Ample scholarship has documented the exclusion of women’s activism in the post-war narratives of resistance and local state-building in the case of Kosovo. Almost paradoxically, however, the state has heavily relied on the documentation labour of women during the 1990s in its construction of self through the archives. This paper argues that the “newborn” state of Kosovo has relied on the documentation labour of women in the assemblage of its grant archival infrastructure, and therefore the constitution of its very identity, while simultaneously neglecting the labour of documentation carried by women. This article intends to make a feminist intervention in the state-building literature on Kosovo in a two-fold manner. Firstly, engendering local state-building practices through highlighting the documentation labour carried by women throughout the 1990s. Secondly, through conceptualising how this documentation labour is co-opted by the state for the constitution of its legitimacy, while neglecting the role of women in its state-building processes. The analysis relies on in-depth interviews conducted with prominent activists who documented, recorded and archived human rights violations throughout the 1990s. It is further enriched through discourse analysis of the Oral History Kosovo Initiative archives.
