While largely understudied to date, those regions in the western Balkans inhabited by Albanian speakers were afflicted by the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 (and then World War I) in distinctive ways. The subsequent parceling out of these former Ottoman and Habsburg administered lands to satiate the needs of neighboring political and economic elite introduced a unique set of consequences for Albanian-speakers and the regimes that occupied these areas during the “long” World War I. While this paper will cover the battles between armies and the residual horrors accompanying war—famine and forced migration—in order to demonstrate how these material manifestation of imperial collapse became the twentieth century reality for most Albanians, this paper will argue that a violence that rips apart these regions have an equally dramatic impact on the manner in which the regimes occupying the area would transform with the sudden turn of fortunes. With Montenegrin, Greek, Serbian, Habsburg, Ottoman (and Bulgarian) administrations beginning a process of folding to new military defeats throughout the 1912-1917 period, this paper will suggest the resulting chaos invariably transformed these imperial administrations as they retreated from the region. At its theoretical heart, this paper wishes to suggest the manner by which locally administered regimes adapted to the shifting fortunes of larger imperial patrons influenced the manner these temporary regimes interfaced with new constituencies arising from these contested geographies inhabited by a politically scattered population. As these “Albanians” faced a future increasingly decided by outsiders charged with occupying Albanian lands under a new, often hostile ambition, the relationship former partners at the local and regional level, the nature of Occupation at crucial moments took on a crucial dynamic of productive tension. Crucially, these occupations often required considerable collaboration with selected local intermediaries, some of whom became the dominant political actors in Albanian lands for much of the 20th C, in large part because of these short-term adjustments taken by departing officials in what would soon-become (re)occupied Albania, Macedonia, and Kosovo under an entirely different kind of regime.