Kosovo

From ancient Dardania to a contested independence at the crossroads of the Balkans.

Kosovo's history is layered and fiercely contested. In antiquity the region was the heartland of Dardania, a Paleo-Balkan kingdom absorbed by Rome and later held by Byzantium. In the high Middle Ages it became the core of the Serbian realm under the Nemanjic dynasty, studded with Orthodox monasteries, and the site of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, an event that became central to Serbian national identity. Five centuries of Ottoman rule followed the conquest, during which the population gradually shifted toward an ethnic Albanian majority and the League of Prizren of 1878 gave birth to Albanian nationalism. Incorporated into Serbia and then Yugoslavia after the Balkan Wars, Kosovo was granted wide autonomy by the 1974 Yugoslav constitution, only to have it revoked by Slobodan Milosevic in 1989, prompting a decade of Albanian nonviolent resistance and then armed insurgency. The Kosovo War of 1998-99 brought a humanitarian catastrophe, a NATO air campaign, and UN administration under Security Council Resolution 1244. Kosovo declared independence on 17 February 2008; the International Court of Justice found in 2010 that the declaration did not violate international law, and around a hundred states recognise it, but Serbia, Russia, China and several EU members do not, leaving Kosovo outside the United Nations and its status unresolved.