
Received 04.11.2023. Revised 12.03.2024. Accepted 17.04.2024.
Acknowledgments. The research was carried out at the expense of the grant of the Russian Science Foundation no. 23-18-00530, https://rscf.ru/project/23-18-00530/ (The project “Political-Territorial Heterogeneity Management and Ensuring the Territorial Integrity of the State”) at the Perm Federal Research Center of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Abstract. The political and territorial diversity management in the context of separatism risks requires the state to implement reforms, borrowing their recipes. Successful recipes in one case may lead to failure in the other. This point is expanded into two more specific questions. Why and who borrows recipes for political reforms and solutions and how do they do it? What role do imitation and coercion strategies play in this? Using the concept of P. DiMaggio and U. Powell on the convergence of institutional structures of organizations as a result of three isomorphic processes – coercion, normative borrowing, and imitation, the article compares successful and unsuccessful cases of reforms to resolve ethnopolitical conflicts (Montenegrin, Vojvodina, Kosovo, Presevo valley, and Sanjak) in the same ethnopolitical and politico-institutional space of Serbia and Montenegro. The comparison parameters are: the composition of conflicts in terms of actors involved, including third parties, the nature and content of requirements and institutional decisions taken in relation to them, as well as strategies for interaction and institutional decision-making. The political and institutional space of Serbia and Montenegro is a common organizational field, where the statuses of the regions are differentiated. This asymmetry is due to the historical experience of autonomous or republican status for Kosovo, Montenegro, Vojvodina and its absence for Sanjak and Presevo valley. Territorial division leads to potential irredentism, which can block the isomorphic effect of related coercive and imitative institutional reforms and inclusive ethnic policies that make the space homogeneous in terms of guarantees of rights, but differentiated in terms of political statuses. The coercive actions of Serbia and Montenegro are accompanied by similar coercion by the EU or UN. The response of subnational public authorities, politicians often turn out to be imitative, which ensures (except for the case of Kosovo) the blocking of separatist projects.
Keywords: ethnopolitical conflicts, separatist movements, self-determination movements, institutional isomorphism, territorial integrity
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