Following the revocation of Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989, a large part of Kosovo-Albanians working in healthcare were dismissed or pressured to resign from public institutions, and the Kosovo-Albanian population lost trust in Serbian-led public health structures. Associations channelled help to Kosovo-Albanians who had lost their employment. The Mother Teresa Society, founded in 1990, progressively opened branches and health centres throughout Kosovo with the help of thousands of volunteers to guarantee the continuity of health and social care. The lost trust in the Serbian-led institution was not automatically “transferred” to the new Kosovo-Albanian health actors. The Mother Teresa Society had to continuously renew its legitimation, although it was one of the largest Kosovo-Albanian associations. In a healthcare system characterised by a complex “entanglement” of actors, the Mother Teresa Society, supported by the Catholic Church and by international associations, entertained relationships of co-operation and competition with the Kosovo-Albanian “parallel” government structures, with public and private health institutions in Kosovo, and with the Serbian government. The Mother Teresa Society showed new ways of providing health and social services and reinvented health and social care in a decade characterised by multiple transformations: by the progressive dismantlement and delegitimation of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and by the construction of a new Kosovo-Albanian state. In the 1990s the Mother Teresa Society went beyond its declared mission of providing health care and social welfare. It blurred the boundaries between the private, associational realm and the public realm through its co-operation with the Kosovo-Albanian “parallel” government structures and their relationship of mutual legitimation, its role as an “associational diplomat”, and the “government-like” legitimation strategies it developed.
