.¹⁰ In addition to identification with the Albanian nation and the Kosovar state borne out of the struggle with the Serbs, these Kosovars also identify with Europe and the West more broadly (Jano, 2013). This collective identification of the Kosovars with the Euro-Atlantic area is based on the premise that ‘the condition for independence is to subscribe to a Western/European supranational identity’ (Ingimundarson, 2007: 97). Kosovo’s flag, for example, features six stars representing its six ethnic communities, and to be as inclusive as possible its anthem has no official lyrics.

Accordingly, the potential destruction of the unfinished church is seen by many as totally incompatible not only with the Kosovar multi-ethnic character but also with its aspirations to join the Euro-Atlantic club of liberal democracies. The former KLA leader and Kosovo’s President Hashim Thaçi, who opposed the destruction of the unfinished church, expressed this sentiment by saying that ‘Kosovo cannot go to Europe if it destroys churches and mosques’ (Rukovici, 2016). Many progressive and pro-Western Kosovo Albanians share similar concerns. As the former advisor to the President of Kosovo Garentina Kraja put it, Kosovo is today building ‘a state which derives its legitimacy in part from how it treats its minorities’ and therefore ‘must never again become a place where religious monuments are razed to the ground’ (Kraja, 2016). The unfinished church hence became an abject space whose unstable symbolism of an oppressed self threatens to collapse into its opposite – a symbol of an oppressive self. To fend this off and stabilize the desired symbolism, Kraja and other progressive Kosovo Albanians have suggested turning the building into a museum devoted to the victims of the Milošević regime and Serbian nationalism.

Despite these restraints among the more liberally minded segments of the Kosovar society, the unfinished church would have probably been destroyed had it not been for the UNMIK and KFOR, who prevented this.¹¹ Although most Western states have supported Kosovo independence and state-building, the international community also sees itself as the guarantor of the multi-ethnic nature of the Kosovo state enshrined in the Ahtisaari plan.¹² That is why it considers the eventual destruction of an unfinished church as a direct affront to its role and legitimacy in Kosovo.¹³ By protecting the Kosovo Serbs, their property and their churches, the international community in Kosovo is defending the humanitarian justification of its presence in the province as well as the multi-ethnic character of the Kosovar state in which it has invested so much.

The abject from the Kosovo Serb point of view

From the Kosovo Serbs’ perspective, the unfinished church also represents an abject ontic space. For them, it is not only a church which failed to materialize, but also a symbol of their dire status as an excluded and rejected community in Kosovo. Unsurprisingly, Kosovo Serbs do not see the church as an instrument of repression by the Serbian regime. They often reiterate that neither Milošević (Ničić, 2015) nor the then Serbian Patriarch Pavle expressed enthusiasm for the construction of the church during the 1990s.¹⁴ In the words of father Sava Janjić, the abbot of Visoki Dechani Monastery, ‘our Eparchy was one of the most vocal opponents of the Milošević regime, a supporter of the opposition and an opponent of discrimination of Albanians at the time.’¹⁵ The Kosovo Serbs also often point out that the project to build the new church was a local bottom-up initiative of the Serbs from Pristina who simply needed a place which can host more than 150 worshipers.¹⁶ The only other church in the city was the 19^th century St Nicholas church, which was too small for the capital of the autonomous province and its approximately 40,000-strong Serbian community. In stark contrast to the above-discussed memories of Kosovo Albanians, one of the Kosovo Serbs who studied at the University of Pristina at the time recalls:

I was studying in the nearby library and watching as this church was being built, as the craftsmen struggled to finish it. These are the memories that stayed with me forever. And then somebody tells me that it’s ‘a mighty church’ of ‘the mighty Milošević’. This is nonsense!¹⁷

