This paper explores how multiculturalism has been conceived and implemented via the liberal Peace-Building strategy adopted by liberal multiculturalists. The liberal peace-building paradigm seeks to promote multiculturalism as a tool of peacemaking, for the purpose of resolving and achieving a political resolution to existing ethnic conflicts. The promotion of “Multiculturalism” has been one of the primary concerns of the Peace-Building mission in Kosovo since 1999. It has been the commitment of the international presence in Kosovo to respect the rights and interests of minority communities that has led to the establishment of ethnic decentralisation policies, as recommended by the international advisors (such as Martti Ahtisaari), finally declared and included in the Constitution (2008). While this is a worthy aim we argue that the manner in which the policy has been implemented, through territorial decentralisation, has been ultimately counterproductive. The multicultural project has relied upon a categorical notion of identity and has elicited a society with homogenised groups divided by municipalities. The paper highlights how a particularly narrow understanding of multiculturalism has promoted a multicultural approach at State level, which supports the existence of diverse groups, but which has ultimately imposed homogeneity within communities and polarized identities, as it has taken for granted already defined groups, omitting possible hybrid or ambiguous identities. This has, thus, perpetuated as well as institutionalised the existing ethnic divide. This application of multiculturalism has also promoted an uncritical engendering of identities and thus has resulted in a non-organic, undeveloped, fictional peace, therefore undermining the liberal ethos of the Peace-Building endeavour in Kosovo. The partition alternative provided to overcome the faults of territorial decentralisation in post-conflict peace-building have been discarded as essentially untenable and not attuned to the spirit of accommodation of identity and tolerance professed by liberal multiculturalism. Nonetheless the paper argues that liberal multiculturalism creates a paradox whereby, whilst attempting to create a cohesive society without resorting to splitting up groups, the end result may actually still be separation of different ethnic groups to protect minorities with a consequential worsening of the division between groups by creating islands of communities not very well integrated in the cohesive societal structure originally envisioned. This is a result that bears resemblance to a partitioned State, the alternative discarded by multiculturalists as essentially brutal and untenable.
