The global ubiquity of informal economic activities has turned informality into a key policy question, not least in international peace- and state-building. This book explores a core aspect of economic informality: its resilience despite comprehensive international anti-informality operations. Using Kosovo as an illustrative case, Danielsson suggests that to understand the resilience of informality, two distinct areas of practice need to be studied in conjunction rather than separately. The first concerns the professional practices enacted by international organisations in their attempts to formalise the informal economy in Kosovo. The second area of practice concerns the everyday informal economic practices of social agents in Kosovo. To study these areas of practice at their junction, Danielsson uses Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power and argues that in post-conflict Kosovo, the distinct practices have become interwoven and co-constitutive of a novel ordering and meaning of informality. The resilience of the informal thus plays out through – while undermining and reinforcing the need of – the international anti-informality operations. Including scholarship from global governance, global political economy and social theory, this book’s original perspective on informal economies and power will appeal to scholars and professionals located in peace studies, development studies, and the field of international relations.
Since the 1970s, the concept of economic informality has served as focal point for a comprehensive scholarly thinking and the development of policy initiatives enhanced by international organisations. Yet, informality displays a puzzling resilience. The problematique of this book concerns the lenses through which informality has been constituted, studied and acted upon as an empirical phenomenon. By developing a critical understanding of informality as object of study, the book uncovers the historical, scholarly and practitioner contexts in which contemporary conceptualisations of informality are constituted. The author argues that three dominant and conventional approaches to informality systematically fail to account for how the reasons behind people's participation in informal economic activities are constituted by an internal and hierarchically structured social order. To transcend the identified shortcomings of the established approaches, the book rethinks informality through a comprehensive power analysis and highlights the importance of hierarchy, covert violence and domination. A central assumption of this rethinking is that informality constitutes a social phenomenon that emerges and is expressed through social practices, which over time and across space have become institutionalised to the point that informality is considered commonsensical and unchangeable. By putting the reconceptualisation to use through the thinking of Pierre Bourdieu, the book performs an empirical analysis of the nexus between resilience, symbolic violence and informal economic practices in Kosovo from the late 1980s until 2011. Based on primary research material, the analysis offers a unique insight into informal dynamics and illuminates the workings of an intrinsic, circular, malleable and ambiguous system of domination that would otherwise remain hidden --
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