Kosovo 25 years on: the high point and end of humanitarian interventions?

In a few days’ time, on 10 June, the international community will mark the 25th anniversary of the end of NATO’s intervention in Kosovo. It began on 23 March 1999 with an air campaign against Serbian forces involved in the repression of the Kosovo Albanian population of Kosovo and went on for 78 days before the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milošević, agreed to throw in the towel and withdraw his special police and paramilitary forces from Kosovo. This was followed by the deployment of 40,000 NATO troops into Kosovo to oversee the departure of the Serbian forces and begin a peacekeeping operation (KFOR). It is still there today, a quarter of a century later, albeit at one-tenth of its original size.

NATO’s Kosovo intervention has generated much impassioned debate that continues to this day about the merits and prerequisites of humanitarian interventions. 

On one side of the debate, supporters point to the successes that justified the alliance’s use of force against a country – the rump Yugoslavia of Serbia and Montenegro) – which had not committed an aggression against any NATO member state. NATO was thus not acting to uphold its basic principle, and obligation, of collective self-defence. Yet supporters point to the degenerating humanitarian crisis in Kosovo, with more civilians being displaced as the violence increased, and the need not to wait until the conflict reached death tolls similar to Bosnia a few years previously before intervening to stop the bloodshed. After NATO’s intervention, the death toll from over a year of fighting between Serbian forces and Kosovo Albanians was estimated at around 10,000. High enough but still far short of the 100,000 plus who were killed in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. Moreover, and contrary to Bosnia, the brief duration of the NATO intervention and the full departure of the Serbian security forces from Kosovo, meant that the Kosovo Albanian refugees were still in the neighbouring countries – namely Albania and North Macedonia – and were able to return quickly to their homes, thereby avoiding another European migration crisis. In sum, Kosovo is often viewed as a successful preventive operation; timely action to avoid a much bigger catastrophe, with a much higher reconstruction bill and refugee resettlement programme falling on the shoulders of the international community. This said, we can only measure with confidence things that have actually happened and not what might have happened. It is impossible to say how many lives were saved because of the NATO intervention but it is reasonable to assume that the death toll of around 10,000 and the number of those displaced would have been significantly higher if NATO had delayed its air campaign or not conducted it at all. Since the end of the air campaign and the introduction of KFOR, Kosovo has not been an unalloyed success story. Tensions between the ethnic Serb and Albanian communities remain high and separation, protest and the occasional shooting have punctuated daily existence. But mass violence on the scale of 1999 has not been repeated and Belgrade and Pristina now deal with each other around the negotiating table rather than on the battlefield.

It is easy for cynics to suggest that we should ‘let wars burn’ until they reach their natural outcome of a clear victor and a clear loser. But apart from the appalling human suffering that prolonged conflicts produce, only in a few cases does unconditional surrender lead to a lasting peace and usually only when the victorious party reaches out to the defeated adversary to reconcile, rebuild and re-integrate into the community of nations. The United States did this with Germany and Japan after World War II, but it is difficult to see Serbia doing this with its rebellious province of Kosovo in 1999 or Putin doing it with Ukraine today. Prolonged conflicts can also spillover onto neighbouring territories and produce a number of de-stabilising knock-on effects, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrates. It is indeed not easy to stop wars once they have started and difficult to mobilise governments into action for things that might happen in faraway places. Much easier when the worst has actually happened for all to see, as was the case with NATO’s previous intervention in Bosnia after the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995. Yet the difficulty of stopping wars does not remove the responsibility to try to do so where intervention is feasible and escalation into wider and riskier conflicts can be avoided. This was arguably the case with Kosovo in 1999.

