CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Koutkova, Karla |
|---|---|
| Title | The Politics of Informality: External State-building in Post-Dayton Bosnia |
| Summary | This dissertation is an ethnography of informality in the context of institution-led state-building in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Based on thirteen months of participant observation in three research sites, it argues that the boundary between the formal and the informal is fuzzy, and is dependent on the meaning-making actors' positionality, power and performativity. As an interdisciplinary project at the crossroads of political science and social anthropology, this dissertation proposes a grounded theory in which informality functions as a communicative vehicle in the process of policy translation among local and non-local actors. Informality has been associated with reproduction �from below� – seen as residual to formalizing initiatives of state – and as an exclusive product of local actors. My research goes counter to these claims in that it sees the two domains as interrelated and a product of interaction between local and international actors. To the landscape of phenomena attached to the qualifier 'informal', including informal practices, institutions, networks, and informal governance, I add the concept of 'informal prism'. Challenging the assumptions in earlier informality studies, the concept of informality as a prism moves beyond the binary of formal/informal, the static normative labeling of informality as inherently a less desirable domain of human activity, and finally the normative residualism implicit in most studies on the subject of informality. Bringing on board the anthropological literature, the research contrasts the experience-distant concepts related to informality (such as corruption, networking, social capital, and clientelism) with the emic terms used in Bosnia: štela (local colloquial term for 'connections' and their use), ko fol (litt. 'as if') and ubleha (litt. 'bluff'). The dissertation traces informality locally, within an international agency, and in interaction between the international agency and its local counterparts. The main research site is the OSCE, where I explore the relationship between informality and internationality as a practice. The second site is formed by the local counterparts of the OSCE, namely 'local communities'(MZs, mjesne zajednice), semi-formal organizations that originated as a neighborhood-level governance in socialist Yugoslavia. In interaction between the OSCE and the MZs, I analyze the informal prism through the process of translating down, in which the local intermediaries interpret the etic language of informality into those emic concepts that the 'internationals' oppose. The third site is a network of NGOs united in an anti-corruption movement ACCOUNT. Here I observe the complementary process of translating up of informality through a series of performances of the local actors aimed at the international audience. The theoretical implications of this research reach over four broad areas of investigation: (1) theories of informality in social sciences; (2) critical state-building literature; (3) interpretive policy analysis and critical policy studies; and (4) area studies on the Balkans and Bosnia. While the primary goal of my research has not been policy-driven, and has been more concerned with challenging taken-for-granted normative ideas rather can creating new ones, there is a set of lessons learnt that address the policy-making world. These can be grouped into: (1) informality management within an international bureaucratic apparatus deployed in a contact zone; and (2) informality management on the local ground. |
| Supervisor | Fumagalli, Matteo |
| Department | School of Public Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/koutkova_karla.pdf |
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