We begin 2026 with a six-part series centered around themes of place, movement, and conflict. These issues demand deeper human-centered context, as displacement, political instability, and environmental pressure increasingly define daily life for millions.
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In the late 1990s, Kosovo emerged from a brutal war that left deep political and emotional scars across the country. Though it declared independence from Serbia in 2008, Kosovo remains only partially recognized, and the legacy of the 1998–1999 conflict still shapes daily life. When photojournalist Valerie Plesch moved there after reporting in Afghanistan, she was struck by how present the war felt: NATO peacekeepers still patrolled the country, massacre anniversaries continued to draw grieving families, and nearly everyone she met carried some personal connection to loss, displacement, or unresolved trauma. Her work in Kosovo became an effort to document not just a postwar nation, but the ways memory remains embedded in ordinary life.
Plesch’s photographs examine how people rebuild in the shadow of violence. Her reporting followed families still searching for loved ones from among the more than 13,000 people killed in the war, and traced the long aftermath of atrocities including mass graves and the legacy of wartime sexual violence. One of her most affecting long-term projects focused on survivors of rape, many of whom have lived for years in silence because of stigma and social pressure. At the same time, her work also observed the fragile reconstruction of civic and cultural life, including institutions like the National Ballet of Kosovo, rebuilt after the war. What emerges from her Kosovo work is a record of a society still living with history in the present, and a reminder that the consequences of war do not end when the fighting stops.
Every spring, Kosovo marks the season in which the war reached its most violent phase. Most of the massacres and war crimes took place between March and June 1999, during the 78-day NATO bombing campaign that sought to halt the Serbian regime’s repression and ethnic cleansing of Kosovo Albanians. Even now, NATO troops remain in Kosovo as part of its longest-running peacekeeping mission. The war’s dead and missing still shape public life: Serbian forces carried out multiple burials and exhumations in an effort to conceal evidence, and today roughly 1,650 ethnic Albanians, Serbs, Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptians remain missing. In some cases, graves have been reopened after newly identified remains were returned from mass graves. The legacy of wartime sexual violence is similarly unresolved. An estimated 20,000 women and men were raped during the conflict, yet shame, stigma, and weak legal accountability have helped preserve a culture of silence in which survivors rarely speak publicly and perpetrators have largely escaped punishment.
About Valerie Plesch
Valerie Plesch is an independent photojournalist, documentary photographer, and writer based in Washington, D.C., where she covers politics, the White House, Capitol Hill, immigration, refugee resettlement, and related issues for editorial and feature assignments. Her work has been published by a wide range of major national and international outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal, PBS NewsHour, USA Today, Reuters, NPR, Politico, Financial Times Magazine, Al Jazeera English, and FRONTLINE, among many others. Her long-form documentary work focuses on the aftermath of war and the ways memory, identity, trauma, and displacement continue to shape individual and collective lives.
Since early 2021, she has documented the growing Afghan community in the Washington area and the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees rebuilding their lives in the United States. As a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting grantee, she has chronicled the challenges faced by Afghans evacuated during and after the Taliban takeover. Before becoming a visual journalist, she spent a decade working in international development on USAID-funded projects in post-conflict and post-disaster countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Haiti, Thailand, and Vietnam, experience that continues to inform the rigor and sensitivity of her work.
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