21. Gëzim Visoka (2019), ‘Metis Diplomacy: The Everyday Politics of Becoming a Sovereign State’, Cooperation and Conflict, 52(2): 167-190.
How do emerging states obtain international recognition and secure membership of international organisations in contemporary world politics? This article explores the everyday politics of becoming a sovereign state in world politics. Using the concept of ‘metis’, this article explores the role of everyday prudent and situated discourses, diplomatic performances, and entanglements in the enactment of sovereign statehood and overcoming external contestation. In exploring the everyday politics of becoming a sovereign state, this article explores Kosovo’s diplomatic approach to becoming a sovereign state by obtaining international recognition and securing membership of international organisations. Drawing on institutional ethnographic research and first-hand observations, this article argues that Kosovo’s diplomatic success in consolidating its sovereign statehood has been the situational assemblage of multiple discourses, practiced through a broad variety of performative actions, and shaped by a complex entanglement with global assemblages of norms, actors, relations, and events. Accordingly, this study contributes to the conceptualisation of the everyday in diplomatic practice by offering an account of how micro-practices feed into macro-practices in world politics.
Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0010836718807503