On the other side of the debate, a high-minded humanitarian intervention – as presented by NATO at the time – has proved paradoxically controversial. In the first place, critics point to the absence of a UN Security Council Resolution specifically authorising the NATO intervention. Russia in particular has made a big issue out of this, seeing the alliance’s action as undermining the authority of the United Nations. Academic experts have debated whether the intervention was still legitimate, if not strictly legal. Others have argued that UN Resolutions, albeit desirable, are not essential, particularly if one obstructionist member of the Security Council is abusing its right of veto to prevent the will of the majority from being implemented. Kosovo has also started a debate as to the extent that other previous UN Resolutions dealing with a particular regional conflict or endorsing general humanitarian principles, such as the protection of civilians or the prevention of genocide, can also be invoked. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, the Security Council passed over 30 Resolutions in the 1990s, most of which were open-ended. Interventionist powers could dip into this archive to choose the specific Resolutions still in force to provide them with a legal basis. Alternatively the option of using the UN General Assembly to provide a UN cover for international action has come back into favour as the Security Council has become polarised once again, after a brief spell of great power cooperation immediately after the end of the Cold War. The US used the General Assembly to bypass the Soviet veto and rally support for a UN endorsed intervention into the Korean War in June 1950 and more recently in two votes to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With 193 countries in the UN today, universality has become an impossible goal. So, at which stage of gathering a majority in the UN does an intervention become legitimate or even legal? For example from two thirds of the vote or just a simple majority? The NATO allies could point out in the case of Kosovo that Russia’s attempts to pass a Resolution in the Security Council condemning the NATO action gained much less support than the efforts of the Western group to get one in favour. But clearly, political and public support for an intervention, no matter how welcome, is not the same as a proper legal basis. Kosovo demonstrated that in certain urgent circumstances a UN veto can be overridden, provided that it is agreed to be a rare exception rather than the opening of Pandora’s box. After the NATO air campaign the alliance quickly replaced itself under the authority of the UN Security Council. Its KFOR mission has operated under UN Resolution 1244 continuously since 1999 and NATO reports to the UN Security Council on its progress every month. Yet a new consensus on what is an adequate legal basis for an action if the Security Council is blocked, or not reformed to remove or modify the veto power, was not created by the Kosovo intervention. In 1999 there was no agreed definition of a legal basis among the 19 allies. They each reached a national position on this question according to what worked best with their attorney generals or chief law officers. The basis in one NATO member state was not the same as in others.

A second criticism concerns the ratio of costs to benefits. “Was it worth the effort?” How many times have we heard that refrain when it comes to military campaigns? As with the legal basis, this area is ambiguous and has given rise to much debate. The NATO air campaign stimulated more Kosovo Albanian resistance to Serbian rule and a harsher crackdown by Milošević’s forces. This produced a higher death toll, war crimes and more forced deportations. Consequently, many observers blamed NATO’s actions for the deteriorating situation and higher level of violence. For them, the cure was worse than the disease, moving a low-intensity conflict into a higher-intensity one. NATO didn’t always help itself by instances of ‘collateral damage’ when it hit the wrong targets – for instance, the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade comes to mind – or hit targets with unexpected civilian casualties, such as the RTS broadcasting centre in Belgrade or a tractor convoy at Djakovica, mistaken for a Serbian military column. Although these targeting mistakes are standard in warfare, they created the impression that civilians in Kosovo and Serbia were also threatened by NATO air strikes and not only by the repression of the government forces on the ground. As Israel is now experiencing with the massive international criticism of its impending military offensive in Rafah in the Gaza Strip, military operations cannot be judged only by whether or not they achieve a strategic objective – here, the elimination of Hamas – but equally by the costs they incur in lost civilian lives, human suffering and more physical damage. The problem for Israel in Gaza is that its calculus of costs versus benefits is very different from that of the rest of the international community for whom security for Israel, no matter how important and legitimate, cannot come at any price in Palestinian casualties. Israel has argued that Hamas is also responsible for these Palestinian casualties by cynically using the population of Gaza as a human shield and depriving it of part of the international humanitarian aid that is able to get into the Strip. Fortunately for NATO, it managed to escape this dilemma in Kosovo. The casualties inflicted by NATO – around 550 according to the best estimates – will always be too many but still a fraction of those inflicted by the Serbian forces over the year of civilian violence in Kosovo. Nonetheless, the problem remains: at what point do the negative consequences of a military operation nullify the validity of its strategic objectives, even if pursued in the cause of self-defence? And at what point is it the responsibility of belligerent states to halt their military campaigns because a humanitarian threshold has been crossed? In his manual on statecraft, “The Prince”, Machiavelli tells us that “the end justifies the means”. But a modern doctrine of intervention needs to reverse this equation and make the means – that is, restraint in warfare using the minimum force to achieve a concrete and realistic objective – justify the strategic end. Conflicts should be fought between regular armed forces under centralised command and any side that uses civilian vulnerabilities to get an advantage perforce violates international law and must be held to account.

