Beyond Skopje: Patterns of Interactions between the Government and Communities in Macedonia

Executive Summary

This paper is intended to offer some perspectives on contemporary political and socio-economic issues in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. For a small country that avoided the violence of the early 1990s, Macedonia has attracted a fair amount of attention, and if the journalists are to be believed, has spent much of the last decade on the brink of war.
The discussion has centered on a number of topics, including the country's dangerous neighborhood, troubled ethnic relations, economic problems, battles with crime and corruption, and struggles over human rights. An issue that has only recently begun to emerge is the particular problem that Macedonia faces in the key field of participatory democratic governance. At the Watson Institute at Brown University, we are currently preparing two inter-linking projects. One is a long-term, cross-regional study to test hypotheses that answer the question.
Why has "participatory democratic governance" emerged to a disappointing extent in the best of cases of post-conflict societies, and not at all in others?
The other project will compare initiatives by different international agencies in different regions of the former Yugoslavia, and ask the question: How can international democratic aid give impetus to local cross-ethnic political and civil associations?
In both studies, we expect to find that local stakeholding in a range of community decisions is a key indicator that sustainable political transition may be underway. The reform of local government structures in order to permit or facilitate significant involvement by citizens is therefore crucial. At the same time, the reform itself cannot be engineered without the participation of citizens.
Part of my own contribution in both projects will be to undertake a study of the Macedonian case. I bring to the study a training in political anthropology rather than economics or constitutional law, and almost ten years of research in Macedonian history and politics.
This paper seeks to set out some of the core issues that must be taken into consideration in the Macedonian case, when we try to understand the contemporary situation and the differential levels of commitment to reform that different local actors have. 

Beyond Skopje - Keith Brown (pdf, 48.7 kb)