For the Kosovo Serbs, the dispute over the site is, however, much more than about property, place of worship or even the heritage of Slobodan Milošević. For the SOC, all land in Kosovo is sacred so maintaining a presence there is a ‘holy duty’. A part of this discourse is a narrative about the longstanding victimization of the Christian and civilized Serbs defending the Holy Land from the barbarian others, from the Turks onwards. For example, on the official website of the SOC’s Diocese in Kosovo, it presents itself as ‘the bulwark towards the infidel, non-Slavs and non-Serbs’ whose over 1000-year-long history is marked by the ‘Golgotha-like challenges during the Turkish rule’ some of which ‘unfortunately persist until this day’ (Eparchy, n.d.). This broader discourse about Kosovo as the Serbian Holy Land and a symbol of victimization only amplifies the narrative that the unfinished church in Pristina represents a living witness of the Albanian atrocities over the Kosovo Serbs. As Sava Janjić put it, ‘this temple is a symbol of the suffering of our Church and our community which has been shrunk in Pristina to only a few old people and priests in the St. Nicholas Church’.¹⁸

Many Kosovo Serbs share this sentiment that the prospect of the unfinished church’s destruction is nothing but yet another humiliation and a stepping stone to complete Albanization and ethnic cleansing of the Serbs from Pristina and Kosovo. They see the unfinished church as a living proof of their discrimination and a truth-telling site that attests to the true nature of the Kosovo state built on ethnic cleansing and exclusion of the Serbs. The unfinished building has become an unpleasant witness to all this, and the entire political class in Kosovo wants to remove it. In the words of Živojin Rakočević, ‘Now only this temple remains as a symbol that needs to be destroyed’ he says and ‘they are done with the Serbs’ (Radio Mitrovica Sever, 2019). Many Serbs outside Kosovo have shared the anxiety over the proposed destruction. An example is the address of the Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dačić to the United Nations Security Council on 16 November 2016:

The Church, the only remaining trace and symbol of the presence of Orthodox Christianity in downtown Pristina in which over 40,000 Serbs lived in the period before 1999, has been ‘designated’ for destruction, just as every other thing Serbian, destroyed or expelled from this and many other places in Kosovo and Metohija (B92, 2016).

In contrast to the Kosovo Albanians, among whom there is a debate on what should be done with the unfinished church, for the Kosovo Serbs its completion does not have an alternative. However, while the prospect of destruction is unacceptable for obvious reasons, it only confirms the Serbian victim self-identity narratives. As one interviewee pointed out, ‘the Kosovo Serbs, or maybe Belgrade, would secretly desire for the unfinished temple to be razed to the ground because it would then be a final confirmation of their victim narrative.’¹⁹ When it comes to the proposal to turn the building into a museum, this is also not considered because, unlike in Catholicism and Protestantism, the Serbian Orthodox tradition does not allow deconsecration of churches.²⁰ As the Kosovo Serb cultural heritage expert put it, ‘the SOC has a big authority, and since the moment when they ruled out any other use for the building as impossible, nobody else has thought about alternatives.’²¹

Over the years, the unfinished church, therefore, turned into an abject ontic space that generates mixed emotions for the Kosovo Serbs. With its transitory nature, it upsets them as if it was a corpse, ‘death infecting life’ (Kristeva, 1982: 4), and ‘a waste, transitional matter, mixture . . . the opposite of the spiritual, of the symbolic, and of divine law’ (Kristeva, 1982: 109). In the words of one Kosovo Serb: ‘the temple’s gold-plated cross stands as a reminder that we used to live there. The unfinished church creates sadness, frustration and anger because we would like to complete it, but we are not allowed’.²² As a one-time object of desire, it has been lost. However, as there has been no closure; mourning over the dead body has turned into melancholia.²³

The unfinished church’s transitory nature also feeds a fantasy that the corpse can still resurrect one day. The trope of resurrection was built into the narrative of the church from the very beginning, implied already by the name ‘Christ the Saviour’. As the Bishop Atanasije explained, the building of the church was meant to reflect ‘the undying and insatiable spirit of Serbian St. Sava’s and St. Lazar’s people’ (Jevtić, 1992).²⁴ Its construction, as he put it, was supposed to ‘resurrect our national and spiritual identity, our determination for the heavenly kingdom and for unchanging values of pure national character that no tyranny, either Turkish, Islamic, communist or Albanian, could extinguish, deny or destroy’ (Jevtić, 1992).

