Ethnopolitics in a Mining Enterprise in Crisis: Revisiting the Albanian Miners’ Protests in Late Socialist Kosovo

Abstract

This article presents a novel approach to explain ethnopolitical mobilization among Kosovo Albanian miners during the winter of 1988–1989. Based on a close reading of the mining enterprise’s journal, it identifies three factors accounting for the rising politicization of ethnicity in microlevel dynamics within the Trepça mining enterprise. First, the article points at ethnic grievances in intra-elite managerial tensions and miners’ unrest. It relates these to structural conditions generated by the shifting cultural divisions of labor in Kosovo mining. Second, the article looks at counter-mobilizational dynamics among Kosovo Albanian miners, which were directly provoked by Serbian ethnopolitical mobilization during Slobodan Milošević’s rise to power. In a final step, the article reconstructs socio-occupational realignments taking shape in the particular decision-making structures of the mining enterprise. Against a background of internal power struggles and reorganizations, the executive management and the miners found themselves on the defensive against party representatives and managerial competitors. Making use of the enterprise’s institutional setup, they established a strong ethnopolitical alliance, which culminated in the underground strike of February 1989. The article suggests that this approach can be valuable to study other cases of intersecting social and ethnopolitical mobilization.