Yesterday’s Rebels

Abstract Amid the breakup of Yugoslavia, the 1990s in Kosovo were characterized by high political mobilization for independence. By comparison, the post-independence period has been largely perceived as one marked by “apathy.” This article questions the assumed straightforward relationship between historical experience and dissent by examining the conditions that generated political hopes in these two periods of Kosovo's recent history. Prioritizing an anthropological over prescriptive or retrospective approaches to hope, this article asks: what conditions, discourses, and modes of governance make specific political hopes plausible, certain forms of political agency conceivable, and particular politico-moral subjectivities desirable? Through ethnographic fieldwork with youth, the article considers the perceived Kosovar youth “apathy” as a lived tension between affective investments in the promissory state project and its future oriented trajectory. This temporal makeup of Kosovo coexists with what I refer to as “newborn governance,” a form of governance through hope, rooted in Kosovo’s positioning as a “newborn,” prospective EU state. The article contends that this orientation shapes political imagination, hope and access to future-making visions, often with demobilizing effects.