Taking the Academy by Storm

Undergraduate Research Yields Diplomatic Lessons

History professor Beshara Doumani remembers vividly the day a brash Penn student came through the door to his office, introduced himself, handed a two-page background paper across the desk, and proceeded outlining some research he was conducting on Kosovo. Dr. Doumani, now at Berkeley, was impressed by the student’s explication of the subject and assumed the research project was part of an M.A. or Ph.D. thesis. He was wrong. Andrew March was a freshman, and the research he was developing was for the University Scholars Program. "I can count on one hand those instances when an incoming freshman took me by storm," says Doumani. "Andrew March is one of those students."

The summer before he stormed Doumani’s office, March, who comes from Maine, had been working as a translator in Slovakia and decided to do some traveling through the Balkans "just for fun." In Kosovo, he fell in with some young people and was invited to accompany them to the Albanian University of Prishtina, where they were students. The "university" turned out to be the spare rooms of a private home. "This was my first introduction to the underground school system of Kosovar Albanians and the whole network of underground institutions," says March. He altered his travel plans and stayed on.

On a weekend trip with the students, March’s education about life in Kosovo was deepened. They had stopped at a "typical" Balkan town, complete with mosque, old buildings, and donkey carts. As he took photos, the police quickly surrounded him and began asking questions. Discovering he was a foreigner in the company of Albanians, the police took the lot of them to the station for some "rough and abusive" interrogation. "This was a small town where the role of the [Serb] police was to keep the Albanian population under strict surveillance," explains March, "and they were not used to anything more sophisticated than a baton." It didn’t help that the police had discovered a letter he had written–with references to President Slobodan Milosevic–describing the underground university. Everyone was eventually released, but March was given 24 hours to leave the country. It was the beginning of a line of research that has engrossed him throughout his undergraduate career at Penn.

Entering his senior year this fall, March is completing a triple major: political science, intellectual history, and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies with a concentration in the Islamic Near East. Despite the formidable work load, he has maintained a GPA only slightly less than a perfect 4.0. His facility with integrating theoretical abstraction and empirical method, attested to by a number of SAS faculty, is complemented by a gift for languages, which makes him a natural at overseas research. He is fluent at Serbo-Croatian (Bosnian), Czech, and Slovak, and proficient at Russian, Albanian, Spanish, and Arabic. He can get by on Mongolian, Polish, and French, and he is a beginner at Turkish. His scholarly achievements were acknowledge in the spring when he was named a 1999 Dean’s Scholar.

Support for his fieldwork has come from a number of sources that fund undergraduate research. Besides ongoing funding from the University Scholars Program, he has received a Rose Undergraduate Research Award, a Nassau Research Grant, and a College Research Grant. That funding allowed him to return to Kosovo the summer following sophomore year to continue his research and once again for a week in the spring of ‘98 as an observer to the elections. This was the beginning of the war.

March has been particularly interested to observe how the Albanian population organized its own shadow state–which included underground political, economic, education, judicial, and other structures–as a strategy for resisting Serbian rule. This "Republic of Kosova" carried out unofficial elections in which writer and critic Ibrahim Rugova, whom March interviewed, was overwhelmingly elected president.

The Serbs never tried to integrate Albanians into their political life, says March, and the resistance Rugova pursued essentially accommodated that policy, resulting in a two-level government composed of the official state in the hands of Serb authorities and a system of parallel institutions that the Albanians used to control their daily lives and affairs. March was one of few Westerners who knew about the workings of these structures. He calls it a "complicated paradox" of direct Serbian police rule that turned a blind eye to unofficial institutions and alternative sources of political authority. Albanians who took part in these institutions were sometimes persecuted, although not to an extent that threatened the viability of the Republic of Kosova. "It was an overt acknowledgment that the Albanians were not part of the Serbian national project, and that if they were content to sit in dark, cold classrooms and not drain Serbian state resources, they were free to do so as long as they did not challenge the fact of Serbian rule." The experiment in nonviolent resistance faltered when the Kosova Liberation Army took up arms.