Critics of the NATO intervention a quarter of a century ago also weigh in on the issue of unintended consequences. The alliance did not set out to serve as the air force of the Kosovo Liberation Army and break Serbia apart, with Kosovo declaring its independence in 2008. The intervention was justified by the need to protect the Kosovo Albanian population. But military interventions provoke dynamics of their own. Protecting civilians in Kosovo meant that the Serb military and police had to vacate the province for an indefinite period, which ultimately meant permanently. Kosovo was placed under international UN administration, thereby nullifying the authority of the Serb institutions and leaving the political space for the Kosovars to create their own. Ironically, and as had happened in Bosnia with the deployment of the NATO IFOR mission in 1995, the NATO troops on the ground spent their time protecting the minority ethnic Serb population, in contrast to NATO air forces which had protected their Bosnian Muslim and Kosovo Albanian adversaries. A similar situation occurred in Libya where NATO intervened in 2011 to stop the Gaddafi regime from carrying out its threat to massacre the population of Benghazi, which had risen up against the regime during the Arab Spring. Keeping Benghazi protected meant destroying Gaddafi’s army, which in turn meant bringing down the regime and ultimately Gaddafi himself. Without a NATO peacekeeping force on the ground to disarm the militias and buttress an effective government authority, Libya descended into prolonged chaos from which it has still not recovered. A NATO operation designed to uphold human rights and implement the new UN doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect ended up making NATO unpopular across Africa, hindering its ability to build security partnerships with African countries which could have proved useful in addressing terrorism.

In comparison to Libya and NATO’s other major intervention in Afghanistan, the outcome in Kosovo was not so bad , even if this new country has suffered internal polarisation, a lack of universal recognition and ongoing hostile relations with Serbia. But the question that the 1999 air campaign threw up is to what extent do intervening powers need to assess all the long-term consequences that could flow from short-term humanitarian relief objectives? If a humanitarian relief objective is achieved, as was the immediate case in Kosovo or Libya, but longer-term instability or different forms of violence result, does that invalidate the initial intervention? Of course, those intervening powers have a duty to try to forecast the results of their actions and do contingency planning to mitigate the worst scenarios; but this will always be a hazardous exercise riven with uncertainties. And the risk is that, if every intervention comes with long-term commitments to nation-building and solving other people’s problems, no one will ever volunteer to do an operation again. Back in 1999, Kosovo showed how tenuous this delicate balance between immediate and limited and more expansive long-term objectives could be. Bosnia and Kosovo were perhaps the last interventions where the Western powers were prepared to stay for 30 years to rebuild the institutions and economies of war-torn countries. Today the US and the UK are prepared to send some soldiers to Gaza to help deliver relief supplies, but they will stay on offshore ships and offloading pontoons and not put a boot onshore in Gaza itself. Civilians in international relief organisations will have to do the distribution job instead. Gaza is the antithesis of Kosovo; an intervention from over the horizon, like the help in shooting down Iranian missiles and drones fired at Israel, with narrowly focused immediate objectives and little risk of mission creep. At the time of NATO’s Kosovo intervention, there was a great sense of optimism about the West’s ability to use its militaries as a force for good in the world, stopping human rights abuses and building democracy. This optimism is best exemplified by the speech given by then British prime minister, Tony Blair, to the Chicago Global Affairs Council in May 1999 when he drew a picture of the West standing up resolutely to dictators who violated the accepted norms of international behaviour. It was a noble principle but the fact that it was seen to work in Kosovo undoubtedly led prime minister Blair astray when he tried also to apply it to Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003. The credibility test for interventionists, as both Kosovo and Iraq demonstrated, was to link human rights abuses by dictators at home to threats posed by the same dictators to international peace and security, thereby legitimising an infringement of the sovereignty of the states in question. Milošević’s record in sowing chaos across the Western Balkans was well proven in 1999, making NATO’s case for intervening in Kosovo easy to make. On the other hand, proving that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had hidden weapons of mass destruction and was preparing to use them was much harder, and was ultimately impossible.

Twenty five years on, the Kosovo air campaign has left its mark on NATO, but on the EU too.

