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Click the image to the left or follow the link below for a full listing of events at the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia this semester.

WCEE Winter Events

WCED Lecture. From Rebels to Politicians: Explaining the Electoral Performance of Rebel Successor Parties with Evidence from the Balkans

Pellumb Kelmendi, Weiser Emerging Democracies Postdoctoral Fellow, U-M
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
12:00-1:30 PM
1636 School of Social Work Building Map
Kelmendi’s lecture will discuss the post-conflict transformation of ethnic Albanian insurgent groups into political parties, focusing in particular on empirical material from Kosovo. At the end of the armed conflict, the leaders of these former rebel groups founded political parties and began participating in local or national elections. This lecture describes and compares these ethnic Albanian rebel successor parties and explains the variation in their political success. It does so by highlighting the ways in which wartime organizational structures of the rebel groups and the character of rebel-civilian ties shaped their post-conflict electoral performance.

Pellumb Kelmendi is an Emerging Democracies Postdoctoral Fellow for the 2016-17 academic year. He completed his Ph.D. in political science at Brown University. His research interests focus on civil conflict, post-conflict institution building, and party politics. Kelmendi’s dissertation analyzes the transformation of rebel organizations into political parties and their divergent performance in post-conflict elections. The core question that the dissertation asks is why, in post-conflict settings, some rebel successor parties enjoy wide electoral success whereas others remain marginalized or fail to emerge altogether. In his dissertation, Kelmendi develops and tests a new theory of rebel party success that emphasizes the role of wartime rebel organizational cohesion and rebel ties with the local population. The dissertation project analyzes an original dataset with observations from across the world, detailed case studies of rebel-to-party transformations in the Western Balkans, and subnational data of rebel successor party support in Kosovo.

As a postdoctoral fellow, Kelmendi will be working on a book manuscript that explains why some rebel organizations transform into successful political parties whereas others do not. Prior to beginning his Ph.D. at Brown University, he received an M.Phil. in development studies from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. in political science from the University of Chicago.
Building: School of Social Work Building
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: Democracy, European, International, Politics
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies, International Institute, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia

Videos of programs organized by WCEE affiliates are posted on the CES, CCPS, and CREES websites.

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