One of the important functions of the parallel state was to help Albanians manage disputes among themselves. Councils of Reconciliation were set up to deal with offenses ranging from murder and rape to theft and petty insults. When one of the council chairmen invited March to accompany them to eastern Kosovo to reconcile a number of cases, which included a long-standing blood vendetta between two families, he jumped at the opportunity.

The council was composed of ten individuals and included a professor, a journalist, a novelist, a Muslim cleric, a farmer, a labor union leader, a lawyer, and a teacher. The reconciliation process is a traditional, highly ritualized and emotional drama that took place as the council shuttled between the homes of the aggrieved and the guilty. Lofty rhetoric and lengthy appeals to patriotic sentiment, guilt, honor, and shame as well as threats of social sanctions were often involved. Members of the council took advantage of March’s presence, exhorting the families not to appear un-Albanian before "this expert," "this friend of all Albanians," "this chronicler of our resistance" who, to be there, had canceled an interview with President Rugova. "In the first home, I spoke very cautiously, so as not to seem as though I were meddling in their ancient ritual," says March. By the sixth home and at three o’clock the next morning, "I had gained enough confidence and frustration to speak in mesele (traditional Albanian rhetoric similar to metaphor) and explained how convinced I had grown . . . after observing one Albanian family after another put aside their pride and be reconciled, that nowhere in Kosovo could one find an Albanian who . . . would be able to tolerate himself if he were to be found collaborating with the Serb enemy." Everyone in the room knew this family had been collaborating–and the family was aware the council knew. March’s direct and skillfully expressed sentiment was met with overzealous applause from the family and chuckles from the council members on the drive home.

Dr. Rudra Sil, assistant professor of political science, is one of those who thinks March is an "exceptional scholar." March stormed his office, just as he had taken Doumani’s, in search of an advisor for an independent study. Sil was so impressed by the unusual information he had collected and his ability to think about what it meant and integrate it with existing scholarship that he agreed to a collaboration. The resulting paper was presented in February to the annual conference of the International Studies Association in Washington, DC. "This is one of the biggest academic conferences in the U.S.," remarks Sil. The working paper, The "Republic of Kosova" (1989—1998) and the Resolution of Ethno-Separatist Conflict: Rethinking "Sovereignty" in the Post-Cold War Era, is posted on the website of Penn’s Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics <http:www.sas.upenn.edu/penncip/>. The co-authors hope to publish a version of the paper in a scholarly journal.

The paper examines the Kosovar Albanians’ resistance strategy, which left them with de facto autonomy, in the light of classical concepts of sovereignty. "The fact that Serbia did nothing to prohibit the institutions of the ‘Republic of Kosova’–institutions that explicitly challenged the authority of the Serbian state and its agents–and the fact that Serbs did little to change the ethnic composition of Kosovo suggests that Serbia’s understanding of its own sovereignty might not completely exclude significant manifestations of Kosovar autonomy." March and Sil argue that the kind of quasi-autonomy or "shared" sovereignty elucidated in their paper suggests there is a "wider (and more widely accepted) repertoire of diplomatic solutions that can bring an end to ethno-separatist conflicts." Negotiators, they say, need to stop thinking solely in terms of conventional notions of state sovereignty and territorial integrity.

To further investigate how some of these "anomalous" conflict resolutions have worked–or failed to work–March has spent this summer doing interviews and archival research in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Palestine. He may include Chechnya as a fourth case in developing a typology that analyzes model resolutions in which these unique quasi-states have been created. Says March, "All of these cases, examples of diplomatic breakthroughs, are of interest to policy makers, particularly analyzing what the long term effects are of these solutions."

Susan Duggan, who coordinates the University Scholars Program, has dealt with March often in his College career and says he has tamed his youthful brashness somewhat. Still, she says, he continues to impress many people as "more expert than the experts." Sil reports that participants at the International Studies Association conference were quite interested in the Kosovo paper he and March presented. "Andrew was thought of as a very, very unusual undergraduate," he recalls. The chair of their conference panel, a professor of political science, turned to Sil as he departed and smiled. "Extraordinary student," he remarked. "He’ll go far."