The fantasy of resurrection is embedded in the broader cyclical understanding of history shared by many Serbian clero-nationalists. According to it, the current weakness of the Serbs in Kosovo is only a temporary phase, analogous to the centuries-long Turkish occupation, which is expected to be superseded with Serbia’s Phoenix-like rebirth. Echoing a trope which has been circulating since the early 1980s, the Serbian Patriarch Irinej, for example, has often compared the Serbian longing for Kosovo to the Jewish 2,000-years-long yearning for the return to Jerusalem (Subotić, 2019: 87, 90, see also Ejdus and Subotić, 2014).

The unfinished church in Pristina has been part and parcel of this longing from the very outset. During the ceremony of laying down the foundation stone and its consecration, Bishop Artemije said: ‘Today a huge God’s miracle has happened in front of our eyes. Today, the wishes, thoughts, emotions and prayers of generations upon generations of our people since the Battle of Kosovo until this day, have been granted’ (YouTube, 2015: 25:32–27:30). These narratives persist until this day. As the Serbian Bishop Teodosije put it during the 2017 Christmas celebration held inside the unfinished church: ‘we came into the Temple the Christ the Saviour here in Pristina because we wanted to say “Christ has arisen” for the first time in our Diocese in this holy martyred temple [. . .] We mustn’t forget this city and this holy land of Kosovo and Metohija we are living on’ (Blic, 2017a).²⁵

The above-described ontological zero-sum logic of the dispute between the Kosovo Albanians and the Kosovo Serbs over the fate of the unfinished Church of Christ the Saviour has led to a stalemate. The status quo has been perpetuated by the influential role of the international community, which has had either formal (in the early 2000s) or informal (in recent years) veto power over any decisions made by Kosovo institutions deemed to endanger minority rights, the multi-ethnic character of the Kosovo state and overall stability. In the absence of any action, the building has over the years become an abject space initially squatted by Roma and homeless people, used as a public toilet and free climbing area, a dark tourist attraction for foreign visitors, and an infernal looking setting for Islamic state propaganda films (Kraja, 2017: 9) and creepy music videos (YouTube, 2014). The site, therefore, both repels and attracts. This jouissance, often violent and painful, in the words of Kristeva, ‘causes the abject to exist as such’ (Kristeva, 1982: 9).

Everyone seems to agree that the unfinished building direly needs a solution, as it keeps haunting both sides as an unwanted symbol. Sociologist Ismail Hanani compares it to ‘a ticking bomb’ which was planted during the time of Milošević and which can always explode (Bislimi, 2016). The unfinished structure, in the words of Kosovo Serb cultural heritage expert,

carries such a contingent of emotions that could burst into a torrent if mishandled. This is why it cannot be solved partially without the conclusion of the final settlement agreement between Belgrade and Pristina. Until then, it’s so emotional that any rational proposal faces huge resistance.²⁶

Despite obviously being an abject space – liminal, abandoned and unwanted – it nevertheless also serves as a material extension of collective selves. For the Kosovo Albanians, the unfinished building symbolizes the time when they were weak and oppressed by its constitutive other – the Serbian nationalist regime led by Slobodan Milošević in the 1990s. The prospect of a completed church is even more disturbing as it threatens to resurrect the other and raises the spectre of the Serbian return to Kosovo. In its current form, hence, the unfinished church stabilizes dominant Kosovo Albanian identity narratives about the self-confident, independent self, liberated from the Serbian yoke, but also raises disturbing questions about the displacement of some 40,000 Pristinian Serbs. For the Kosovo Serbs and the SOC, on the other hand, the unfinished church also disturbs the healthy sense of self with its transient and liminal character, as an embalmed corpse, stuck in a limbo, awaiting closure. However, as tangible evidence and a spontaneous monument of the martyred, tortured but also resilient Serbian self, the site also serves as a material expression of the Serbian national storylines of victimization, resilience and resurrection in the sacred ground of Kosovo.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that material environments can be turned into ontic spaces – physical extensions of self-identity narratives – also through abjection. I illustrated my claim in a case study of the unfinished Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina. Although the war ended in 1999, the unfinished church has been lingering in limbo ever since. On the surface of things, the dispute appears to be a legal property dispute between the University of Pristina and the SOC.

