ABSTRACT
Official unemployment numbers in Serbia hover around 11 percent, and youth unemployment accounts for 29.1 percent. Though the ensuing violence accompanying the two Balkan and two World Wars is too extensive to cover in this book, it is imperative to understand that the Muslim population was driven to leave Southeastern Europe for Turkey by violence and fear that was compounded by their loss of land. As such, Novi Pazar indeed consists of a "settled population that lives as a minority outside its ethnonational homeland", which is Bosnia and Herzegovina. Novi Pazar is, to put it in Pierre Bourdieu's words, a "vast social laboratory" in which one is able to examine the longue duree of transnational diaspora connections. Cross-border practices are embodied, as opposed to virtual cross-border assignations. Belgrade not only approved of but fostered small-scale sverc to penetrate the internationally imposed trade sanctions on Serbia during the first half of the 1990s.
