Equal Citizens, Uneven ‘Communities’: Differentiated and Hierarchical Citizenship in Kosovo

This paper uses the case of citizenship in Kosovo to show how despite the constitutionally and legally enshrined promise of equality, 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’. The paper argues that the hierarchy exists not only between the core or dominant community (Albanians) and the non-dominant communities, but between the latter as well.