ABSTRACT
This chapter takes as first step to account for the book’s argument of a logic of inclusion–exclusion, that is, of how everyday informal economic practices in post-conflict Kosovo are co-constituted by professional anti-informality practices and the scholarly knowledges enacted through them, and this with contradictory effects. To do this, the chapter makes use of interview and secondary material, and approaches detected regularities in Kosovo’s post-conflict economy through the Bourdieusian concepts of capitals and field. The chapter finds that by weaving into rather than challenging certain historically formed dynamics, the international anti-informality operations have gained a first constitutive effect. Specifically, they have unwittingly co-created conditions that have empowered and enabled certain businesses to ‘set the rules’ of informality in its whole. This shows in how the resources that make the activities and practices of these agents possible, such as links to political and criminal groups, have gained wider and systematised effects – shaping from afar the space of possibles of all agents involved in informality. Overall, however, this objectivated discussion of the informal field in post-conflict Kosovo can only be fully grasped (and potentially challenged) in relation to the following chapter’s analysis of everyday agents’ experiences and mobilised dispositions.
