De-recognition of States: The Case of Kosovo, Vol. 53 – Cornell International Law Journal

The literature on the recognition of states, a foundational topic of public international law, is truly vast. But the literature on de-recognition, the withdrawal of recognition once given, is measured, not in books, but in paragraphs. This is the first Article to systematically explore the question of de-recognition. It does so by examining a peculiar—indeed, genuinely strange—ongoing case study of a series of de-recognitions of Kosovo as a state. De-recognitions are by any account an exceptional phenomenon in international practice. The recognition of a new state is, by contrast, perfectly commonplace. It is an act by which the recognizing state acknowledges that a new sovereign political entity is born and possesses the attributes of statehood.

Senior Michigan Grotius Research Fellow 2019– 2020, University of Michigan Law School; Professor of Law, Union University Belgrade Faculty of Law. tatjana.papic@pravnifakultet.rs. I am very grateful to Steven Ratner, Marko Milanović, Vladimir Djerić, Kristina Daugirdas, and Mathias Reimann, as well as to the participants of the Michigan Law Colloquium 2019– 2020, for their valuable insights and comments. Special thanks goes to my students at the Union Belgrade Faculty of Law, Sara Djurišić, and Jana Stanojević for their research support. The work on this Article was supported by the University of Michigan Law School’s Michigan Grotius Research Fellowship and the Open Society Foundations’ Civil Society Scholar Award 2019. Views in this Article, as well as its errors, are my own.