On a closer examination, however, I have demonstrated that the unfinished church has been so difficult to resolve due to an ontological zero-sum game between the two communities. For the Kosovo Albanians, it is a symbol of the oppressive Milošević rule and the weak and humiliated self that they want to leave behind. It is also a constant and unpleasant reminder of the expulsion of virtually the entire Kosovo Serb community that once lived in Pristina. For the Kosovo Serbs, on the other hand, the building represents an abject, which is in the words of Kristeva, ‘the violence of mourning for an object what has already been lost’ (Kristeva, 1982: 15). As a result of this stalemate, the unfinished church in the city centre has been turned into a public toilet, a no-man’s land, a grisly and uncanny place which both repels and attracts. As a metaphoric corpse and a liminal and ambivalent in-between object hovering over the boundaries of collective subjectivities of Serbs and Albanians, it is threatening to collapse the boundary between self and other, victim and oppressor. As such, the unfinished church both disturbs their healthy sense of self and yet is constitutive of how they construe each other.

These theoretical and empirical insights have important implications for several bodies of scholarly research. First, the concept of abject ontic spaces moves forward the ongoing investigation of materiality within ontological security studies but also the broader spatial turn in IR (Brigg, 2020) and its growing interest in the everyday (Björkdahl et al., 2019). Second, it opens up new space for debate and exchange between the emotional and the material turns in IR, scholarships which have thus far mostly talked past each other. Third, these insights also have implications for broader debates on the politics of cultural heritage, which has most recently been placed front and centre of world politics by the decision to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque.

These insights also raise several additional questions that could guide future research. This article conceptually and empirically looks solely at the abjection of ontic spaces. It would be interesting to widen the perspective and study how the processes of projection, introjection and abjection are simultaneously implicated in the production of different ontic spaces. Second, future research could unpack different emotional aspects of abject ontic spaces. In particular, it would be useful to inquire how the emotions of disgust and fear, implied in abjection, are related to anxiety which is so central for ontological security scholarship. Third, it would be worth exploring how the abjection of material environments is tied to the abjection of bodies. Does the abjection of space enhance securitization of abject bodies or it can also serve as its substitute? Also, an abject may be ineliminable, but there are different political strategies of dealing with it and they are worth investigating. Finally, it would also be interesting to use ideas from ontological security studies to dive into different policy solutions to this or other similar disputes. If the problem about the unfinished church is not primarily about the property but rather about identity and emotions, can this insight help us devise a solution which could satisfy all identity claims at once? One such idea could be a transformation of the unfinished church into a jointly led museum of civil co-existence of Serbs and Albanians in Pristina over the centuries.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers as well as participants at the EWIS workshop on Anxiety and International Relations held online on 1–3 July 2020, and in particular John Cash, Nina Cathrin Krickel-Choi and Rok Zupančič, for their valuable feedback to the earlier version of this article.

Funding

This article has been funded by the project ‘Political Identity of Serbia in Regional and Global Context’, No. 179076 at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Political Sciences, financed by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia.

ORCID iD

Filip Ejdus

Notes

Author biography

Filip Ejdus is Associate Professor of international security at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade. His most recent book is Crisis and Ontological Insecurity: Serbia’s Anxiety over Kosovo’s Secession (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). He is President of the Board of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy and (co)Editor in Chief of Journal of Regional Security.

References

Arya

(2014) Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Auchter

(2013) Border monuments: Memory, counter-memory, and (b) ordering practices along the US-Mexico border. Review of International Studies 39(2): 291–311.

