ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a second step to account for the book’s argument that informal economic practices in post-conflict Kosovo are guided by a logic of inclusion–exclusion, partly constituted by (and through) international anti-informality operations. Drawing primarily on interview material, the chapter zooms in on and analyses the experiences, mobilised dispositions, and practical knowledges of agents positioned, at a particular point in time, in the dominated segment of the informal field as constructed in the previous chapter. It demonstrates that dominated agents reason and enact informal economic practices in relation to the practices of dominating agents, the so-called first movers. More precisely, social capital as the main currency in the informal field has transformed from being a precondition for and symbol of an informality of resistance and national solidarity, to become a resource that signals and creates inequalities, disadvantages, and biases. A second co-constitutive effect of the international anti-informality operations in post-conflict Kosovo is thus to have contributed to a shift in the doxa of informality, in what dominated agents take for granted to be at stake in informal activities and how this shapes what informality means for them. By suggesting the presence of a certain mechanism of legitimation, the chapter further finds that this ordering also contains traces of symbolic violence.
