Critical Approaches to Southeast Europe: A Cross-Disciplinary Series - CEU Press – serie

In Southeast Europe, there is a growing disjunction between “the way the world is” and the world that is described by law. The informal practices that address problems when formal institutions fail can be celebrated as spaces of creative problem-solving, or criticized as spaces for favouritism and corruption. When ruling political parties control informal networks, they consolidate the hold of unaccountable actors on power, moving from state capture to societal capture. This book presents findings from a collaborative, multidisciplinary research project. Over three years, a group of forty researchers examined informal practices in nine Southeast European states, adopting a mix of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. This close look at the Balkans illuminates persistent deficits in state legitimacy and capacity. The evidence allows a critical assessment of “Europeanisation” processes that produce only superficial formal changes, and of ways that networks of mutual assistance turn into instruments of social control and closure.

Water potential is a significant natural wealth of most parts of the Balkans, and it has given rise to a surge in hydropower investments unparalleled across Europe. As part of the process, a dam was planned to be built on the Una River, which runs through the Bosnian town of Bihać. This prospect alarmed the city’s residents, culminating in a protest in 2015. The book begins with this protest, and it explores how the threat of dam construction transformed the seemingly apolitical love of the river into a powerful political force around which thousands of people mobilized: riverine citizenship.The book is based on interviews with participants, archival research, and over twenty years of ethnographic research. Azra Hromadžić focuses on the tension between ecological sustainability efforts in favor of renewable energy, on the one hand, and citizens’ historically shaped, deeply-felt, love for the river, on the other. She shows how the language and promises of green transition can mask the forces of capitalist accumulation that drive this change — whether in the form of building hydroelectric dams or promoting eco-tourism — and thus set in motion another cycle of environmental degradation, social dispossession, and economic exploitation.

This book focuses on the cultivation, production, and trafficking of Macedonian raw opium, tracing and contextualizing both the licit and the illicit processing and trade of opium alkaloids from the Western Balkans through Turkey, and to the rest of the world between the two World Wars. The author explores this both from the angle of the League of Nations and politicians and diplomats, and by analyzing of the activities of smugglers, police, and ordinary people who participated in its production and distribution. He describes the process of relocating the illegal processing industry from Turkey and Bulgaria to Yugoslavia. He shows the implicit continuity of relations between the former Ottoman Empire and the newly constituted Yugoslav state in the form of bilateral political agreements. Special attention is paid to the illegal activities within the legal pharmaceutical industry and exposes the role of criminal networks, which the author situates in political and social context.