Edward P. Joseph and Conflict Management in the Balkans

It was an early day of September 2006, my first week of classes at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. I had been in Washington, D.C. for less than a week, and I was ‘shopping’ around for classes. As I scrolled down the schedule, my attention was captured by a class called ‘Intervention and Pre-emption: From Africa, Haiti and the Balkans to Iraq and Lebanon’ taught by Edward P. Joseph. I decided to sit in and from that first moment I realized that something different was going on there.

Mr. Joseph engaged the class with a vibrant and passionate discussion over the meaning and complexities of intervention, and as soon as students started to introduce themselves he would address many in their native language. As a former student at SAIS, he had studied at the Bologna Center in Italy, and addressed me in my native Italian. His attitude was so positive and his approach quite atypical that after the two hours he was compelled to confessed: it was the first time ever he taught a class. “I am glad I made it” he added, with his look revealing alleviation and gratitude at the same time. This class was by far the best I took during my two years at SAIS.

Intervention is so controversial, Mr. Joseph would explain, because it entails interfering with a country’s domestic affairs, violating its sovereignty and one of the foundational principles of the community of nations. Thus, it requires a high degree of legitimacy and strong moral stance to succeed.

Among the organizations Mr. Joseph worked with in the Balkans was Catholic Relief Services, “a great organization” as he called it, dealing with emergency relief and development. At CRS, Mr. Joseph was senior manager of the Stenkovec-I camp for Kosovar refugees in Macedonia, one of the most significant refugee camps during the NATO-led war against Slobodan Milosevic in 1999.

“It was an emergency situation”, he recalls, since “refugees were pushed out by the Serbs to the border with Macedonia.” Stankovec-I was a “small camp on a former air strip that we could not expand in size” because it was at walkable distance from the border with Kosovo and due to the fact that the neighbors were Macedonian orthodox sympathetic to the Serbs. “It was just getting more crowded and crowded, and at the maximum, we were over 30,000 people”, he says. “You can find camps that have more refugees, but will never find a camp that has more refugees and less space.” But according to Mr. Joseph, it was “tremendously rewarding, exhausting, challenging, and difficult.”

Running a refugee camp is a hard business. M. Joseph recounts its activities: “In the operation of a refugee camp you generally have a number of actors: for example, one group is providing water, one is in charge of food, and one is doing blankets. One, like us, administrates overall the camp, tries to keep safety and order, and resolves all the issues. You have to deal with authorities about security, police and so forth. Thus, there is a wide range of issues, and we try to keep everybody working together and dealing with these revolving demands of refugees’ population, which is very difficult to deal with.

So, for example, you could be called because people don’t have enough blankets. Or you have to find more space, maybe moving tents around to make more space, because UNHCR [the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] calls you up and says that more buses are coming. You have to stay up all night sometimes receiving the buses, making sure that families are put in order into the tents. You have to coordinate with colleagues by working together, and have to make sure that people have the information they need. In the end, you have to deal with all these needs and find solutions to problems.”

Mr. Joseph visited the Balkans for the first time in the winter of 1981 during a school trip while he was a SAIS student in Bologna. “It was an organized propaganda trip in many respects”, he recalls. “We were official guests of the government. They took us around and try to show off how good their system was.” To put it in historical perspective, the Cold War would run only one more decade, and Tito had just died one year earlier even though he “was still a very much unifying character.” Asked whether there was any warning signal of the ethnic bloodshed that would follow, Mr. Joseph definitively replies “no, absolutely not! And in fact, later I went to visit Dubrovnik [Croatia], and I was not even aware that I was in a place called Croatia. We only thought of it as Yugoslavia: that was the only conception of this place.”

Nearly eleven years later, in 1992, Mr. Joseph returned to the Balkans at a time when Yugoslavia had already collapsed and war was just starting. He was working in Geneva as a lawyer with the State Department, but as a U.S. Army Reservist he was required to perform his military service. He got a short two-week assignment to a small U.S. detachment to UNHCR in Sarajevo. After his assignment he was then quickly hired on staff. Until 1995 Ed Joseph held several positions with the U.N. Protection Force in Sarajevo, Mostar, Bihac, Tuzla, and Zagreb. In particular, he coordinated the humanitarian evacuation of Zepa, Bosnia (near Srebrenica) when the latter was suffering from the infamous ethnic cleansing that took the lives of more than 7,000 Bosnian males.

After the war, Mr. Joseph kept working in the Balkans on post-conflict reconstruction efforts although he changed jobs. He is now employed by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. He says that the U.N. lost all its credibility following Srebrenica, giving it a small-scale role after the war, with the OSCE “the big player.” From 1995 through 1998, he was appointed to several senior positions including Director-General for Democratization in Sarajevo, executive assistant to Head of OSCE Mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina, director of OSCE Brcko Center, and director of OSCE regional center in Mostar. Then, following the war in Kosovo, Mr. Joseph worked for the U.N. Mission in Kosovo as deputy municipal administrator in Mitrovica.

In 2001, Mr. joseph was asked to become the director of the Macedonia Project at the International Crisis Group. Working at ICG proved to be a launching pad for a career as a scholar, representing the middle-groung between the field and scholarly activities. ICG’s advocacy experience helped him transition to a new career that included becoming a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. However, after dabbling in the world of think tanks and academia Mr. Joseph returned to the field: first in Iraq (in Baghdad’s “red zone” in fall, 2004), and then in Haiti with IFES.

As a strong advocate of field experience, Mr. Joseph has continuously encouraged his students to go to the field, “confront the obstacles and see how hard it is to get people to do what you think they ought to do, which is essentially what it comes to.” But he figures that the field of conflict management, as well as development, does “not really lend itself to too much academic precision.”

“The real understanding cannot really take place in a book,” explains Mr. Joseph. “It is very important to identify the academic contribution, but conflict management is subject to so many different factors in terms of whether you achieve any success at all.”