B92 (2016) UN Security Council session on Kosovo: Full Text of Serbian FM’s address. Available at: https://www.b92.net/eng/insight/pressroom.php?yyyy=2016&mm=11&nav_id=99729; https://www.blic.rs/vesti/drustvo/smigic-zemljiste-je-uredno-registrovano-kao-vlasnistvo-crkve/hqbhj7p (accessed 31 December 2019).

Bislimi

(2016) Priština: šta sa crkvom u univerzitetskom dvorištu, 20 September. Available at: https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/kosovo-crkva/28002872.html (accessed 31 December 2019).

Björkdahl

Hall

Svensson

(2019) Everyday international relations: Editors’ introduction. Cooperation and Conflict 54(2): 123–130.

Blic (2017a) Božić obeležen u Hramu Hrista Spasa u Prištini, 7 January 2017. Available at: https://www.blic.rs/vesti/drustvo/bozic-obelezen-u-hramu-hrista-spasa-u-pristini/t3dcqt1(accessed 31 December 2019).

Blic (2017b) Zemljište je uredno registrovano kao vlasništvo crkve, 13 November. Available at: https://www.blic.rs/vesti/drustvo/smigic-zemljiste-je-uredno-registrovano-kao-vlasnistvo-crkve/hqbhj7p (accessed 31 December 2019).

Boyle

(2010) Revenge and reprisal violence in Kosovo: Analysis. Conflict, Security & Development 10(2): 189–216.

Brigg

(2020) The spatial-relational challenge: Emplacing the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies. Cooperation and Conflict. Epub ahead of print 3 September. DOI: 10.1177/0010836720954479.

10.

Chan

(2020) In moderation of ‘strangers’: Terrorism, ontological (In) security and counter narratives in Malaysia. Critical Studies on Security 8(1): 28–45.

11.

Commissariat for Refugees and Migration (n.d.) Internally displaced persons. Available at: http://www.kirs.gov.rs/wb-page.php?kat_id=199&lang=2 (accessed 31 December 2019).

12.

Coward

(2008) Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction. London: Routledge.

13.

Cupać

(2020) The anxiety dilemma: Locating the Western Balkans in the age of anxiety. Journal of Regional Security 15(1): 7–38.

14.

Danas (2019) Završeno iskopavanje u Prištini, nema masovne grobnice u kampusu Univerziteta, 29 November. Available at: https://www.danas.rs/drustvo/zavrseno-iskopavanje-u-pristini-nema-masovne-grobnice-u-kampusu-univerziteta/ (accessed 31 December 2019).

15.

Dayaratne

(2012) Landscapes of nation: Constructing national identity in the deserts of Bahrain. National Identities 14(3): 309–327.

16.

De Vrieze

(2004) Kosovo after the March 2004 Crisis. Helsinki Monitor 15(3): 147–159.

17.

Delaney

Van Der Haar

Van Tatenhove

(2017) ‘If this was a normal situation’: Challenges and potentials for deliberative democratic peacebuilding in Kosovo’s emerging governance networks. Public Administration and Development 37(2): 136–152.

18.

Dupuis

Thorns

(1998) Home, home ownership and the search for ontological security. The Sociological Review 46(1): 24–47.

19.

Eberle

(2019) Narrative, desire, ontological security, transgression: Fantasy as a factor in international politics. Journal of International Relations and Development 22(1): 243–268.

20.

Ejdus

(2017) ‘Not a heap of stones’: Material environments and ontological security in international relations. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 30(1): 23–43.

21.

Ejdus

(2018) Critical situations, fundamental questions and ontological insecurity in world politics. Journal of International Relations and Development 21(4): 883–908.

22.

Ejdus

(2019) Crisis and Ontological Insecurity: Serbia’s Anxiety Over Kosovo’s Secession. London: Palgrave.

23.

Ejdus

Subotić

(2014) Kosovo as Serbia’s sacred space: Governmentality, pastoral power, and sacralization of territories. In: Ognjenović

Ozelić

(eds) Politicization of Religion, the Power of Symbolism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 159–184.

24.

Eparchy (N/A) Istorijat eparhije. Available at: http://www.eparhija-prizren.com/sr/eparhija (accessed 31 December 2019).

