3 Forgiving, listening, waiting: Ethics of solidarity in Kosova’s movement of civil resistance in the1990’s

Abstract

As the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early years of the 1990’s turned violent and pitted constituent republics against one-another, an overwhelming majority of ordinary people in Kosova embraced a societal-wide movement of civil resistance to the oppressive policies adopted by the state of Serbia. Kosova's non-violent movement, which ran for almost a decade,
emerged upon strong moral foundations stemming from tradition and was characterized by the invocation of an ethics of solidarity. In this paper, I elaborate on three concrete ethical and affective practices in which ordinary people were invested during this period – forgiving, listening, and waiting. I argue that a heightened degree of ethical comportment was central to the
conception, as well as to the life of, the non-violent movement.