ABSTRACT
With particular attention to the crucial decade of the 1990s, this chapter historicises the practice of economic informality in Kosovo. The aim is to give an account of the genesis of certain principles of (di)vision and resource distribution that in part have come to constitute the social order and power relations of informality in contemporary Kosovo. To do this, the chapter zooms in on two phases that were formative in the emergence of a ‘logic of inclusion’, that is, a dynamic of informality that favours businesses with connections to the ‘right’ political elites and criminal groups. The chapter draws predominantly on secondary material in the form of previous academic research on informality, illicitness and criminality in Kosovo and during the Balkan wars, as well as on works that discuss the history and situation of Kosovo in Yugoslavia. To a lesser yet important extent, the chapter also makes use of interview material.