25.

Folić

(2001) Crucified Kosovo: Destroyed and desecrated Serbian Orthodox Churches in Kosovo and Metohija (June 1999-May 2001). Prizren – Gračanica: Serbian Orthodox Church.

26.

Frowd

(2014) State personhood, abjection and the United States’ HIV travel ban. Millennium 42(3): 860–878.

27.

Giddens

(1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

28.

Giddens

(1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

29.

Giddens

(1991) Modernity and Self Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

30.

Grenville

(2007) Conservation as psychology: Ontological security and the built environment. International Journal of Heritage Studies 13(6): 447–461.

31.

Grenville

(2015) Ontological security in a post-crash world – A tale of two Yorkshire cities. Heritage & Society 8(1): 43–59.

32.

Halink

(2014) The Icelandic mythscape: Sagas, landscapes and national identity. National Identities 16(3): 209–223.

33.

Heath-Kelly

(2015) Securing through the failure to secure? The ambiguity of resilience at the bombsite.”. Security Dialogue 46(1): 69–85.

34.

Heath-Kelly

(2020) Memory loss: Post terrorist sites in Norway. The Architectural Review, 10 January. Available at: https://www.architectural-review.com/places/europe/scandinavia/memory-loss-post-terrorist-sites-in-norway/10045911.article (accessed 16 July 2020).

35.

Heynen

(1999) Petrifying memories: Architecture and the construction of identity. The Journal of Architecture 4(4): 369–390.

36.

Hiscock

Kearns

MacIntyre

, et al. (2001) Ontological security and psycho-social benefits from the home: Qualitative evidence on issues of tenure. Housing, Theory and Society 18(1–2): 50–66.

37.

Human Rights Watch (1999) Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: A Week of Terror in Drenica, Humanitarian Law Violations in Kosovo. Report. https://www.hrw.org/report/1999/02/01/week-terror-drenica/humanitarian-law-violations-kosovo# (accessed 1 March 2019).

38.

Huysmans

(1998) Security! What do you mean? From concept to thick signifier. European Journal of International Relations 4(2): 226–255.

39.

Ingimundarson

(2007) The politics of memory and the reconstruction of Albanian national identity in postwar Kosovo. History & Memory 19(1): 95–123.

40.

Janjić

(2015) Hari Holkeri Head of UN Administration in #Kosovo in 2003 & Farid Zarif UNMIK Head in 2012 confirm Church property. Available at: https://twitter.com/SavaJanjic/status/783751540611883008 (accessed 31 December 2019).

41.

Jano

(2013) Kosovar multi-layer identity: What is the same, different and in common with Albanian identity. Journal of European and International Affairs 1(1): 27–40.

42.

Jevtić

(1992) Neugasivi svetosavski duh. Vidovdanski Glasnik 48–49.

43.

Jones

(2006) The sociology of architecture and the politics of building: The discursive construction of Ground Zero. Sociology 40(3): 549–565.

44.

Jovanović

(2014) Slike Jedne Neuspele Integracije: Kosovo, Makedonija, Srbija, Jugoslavija. Beograd: Fabrika knjiga.

45.

Kaufmann

Zimmer

(1998) In search of the authentic nation: Landscape and national identity in Canada and Switzerland. Nations and Nationalism 4(4): 483–510.

46.

Kinnvall

(2004) Globalization and religious nationalism: Self, identity, and the search for ontological security. Political Psychology 25(5): 741–767.

47.

Kinnvall

(2006) Globalization and Religious Nationalism in India: The Search for Ontological Security. London: Routledge.

48.

Kinnvall

Mitzen

(2017) An introduction to the special issue: Ontological securities in world politics. Cooperation and Conflict 52(1): 3–11.

49.

Koranyi

Cusack

(2014) The making of landscape in modernity. National Identities 16(3): 191–195.

50.

Kraja

(2016) A Symbol of Repression which should Remain Just That, Kosovo 2.0, 4 October. Available at: https://kosovotwopointzero.com/en/a-symbol-of-repression-which-should-remain-just-that/ (accessed 31 December 2019).

