Vjosa Musliu
Girlhood at War

19.02.2026
18:00h
National Library of Kosovo

Author Vjosa Musliu is joined in conversation by Lura Limani and Doruntina Vinca for the launch of her new book. Girlhood at War tells the true story of a young girl growing up during the Kosovo war and its immediate aftermath following Kosovo's liberation by NATO troops in 1999. Through her embodied experiences, the book exposes the tangible and everyday acts and events of the war, providing brutal insight into the impact of war and the politics of subjugation.

At the outset of the book (in 1998), Vjosa's view of the world, as a young child, is organized in clear dichotomies: the good Albanians and the evil Serbs; the brutal Serbian military shelling Albanian civilians and the angelic NATO airplanes bombing Serbian military sites. This Manichean worldview starts to unravel after Vjosa and her family are chased away from their home by the Serbian military and moved to the suburbs. There, surrounded by mostly poor and uneducated fellow Albanians, she gradually discovers the layers of her family's socio-economic privileges.

When the war ends in 1999, Vjosa believes she has received her own 'happily ever after'. She celebrates her thirteenth birthday happily wearing a US military uniform, holding an unbearably heavy unloaded gun as she becomes the favorite interpreter of the American NATO troops. She spends several months after the war occasionally translating between angry Albanians who now seek revenge against Serbs and NATO troops who insist on not picking sides; showcasing the impossibility of (re)building Kosovo with “both-sides-ism” becoming the modus operandi of the international intervening structures.

Vjosa Musliu is Associate Professor of International Relations at Free University of Brussels, Belgium. Her research focuses on international and European interventions and statebuilding. Her area of focus is primarily the Balkans and post-Soviet space. She is a member of the Yugoslawomen+ Collective, a collective of six academics from the post-Yugoslav space working in ‘Global North’ academia. She is the author of three books and dozens of journal articles in the  field of international relations.

Lura Limani is a writer and independent researcher from Kosovo. Her essays and journalistic work have been published in multiple European and regional publications and she is the author of Trans në Kosovë [Being Trans in Kosovo] (2023), the co-author of BOOM (2020) and co-editor of Home (2023). She is the co-founder of the Kosovo Oral History Initiative and the Lirindja Foundation, and serves on the Executive Board of the Lumbardhi Foundation. Lura currently leads a regional  team at the Open Society Foundations – Western Balkans and heads the national office in Kosovo.

Doruntina Vinca is a writer, researcher, and translator from Prishtina, based in Tirana. Her practice moves between language, feminist literature, and the text as a tool for exploring new forms of collectivity and knowledge-sharing. She is the co-founder of the reading group Radical Sense and the editor of two volumes of feminist texts translated and published in Albanian.

The conversation will be in Albanian, with simultaneous translation into English.

This public event is co-organized by Heritage Space, which is implemented by CHwB Kosovo and funded by the Swedish Government, Open Society Foundations - Western Balkans, and the University of Prishtina.