“I hope you’ve remembered the helmet!” I opened the mail just as I had arrived to my hotel in Pristina. A joke or not, the image of Kosovo, the Kosovo brand so to speak, is still defined by images of war, poverty, illegal activities (“Welcome to Kosovo, your car is already here!”) and the foreign presence that at least some feel is turning Kosovo into a US fiefdom.

So how do you go ahead, if you want to create and show another version of Kosovo, a Kosovo 2.0 maybe? Yes, the latter is in fact the name of a magazine and a website with bold ambitions to rebrand – and rethink – Kosovo.

Just by seeing the cover of the first issue of Kosovo 2.0 it is clear that the editors have at least partly succeeded in their ambitions. “It doesn’t look Kosovo!” and sure, it doesn’t, it could be just any artsy fashion magazine with a retro 70’s touch. It opens up with something that looks like an Audi ad, but it is in fact a story about cars driven by the Kosovo elite (“The assembly Chairman has a 4×4 Toyota that can conquer most terrains. Thirty percent of his compatriots find it hard to traverse the poverty line and 13 percent live in extreme poverty”).

The ironic twist continues all the way through the magazine (did you know that Kosovo still doesn’t have its own country phone code or Internet suffix?) and even though some articles might be a bit predictable and would have needed more editing (who cares whether it took 30 hrs or not for a young Canadian to travel to Kosovo?) but the overall result is impressive. There are a number of countries in the world that need this kind of rebranding and I would love to see more magazines created with the same feeling (time for a Haiti 2.0!)

If you can’t get hold of a copy of the magazine, check out their website at http://www.kosovotwopointzero.com/en