51.

Kraja

(2017) The Islamic State Narrative in Kosovo: Deconstructed One Story at the Time. Prishtina: Kosovo Centre for Security Studies.

52.

Kristeva

(1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia; Princeton, NJ: University Presses of California.

53.

Krolikowski

(2008) State personhood in ontological security theories of international relations and Chinese nationalism: A sceptical view. The Chinese Journal of International Politics 2(1): 109–133.

54.

Lacan

(1977) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London: Penguin.

55.

Laing

(1990 [1960]) The Divided Self: And Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. London: Penguin Books.

56.

Leach

(2006) 9/11. Diacritics 33(3): 75–92.

57.

Lupovici

(2012) Ontological dissonance, clashing identities, and Israel’s unilateral steps towards the Palestinians. Review of International Studies 38(4): 809–833.

58.

McSweeney

(1999) Security, Identity and Interests: A Sociology of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

59.

Mälksoo

(2009) Liminality and contested Europeanness: Conflicting memory politics in the Baltic space. In: Berg

Ehin

(eds) Identity and Foreign Policy. London: Routledge, pp. 65–84.

60.

Mitzen

(2006) Ontological security in world politics: State identity and the security dilemma. European Journal of International Relations 12(3): 341–370.

61.

Mitzen

(2018) Feeling at home in Europe: Migration, ontological security, and the political psychology of EU bordering. Political Psychology 39(6): 1373–1387.

62.

Morina

(2016) Kosovo students protest against Serbian Church, Birn, 20 September. Available at: https://balkaninsight.com/2016/09/20/pristina-students-with-actions-against-orthodox-church-09-19-2016/ (accessed 31 December 2019).

63.

Municipality of Prishtina (1990) Odluka o izmeni o dopuni odluke o usvajanju detaljnog urbanističkog plana univerzitetskog centra u Prištini, Izvršno veće skupštine opštine Priština, 26.septembra 1990. broj 110-74/90-02.

64.

National Assembly (1991) Rešenje Narodne Skupštine Republike Srbije br.407, 28. novembra 1991.

65.

Neumann

(2018) Halting time: Monuments to alterity. Millennium 46(3): 331–351.

66.

Newton

(2008) Emotional attachment to home and security for permanent residents in caravan parks in Melbourne. Journal of Sociology 44(3): 219–232.

67.

Ničić

(2015) Hram SPC u Prištini – test za buduće odnose, Voice of America, 5 April. Available at: https://www.glasamerike.net/a/hram-hrista-spasa-u-pristini-osetljivo-politicko-pitanje/2707549.html (accessed 31 December 2019).

68.

Padgett

(2007) There’s no place like (a) home: Ontological security among persons with serious mental illness in the United States. Social Science & Medicine 64(9): 1925–1936.

69.

Palmer

(1998) From theory to practice experiencing the nation in everyday life. Journal of Material Culture 3(2): 175–199.

70.

Pavle (1992) Nauk patrijarha Pavla o podizanju Crkve Sv. Spasa, Vidovdanski glasnik, 18.

71.

Platt

(2020) Why People are Toppling Monuments to Racism. Scientific American, 3 July. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-people-are-toppling-monuments-to-racism/ (accessed 18 July 2020).

72.

Pula

(2004) The emergence of the Kosovo ‘Parallel State’ 1988–1992. Nationalities Papers 32(4): 797–826.

73.

Radio KIM (2016) Direkcija za gradnju traži dozvolu za krečenje u hramu, 15 September. Available at: https://www.radiokim.net/vesti/religija/direkcija-za-gradnju-trazi-dozvolu-za-krecenje-u-hramu.html (accessed 31 December 2019).

74.

Radio Mitrovica Sever (2019) Rakočević: Licemerne tvrdnje gradonačelnika Prištine, 29 August. Available at: http://radiomitrovicasever.com/2020/01/03/predstavnici-privremenog-organa-opstine-obilic-obisli-socijalno-ugrozene-u-plemetini-i-babinom-mostu/ (accessed 31 December 2019).

