Dissertation Defenses

Dustin Sanchez
Friday, September 18, 2026
9:30 AM
ELA 344

Abstract:
Global wine production is on the verge of calamitous disruption caused by global warming-induced climate change. In many regions, the interlocking forces of political and military conflict further intensify the effects of climate hazards by disrupting established systems and deepening vulnerabilities. The purpose of this study is to investigate the structural violence, the systemic, avoidable harm caused by political, economic, or social structures that restrict access to resources or power, and territorial transformation driven by conflict and vulnerability for viticulturalists within the fragile-state dynamics in the Dukagjin (Metohija) wine region of Kosovo. This project explores how historical marginalization of Albanian identity, in particular within late Yugoslavia, structured conditions that produced socio-ecological vulnerability with a cross-case study mixed-methods approach. By examining Kosovo viticulture, a climate-vulnerable agricultural industry within a geopolitically fragile region, this study explores how structural violence during territorial transformation influences hazard vulnerability. When power is consolidated into a functional political state where outcomes appear linear, it can be understood as enhancing vulnerability. When power becomes asymmetrical, and exists in parallels, it can actively produce vulnerability through structural violence. The viticulturalists of Kosovo are trapped in a Serbian geopolitical economic system blocked by profit-motivated capitalists employing historic structures to turn farmers into bounded serfs with a cartel-controlled oligopsony. These market conditions were originally part of a hybridized-war against Albanians beginning in the late 1980s, which devolved into a kinetic war of ethnic cleansing. While the ethnic cleansing was stopped by western intervention, the hybridized-war continues. This framework enables a future-oriented analysis of how history shapes present vulnerabilities and limits the potential for equitable adaptabilities.