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Kosovo is one of several Western Balkan countries that are part of the next round of accession to the EU. Like Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia, it is also a country in which the history of conflict is recent and the benefits of EU membership ought to be a strong economic and political enticement to meet the standards necessary for membership. Yet, instead of major transformation of the post-conflict society towards democratization, economic development, and a robust human rights regime, the prospect of European Union membership appears to be leading to superficial legal changes without enforcement. This article investigates the tensions between internal challenges to legal change and external pressures for reform, adding to the literature on the decoupling of Europeanization and domestic change in candidate countries. A short analysis of one policy area, women’s property rights, illuminates the gaps between legal change and enforcement processes. The article also considers how and when a change in law can lead to social change. It is argued here that legal change in response to EU conditionalities may begin superficially, but creates an opportunity for collective action that can eventually lead to democratic change and a more robust enforcement of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is currently in international law an overstatement of the tie between property and identity. International conventions have folded property into a set of immutable human rights. There needs to be greater flexibility and nuance in this perspective. In this article, we identify two approaches to property rights: the first, which argues that property and identity are necessarily bundled together and considers property to be a human right; and the second, which understands them as explicitly separate and views property as a commodity. Empirically, we observe a transition between these two competing ideas. We posit that this transition happens voluntarily, with market development, or involuntarily through displacement due to conflict and disaster. The relationship between property and identity changes based on time, circumstance, and individual choice. Rights-based norms regarding property, and more specifically the restitution of property after displacement, need to be sufficiently flexible to encompass changes in identity and context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]