Map & Analysis: Which Countries Recognize Kosovo in 2020?

Announcing the re-launch of our Kosovo recognition updates series! PolGeoNow will now once again be providing timely reports on when countries recognize - or un-recognize - the disputed Republic of Kosovo.

Click to enlarge. By Evan Centanni, modified from public domain blank world map.
Contact us for permission to use this map.

Map Update: Kosovo Recognized by 3 More Countries in 2015 (108/193 UN members)

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Map by Evan Centanni, modified from public domain graphic (source).

Kosovo Becomes an Olympic Nation

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Kosovo controversially claims independence from Serbia (Northern Kosovo is under partial pro-Serbian control). Map by Evan Centanni, based on these two blank maps by Nord-NordWest. License: CC BY-SA

By Evan Centanni

Next Stop: Rio 2016
Disputed country Kosovo has become the 205th member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), making it an official Olympic Nation and allowing it to field a team at the 2016 Olympics in Brazil. Its full acceptance came at an IOC meeting in Monaco on December 9, after being granted "provisional recognition" in October.

Kosovo's admission process has been ongoing for five years, and the self-proclaimed country was denied the chance to participate in the London Olympics of 2012. However, one Kosovan athlete attended the games with the team from Albania, a neighboring country with close cultural ties to Kosovo.

Disputed Status
Located in southeastern Europe, Kosovo controversially declared independence from Serbia in 2008, while under the control of UN peacekeepers. Since then, it has been recognized as independent by over half of the world's countries, including the US and most of the European Union. However, Russia, China and many other countries still consider it to be rightfully part of Serbia.

Map Update: Kosovo Now Recognized by Every Country in Oceania (107/193 UN members)

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Countries recognizing the Republic of Kosovo in green, highlighting recent additions. Disputed recognitions in yellow. Kosovo in magenta. Map by Evan Centanni, modified from public domain graphic (source).

North Kosovo Status Changing After Serbia Deal

Map by Evan Centanni, based on these two blank maps by Nord-NordWest. License: CC BY-SA

Kosovo & Serbia in Historic Agreement
Serbia and the breakaway Republic of Kosovo reached a landmark deal on Friday to normalize their relations, partially compromising on several contentious issues between the two governments in southeastern Europe. Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, but due to Serbia's opposition it has still not achieved full international recognition. 

Status Change for North Kosovo
North Kosovo is the largest of several areas within Kosovo where the majority of people are part of the Serb ethnic group, whereas 90% of people in Kosovo as a whole are ethnically Albanian. When Kosovo split from Serbia, many Serbs in the north refused to go, governing themselves separately from Kosovo and choosing instead to continue cooperating with and accepting government funding from Serbia.

Kosovo Now Recogized by Half of U.N. (97/193)

Countries recognizing the Republic of Kosovo in green, with the five most recent additions to the list labelled. Kosovo in magenta. Map by Evan Centanni, modified from public domain graphic (source).

Kosovo Diplomatic Recognition Continues

Country Name: Kosovo (English, Serbian), Kosova (Albanian)
Official Name: Republic of Kosovo (English), Republika e Kosovës (Albanian),
Republika Kosovo (Serbian)
News Categories: Recognition, Partially Recognized States, Breakaway States
Summary: The Republic of Kosovo has continued to receive diplomatic recognition from other countries, despite widespread opposition to its 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia. Thirteen more U.N. members have declared their recognition of independent Kosovo just within the last year.

Flag of the Republic of Kosovo.
Image by Cradel (source). License: CC BY-SA

Full Story
The majority of recently independent countries, such as South Sudan and Montenegro, enjoy unopposed recognition from the U.N. and its members. However, acceptance into the international community doesn't always come so easily. Kosovo is one example: because it declared its independence without first coming to an agreement with its former host country (unlike South Sudan and Montenegro), it has struggled to gain acceptance as a sovereign state. The last of the Balkan countries to declare independence after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Kosovo was first separated unofficially from the country in 1999, when NATO intervened militarily in the province to stop Serbian government violence against ethnic Albanians. The Albanians are a cultural group from southeastern Europe who speak a unique language only distantly related to other European tongues, and like the Bosniaks in nearby Bosnia & Herzegovia, are one of the few majority-Muslim European peoples. They also form a majority of the population in the neighboring country of Albania.

Kosovo, claimed as a province of Serbia, is
policed by U.N. and E.U. peacekeepers. The
Republic of Kosovo also governs the region,
except for the Serbian-loyalist north. Map is
my own work, based on these two blank
maps by Nord-NordWest. License: CC BY-SA

Policed by a U.N. peacekeeping mission since 1999, most of Kosovo has never since been controlled by the Yugoslav (now Serbian) government, though the U.N. still officially considers it to be a province of Serbia. Despite fierce political opposition from Serbia, Russia, and other countries, as well as from the ethnic Serb minority within Kosovo, the local government declared independence in 2008. The self-proclaimed Republic of Kosovo government has since administered the territory alongside the U.N. and another police force sent by the European Union, though the Northern Kosovo area, a Serb-majority region, has resisted independence and continues to support the Serbian government in Belgrade, even setting up roadblocks to keep out the Kosovan police - a sort of breakaway state within a breakaway state.

The Republic of Kosovo has not been admitted into the U.N., and it is recognized by only 88 U.N. member countries (many of them NATO members or countries with Muslim populations) and one other state (Taiwan). Serbia and Russia still strongly oppose independence for Kosovo, but the list of states recognizing its sovereignty has nevertheless continued to grow. Within the last year, 13 more U.N. members have offered diplomatic recognition of Kosovan independence: Andorra, the Central African Republic, Guinea, Niger, Benin, Saint Lucia, Nigeria, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Kuwait, Uganda, Ghana, and Haiti.

Diplomatic recognition of the Republic of Kosovo. Countries that recognized Kosovan independence recently (in the last twelve months) in light green, others in dark green; Kosovo in magenta. Public domain (source).

Sources: See citations on Wikipedia's list of Entities that recognize Kosovo as an independent state.