The alliance’s intervention showed the overwhelming dependence of NATO on the US when conducting any major military operation. The US intelligence agencies drew up 99% of the targets for NATO’s commanders and political authorities to consider – although in the case of the mistaken bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, not always reliably. US aircraft and airbases in Italy were the backbone of the NATO campaign and the US supplied the stealth fighter jets, vital air defence and search and rescue capabilities as well. Kosovo kicked off the burden-sharing debate in the alliance that resonates to this day, as Pentagon planners came to see that many European air forces lacked the night flying capability and precision-guided munitions essential for modern warfare. This alarm at the Europeans’ under-investment in their own defence and over-reliance on the US, and thus inability to conduct even small military combat missions without US involvement, was boosted further when NATO intervened in Libya in 2011. At that time, the US secretary of defence, Robert Gates, came to Brussels and gave his celebrated speech on transatlantic burden sharing at Friends of Europe. He warned the European allies that if they continued to under-invest in their own defence, it would become increasingly difficult for friends of the alliance to make the case for NATO in Washington, particularly to a new generation of US politicians who had not come of age during the Cold War. The unwillingness of the Obama administration to engage in NATO’s Libya operation, preferring to “lead from behind”, seemed to underscore the urgency of Gates’s warning. The Kosovo experience was also dubbed by many in the Pentagon as “war by committee”: a sense that the US had to bail out NATO militarily but have its capabilities reined in by excessive micro-management in targeting by the North Atlantic Council. The administration of George W. Bush took over from Bill Clinton and Donald Rumsfeld became the Secretary of Defence, the US preferred to go it alone, or at least retain full political as well as military control of its operations. “It’s the mission that determines the coalition”, proclaimed Rumsfeld in an effort to distance the Bush administration from the Kosovo campaign. It invaded Afghanistan in 2001 on this basis, despite the fact that NATO invoked its Article 5 collective defence clause for the first time in its history as the Europeans pledged to support the US response to the Al Qaeda attacks on 11 September. Two years later the Bush administration invaded Iraq without much of an effort to form a genuine coalition of the willing either. Yet ultimately the go-it-alone approach proved costly for the US and derailed its chances for success in both theatres. If NATO had gone to Afghanistan in 2001 instead of only in 2003, arguably there would have been better military coverage of the country to enable reconstruction to move ahead during the “golden hour” when the Afghan population was still ready to align with the Western powers. Similarly in Iraq, a properly constituted coalition linked to a better thought-through political strategy might have prevented the chaos and looting and inter-ethnic violence that the US forces seemed powerless or unwilling to contain after their takedown of the Saddam regime.

NATO built useful partnerships with the UN on the ground in Kosovo, which established a civil administration of the province (UNMIK) and with the EU, which took over the responsibility for law and order and training a new multi-ethnic police force. The relationship between the EU police force (EULEX) and the NATO military contingent (KFOR) proved essential in dealing with riots and civil disorder. The two big institutions of Brussels worked together in Kosovo in a way that they failed to do in Afghanistan a decade later. Yet Kosovo regrettably damaged one particular NATO relationship: that with Russia. Former Russian president Boris Yeltsin felt humiliated that Moscow had failed to prevent the NATO air campaign and that Russia had been bypassed in the UN. Domestically, he was under a lot of pressure because NATO was striking Serbia, a country with close historical and cultural links to Russia. The former Russian prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, was brought in by the US to work with the former Finnish president and UN under-secretary, Martti Ahtisaari, to persuade Milošević to withdraw his forces from Kosovo. Yet Russia was not included in the planning for a post-conflict peacekeeping force with the result that Yeltsin decided to force the issue by deploying Russian troops into Kosovo from Bosnia and flying in Russian Spetsnaz units from Russia itself. A military clash with NATO was narrowly averted when NATO allies and partners in central and eastern Europe closed their airspace, thereby preventing the Russian airborne forces from reaching Kosovo. At the time, all seemed to end well. Russia eventually joined KFOR by running the airport in Pristina for several years and three years later Putin attended the NATO Summit in Rome and agreed to establish a NATO-Russia Council. Some years of cooperation on Afghanistan, terrorism and nuclear weapons safety followed. But in reality, Kosovo was a harbinger of trouble ahead in the NATO-Russia relationship. The allies and Moscow were clearly on different trajectories when it came to the Western Balkans and security arrangements elsewhere in Europe, particularly when it came to the concept of sovereignty, the rights of minorities and the quest for spheres of influence. As relations between NATO and Russia soured in the wake of Putin’s incursions into Georgia and Ukraine, the different interpretations NATO and Russia gave to these concepts pushed them increasingly towards confrontation.

