ABSTRACT

This chapter takes as its object of analysis the anti-informality practices that international organisations have enacted in Kosovo from 1999 until 2014, with the ambition to reduce the informal economy. By enquiring into what these operations ‘are’, in terms of the ideas and assumptions that constitute them, the chapter argues that international anti-informality operations are characterised by a logic of exclusion that derives from scholarly knowledges and theorisations of informality. To make this argument, the chapter proceeds in two main steps. First, and as the analysis concerns historical practices that cannot be directly observed, the chapter accesses and maps the international anti-informality practices indirectly. More precisely, it conducts a text analysis of a large number of interventionary documents that reveal international organisations’ knowledge production and actions on informality in post-conflict Kosovo. The chapter then proceeds to conduct a conceptual analysis of the ideas and knowledges that have informed – and been put to use through – these actions. The findings made in this chapter are crucial in relation to the following chapters of the book, as they turn to examine potential constitutive effects of the international anti-informality practices on how everyday informality plays out in Kosovo.