Women’s Rights in Kosovo: Cultural and Religious Barriers

Abstract

Women’s Rights have often been a subject of the debate between universal rights versus cultural relativism. In Kosovo women’s rights have gone through drastic changes. After the NATO intervention in 1999, UN established international bodies to temporary govern the territory of Kosovo. UNMIK’s mission contributed massively in establishing frameworks to support, protect and empower women. In this thesis I am going to analyze this process of imposing universal ideas such as women’s rights in a country that has had a long history of patriarchy. Was UNMIK mission successful in terms of framing these sets of ideas and adopting them to the state legislature? Or did that fail because of cultural and religious barriers? This thesis will focus on three main actors including; the international community, women’s rights activism and religious resistance.