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International audience ; The arrangements offered by international community as solutions to Yugoslav dissolution process have significantly affected the development of the Kosovo conflict. These policies failed to produce consensus between the parties in conflict, instead, as the paper demonstrate, they played the role of a catalyst in the initiation of the conflict. This paper, by offering a detailed reconstruction of the process by which the international community tried to settle the Kosovo case, demonstrates how the dynamics of the conflict interacted dynamically with international community attitudes and policies towards the case. The paper discusses the attitudes and policies of international community toward the Kosovo case underlining its attachment to traditional prerequisites of international order instead of inherited causes of conflict. There are three important events that underline the interference of international community in the case of Kosovo before the war: the Conference on Yugoslavia that followed up the creation of the Badinter Committee, the Dayton Agreement and the Rambouillet Talks. These events are explained in details in three separate sections since they have immediate implications for the situation in Kosovo and consequently for the development of the conflict. We first discuss the contribution of existing normative framework to models of international community behavior and their effects in the case of Kosovo conflict following with the reaction of the conflicting parties towards offered arrangements. Both moments are assumed to be of importance in providing a larger picture in the understanding of the outgrowth of Kosovo conflict.

A current ambition in welfare states across Europe and in the US is for political decision-making to be based on rigorous research (Bason 2010; Cartwright et al 2009; Mulgan 2009; Nilsson et al. 2008). Promoted as 'evidence-based policy-making', 'good analysis, or 'better governance' (Nilsson et.al. 2008) the aspiration finds its roots in the governance paradigm generally referred to as 'new public management' (Hartley 2005) and the central concern for developing a cost-effective and agile public sector (Rod 2010). . Sound as this ambition may seem, it has nevertheless been problematized from within the civil services and from the research community (e.g. Boden & Epstein 2006; Cartwright et al. 2009; Elliott & Popay 2000; House of Commons 2006; Nilsson et al. 2008; Whitty 2006; Rod 2010, Vohnsen 2011). Some warn that the term 'evidence-based' is used too lightly, and often in cases where 'evidence' has not fed into the policy processes but rather has been invoked after the fact to support already agreed upon policy (House of Commons 2006; Nilsson et al. 2008); others warn that politics and science are – if not incompatible – then at odds with one another (e.g. Boden & Epstein 2006; Whitty 2006). The article pin-points the friction points between science and policy-making and discuss why it is that evidence rarely feeds into policy-making and how the evidence-based paradigm effectively challenges the traditional craftsmanship of the civil service.