Kosovo was also a turning point for the EU. Although NATO provided security, it did not get much involved in the politics of building democratic institutions in Kosovo or in the arduous task of reconciling Belgrade with Pristina. Kosovo was only slowly integrated into some of the partnership activities that NATO offered to other European states under the Partnership for Peace programme. So it was left to the EU to start membership negotiations with Serbia and to use these as a lever to press Belgrade to normalise its relations with Pristina. The EU-sponsored Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue still has a long way to go. Belgrade still refuses to recognise the independence of Kosovo and frequent incidents in northern Kosovo involving the ethnic Serb minority have derailed the Dialogue for months at a time. Yet the EU has succeeded in negotiating a framework agreement on the normalisation of relations between Belgrade and Pristina, although it lacks a plan for its implementation. Soon after the Kosovo conflict the EU developed its skills in crisis management and conflict resolution when the first High Representative, Javier Solana, worked with the NATO Secretary General, George Robertson, to prevent a war in North Macedonia between ethnic Albanian guerilla forces and the army dominated by Slav Macedonians. The peace agreement signed at Lake Ohrid in 2004 has held to this day. So, Kosovo gave substance to the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy which was launched at the EU’s Cologne summit immediately after the conflict ended. And in 2002 in Thessaloniki, the EU leaders proclaimed that all the countries of the Western Balkans would have the prospect of EU membership, thereby tying the future of the Union to its ability to durably pacify and integrate this troubled region into its structures.

Twenty five years on, Kosovo stands as an imperfect but still successful humanitarian intervention when so many others, before and after, have failed. Certainly, NATO’s willingness to keep troops there for a quarter of a century and more until a lasting stability has been achieved is a reason for this more positive outcome and it is a factor not likely to be repeated elsewhere. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya, Kosovo is in Europe and therefore it is more difficult for the EU or NATO to walk away. Yet failure in Iraq and Afghanistan has affected European security too in terms of the majority of refugees flowing towards the EU’s borders Libya for its part has become a major transit centre for migrants. Continued fighting in Kosovo on the other hand would not only have engendered a new refugee crisis in Europe but drawn in the neighbouring countries and sparked a new Balkans conflict. Democracy and EU and NATO integration in the region would have been set back by decades. Yet when this is said, and 25 years on, the question is about the legacy and significance of Kosovo for the future of interventions. Was Kosovo a special and isolated case or does it hold some lessons for us? Especially if the tide of humanitarian interventions, now so much out of fashion, would one day return.

In first place, the lesson is to focus on the protection of civilians rather than on political and social transformation. Interventions work best when the population to be protected and supplied with aid is in a circumscribed geographical space. An example is the no-fly zone (Operation Provide Comfort) that the US and its allies imposed in northern Iraq after the Desert Storm operation against Saddam Hussein in 1991. It prevented Hussein from using his forces to attack the Kurdish minority already subjected to attacks by the Iraqi air force using chemical weapons in 1982. Today, we have international pressure on Israel to postpone an offensive against Rafah in order to address the needs of Palestinian civilians and allow in more aid, facilitated by US and UK troops operating an offshore pontoon to deliver relief aid. It is an irony that the withdrawal of the Western troops from Afghanistan in 2021 after a failed attempt at nation-building led to the return of the Taliban. As the Taliban is treated as a pariah by these same Western powers who refuse to recognise its regime, Afghanistan has not received significant international aid during the recent catastrophic floods in the north of the country. Arguably if the international intervention in Afghanistan after the US took down the Taliban regime at the end of 2001 had focused on humanitarian relief and then rapidly handed over to a UN peacekeeping force to protect the civilian population, there would still be an international presence in Afghanistan today to allow NGOs and the UN relief agencies to continue to function. Rather than stretch out across the country and try to build Western-style institutions in places with very different cultures, interventions can have a more limited scope; for instance creating safe areas or zones of temporary occupation where civilians can flee to and from which humanitarian aid can be delivered. Or implementing no-fly zones to make military offensives more difficult as could have been effective in protecting the anti-Assad communities in northern Syria. An advantage of this approach is that it would give a much-needed boost to the UN doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect, which was adopted by the General Assembly in 2002. Because it was invoked by France and the UK in Libya in 2011 and the NATO intervention led to the fall of the Gaddafi regime and the death of Gaddafi himself, many leaders in Africa and elsewhere have viewed The Responsibility to Protect as a flimsy pretext to impose regime change. So re-linking it to purely humanitarian purposes would help to garner more support for it. In Kosovo in 1999, NATO focused on creating a safe zone for the civilian population. There was no move against Belgrade. It was left to the Serb people to decide the fate of Milošević. So, in sum, the benchmark for judging the success or failure of humanitarian missions is a simple one: how many lives were saved in relation to the costs and inevitable consequences?

