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The Albanian-speaking population living in Switzerland mobilised massively on behalf of the national cause in Kosovo in the 1990s. After the end of the conflict, that saw the departure of the Serbian forces from Kosovo (1999), some of the Albanian-speaking activists from Switzerland returned to their homeland. Many others remained in Switzerland, where they largely diminished or terminated their homeland engagement. Since the end of the war, very little attention has been paid to these former champions of the national cause in Switzerland. Furthermore, there is also very little literature on the memories of the mobilisation in Switzerland and the related discourses of belonging to the “Albanian nation”. The situation differs in Kosovo where several researchers have analysed the memorialisation of the recent past. This dissertation explores the narratives of homeland engagement related by Albanian-speaking former activists who engaged on behalf of the national cause in Kosovo from Switzerland in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, it scrutinises how they narrate national belonging in their memories of the quieter post-war years (after 1999). As such, this study falls within the field of research on nationhood and ethnicity that examines how people negotiate and reproduce nationhood away from extreme situations of nationalist movements and warfare. Furthermore, this research analyses the narratives with a transnational perspective as it focuses on how the interviewees mobilise and negotiate different discourses of national belonging embedded in the different social spaces they inhabit at the local, national, transnational and international levels. This research mainly relies on oral history interviews conducted with former Albanian-speaking activists who were active on behalf of Kosovo in Switzerland in the 1980s and 1990s. Of the fifty former activists who participated in this research, seven were interviewed in Kosovo and the rest in Switzerland, where most of the research participants still reside on a fixed or irregular basis. The interviewees told me about their trajectory as activists on behalf of the national cause, their vision of Albanianness and their position in the evolving “Albanian nation”. The thesis is chiefly composed of three articles. They highlight the trajectories of the former activists from the years of engagement in the 1980s and 1990s to the search for a new status during the post-war period. While the thesis accounts for the negative image of the Albanianspeaking population in Switzerland, it also shows how they feel excluded and forgotten in postwar Kosovo. Moreover, the research demonstrates how the former activists use narratives of homeland engagement to reconfigure the symbolic categories and boundaries that delimit the “Albanian nation” and seek to enhance their own position. The thesis thus underlines the evolution of the narratives of belonging as an adaptation of the transnational situation of the activists, from the period of “hot” nationalism during the years of engagement to the milder forms after the end of the war.

Memories of the "liberation of Kosovo" among Albanian-speaking activists in Switzerland: narrating transnational belonging to the nation