75.

Rakočević

(2019) Nema masovne grobnice kod Hrama Hrista spasa. Politika, 5 December. Available at: http://www.politika.rs/scc/clanak/443412/Nema-masovne-grobnice-kod-Hrama-Hrista-Spasa (accessed 31 December 2019).

76.

Ristić

(2016) Kosovo’ mass grave’ fails to yield bodies. Available at: https://balkaninsight.com/2016/07/29/kosovo-mass-grave-failed-to-yield-bodies-07-29-2016/ (accessed 31 December 2019).

77.

Rukovici

(2016) Što sa srpskom crkkom u Prištini? 3 October. Available at: https://www.bilten.org/?p=15226 (accessed 31 December 2019).

78.

Rumelili

(2014) Conflict Resolution and Ontological Security: Peace Anxieties. London: Routledge.

79.

Rumelili

(2015) Identity and desecuritisation: The pitfalls of conflating ontological and physical security. Journal of International Relations and Development 18(1): 52–74.

80.

Sand

(2010) The Invention of the Jewish People. London: Verso Books.

81.

Sand

(2012) The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland. London: Verso Books.

82.

Scharff

(1996) Object Relations Theory and Practice: An Introduction. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

83.

Silberman

(1995) Promised lands and chosen peoples: The politics and poetics of archaeological narrative. In: Kohl

Fawcett

(eds) Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 249–262.

84.

Skey

(2011) Thank god, I’m back!: (Re) defining the nation as a homely place in relation to journeys abroad. Journal of Cultural Geography 28(2): 233–252.

85.

Steele

(2007) Making Words Matter: The Asian Tsunami, Darfur, and Reflexive Discourse in International Politics. International Studies Quarterly 51(4): 901–925.

86.

Steele

(2008) Ontological Security in International Relations: Self-Identity and the IR State:. London: Routledge.

87.

Steele

(2013) Alternative Accountabilities in Global Politics: The Scars of Violence. London: Routledge.

88.

Subotić

(2016) Narrative, ontological security, and foreign policy change. Foreign Policy Analysis 12(4): 610–627.

89.

Subotić

(2019) The Church, the Nation, and the State: The Serbian Orthodox Church after communism. In: Ramet

(ed.) Orthodox Churches and Politics in Southeastern Europe. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 85–110.

90.

Surlić

Novaković

(2020) Serbian Cultural and Religious Heritage in Kosovo from Ahtisaari’s Special Zones to the Final Status. Belgrade: Institute for Territorial Economic Development.

91.

UN (2007) Letter dated 26 March 2007 from the Secretary-General addressed to the President of the Security Council, 26 March 2007. Available at: https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/Kosovo%20S2007%20168.pdf (accessed 31 December 2019)

92.

Vale

(2014) Architecture, Power and National Identity. London: Routledge.

93.

Väyrynen

(2019) Corporeal Peacebuilding: Mundane Bodies and Temporal Transitions. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

94.

Vladisavljević

(2008) Serbia’s Antibureaucratic Revolution: Milošević, the Fall of Communism and Nationalist Mobilization. Cham: Palgrave.

95.

Wæver

(1998) Security, insecurity, and asecurity in the West European Non-War community. In: Adler

Barnett

(eds) Security Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 69–118.

96.

Weiss

(2010) Establishing roots at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport Garden: Landscapes of national identity. National Identities 12(2): 199–21

97.

YouTube (2014) Era Istrefi ft. Mixey – E dehun, 17 May. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yddX5MB9vig (accessed 31 December 2019).

98.

YouTube (2015) Hram Hrista Spasa u Pristini, Video on Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn-eZkqeu4E&feature=youtu.be (accessed 31 December 2019).

99.

YouTube (2016) Serbia: Orthodox church in Prishtina set ablaze in suspected arson attack, 10 September. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if9m8ewOXts (accessed 31 December 2019).

100.

Zarakol

(2010) Ontological (in) security and state denial of historical crimes: Turkey and Japan. International Relations 24(1): 3–23.