A second lesson is to work for more international support for humanitarian interventions beyond those Western countries which tend to carry them out. During the Kosovo campaign, NATO had to work hard to keep its own coalition together, particularly vis-à-vis countries like Greece, Czechia or Italy where political and popular support for the air campaign was wobbly. Its intensive media activities were largely directed at its own domestic audiences, who were made uneasy by the instances of ‘collateral damage’ and the deteriorating refugee crisis, leaving less time to reach out to audiences elsewhere in the world. This left less time also for diplomacy vis-à-vis countries in what is often referred to as the ‘Global South’, which were uneasy about the sovereignty of a country being infringed, even to stop gross human rights violations. The fact that the Kosovo Albanians are mainly Muslims helped the alliance to rally some welcome support from Muslims across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. In Libya in 2011, NATO’s cause was helped when Sweden – which was not an ally at that time – Qatar and the UAE participated in its air operations. Yet today, as countries outside the West become more active and influential on the international stage, persuading them to support and ideally participate in future humanitarian missions is a challenge that will not be easy but that is essential to give interventions a sounder legal and political basis. The way in which the US and the EU have closely coordinated with countries like Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia over Gaza shows encouragingly that this lesson is being heeded.

Finally, Kosovo shows that interventions work best when military and civilian efforts are well balanced. After the NATO air campaign, all the major institutions set up missions in Pristina in an effective division of labour. While NATO took care of physical security and the EU took over the police, the UN ran the administration, the OSCE focused on missing persons and the reform of the judiciary and the World Bank funded projects to repair and rebuild critical infrastructure. This was a good example of the alliance’s comprehensive approach and showed that military forces and civilian agencies could set common priorities and work closely together on the ground. Even 25 years on these institutions are still present in Kosovo, although the UN UNMIK administration gave way to Kosovo’s own institutions of self-government after the province declared its independence in 2008. Yet when it came to Afghanistan after 2001, this civilian-military balance was lost. NATO found itself on its own alongside a small UN presence and the EU according the country a low priority, despite the fact that 40,000 troops from EU member states were part of the NATO-led ISAF mission in Afghanistan. I remember well as a NATO official visiting prime minister Tony Blair in 10 Downing Street and a conversation with Blair during which he revealed that he had never seen Afghanistan on the agenda of an EU summit. It was left to NATO despite the fact that NATO as a military organisation lacked many of the civilian assets and capabilities for the comprehensive approach to succeed. So a key lesson of Kosovo is for the major international institutions to plan together for their respective roles and coordination in a humanitarian intervention so as to be ready to mobilise at the earliest opportunity. Paradoxically, this was done for Libya in order to have an effective ground presence after the NATO-led air campaign in 2011, but it failed because the Obama administration was strongly opposed to a NATO presence on the ground, thereby taking the essential security backbone out of the planning.

When we mark the anniversary of the NATO Kosovo air campaign in June, the focus will no doubt be on Kosovo’s progress as a democracy over the past quarter century and the frustrating and sorrowful state of relations between Belgrade and Pristina. Yet spare a thought for what it all means for the future of humanitarian interventions. Kosovo shows that they are not mission impossible and that although there may be as many failures as successes, learning a few lessons can tip the balance in the right direction.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.