'We don’t work for the Serbs, we work for human rights': justice and impartiality in transitional Kosovo

This chapter looks at the modalities through which impartiality can be guaranteed in a context as fraught and highly politicized as post-war Kosovo, and explores how impartiality is produced in the everyday at the Kosovo Property Agency (KPA). The KPA is a quasi-judicial institution put in place by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) to ‘resolve’ war-related property claims and thereby restitute property rights to, for a great majority of claims, Kosovo Serbian ‘displaced persons’. The chapter argues that impartiality is produced and made possible by different, seemingly contradictory repertoires of justice that are acted out in everyday practice by the national lawyers of the agency. It probes the tenets of the dialectic between ‘global’ ideals and ‘local’ practice, and ethnographically demonstrates the limits of an anthropology of human rights that sees vernacularization and meaning-making as the only analytical tools available. The chapter shows that, in the specific political landscape of post-war Kosovo, it is the ‘nationalistic bias’ of Kosovo Albanian lawyers that ensures due diligence and respect for rule of law principles.