DOWNLOAD A FREE COPY HERE! https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789633866436/captured-societies-in-southeast-europe

(follow the link to “open access”)

Let me begin with a few basic details. The title of the book is Captured societies in Southeast Europe: Networks of trust and control. It is published jointly by Central European University Press and Amsterdam University Press. It is edited by me with two other colleagues, Alena Ledeneva of UCL and Predrag Cvetičanin of University of Niš. There are several other colleagues from around the region who appear as chapter coordinators, but we prefer to think of the book as collectively authored by all 40 researchers in 9 countries who contributed to the project.

Just one more detail about the book: it is available FREE to anybody who wants to download the PDF from this site: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789633866436/captured-societies-in-southeast-europe. Here is a direct link to the free download: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789633868034/captured-societies-in-southeast-europe. We are grateful to the “Opening the Future” programme for providing the support to make this possible. If anybody does want to buy a hardback paper copy they are able to do this at a very high price, but we do not expect many people to do this. Our goal is not to make money but to share our findings as widely as possible.

The research is about informal networks in Southeast European states: what they are, how big they are, what they do, and what they mean. In the briefest possible summary, our argument is this: informal networks exist because states have been established that do not have the capacity to meet citizens’ needs or to fulfil their ambitious promises to remake the world in the image of their ideology (regardless of what this ideology is). So they begin life as “networks of trust,” ways in which people without power are able to help one another. But over time they are colonised by powerful forces, political parties in particular, and they become the means by which access is controlled to employment, social benefits, all of the things that people might need. When this happens they are transformed into “networks of control,” extending their power throughout the whole society and compelling everybody into dependence on political connections.

Lots of people have talked about “captured states” in the region, but this is something more. The control of these informal networks extends into private businesses, civil society, personal relationships – this is why we have started talking about “captured societies.”

There are a couple of reasons why the material in this book is new. One of them is simply that even though networks of control are something that “everybody knows” (the academic literature likes to use the category of “open secrets”), we have made an attempt to measure it (using quantitative tools) and to talk about what it means for people who deal with it (using qualitative tools). Another is that what we are talking about is structural, not ideological. It doesn’t matter whether a state is calling itself socialist, conservative, nationalist, liberal, whatever – this is what is happening in all of the states of the region. A third is that we have put an end to talk of “backsliding” (another piece of jargon that a lot of academics talking about the region like to use). The things that we are observing are not residues of Communism, but creations of the elites that have emerged in the period since 1990.

There are also some reasons why we think the material in the book is timely and important. The research predates the big protests that have been taking place in Serbia since last November (our field research was carried out between 2016 and 2019) but it addresses a lot of the things that these protests – like the 2014 protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina, among others – have been about. We are talking about control of public life and public work by networks that operate parallel to law and sometimes move around the law, and how this form of capture weakens the state and puts citizens in danger. People who want to look a little bit more deeply at the conditions that produced these events might find something in our book.

We are not entirely down on informal networks and informal practices, though. There is some evidence that they offer ways of resolving problems that unresponsive legal systems cannot resolve. Informal business seems to be better than legal business at promoting cooperation between people in different ethnic groups in places where states are discriminating, for example. And informal businesses are able to use their flexibility to accommodate the needs of people (mostly women) who need to adjust their work obligations to care for other family members. The problem is not informality itself, but the control exercised over it by political parties.

We are also not uncritical of the European Union and its effort to integrate and encourage reform in the states in the region. The intentions behind EU conditions may be excellent, but the conditions themselves take the form of recommending that laws be passed. How these laws will be implemented and interpreted is up to political parties in power, and they often use the demand for reform to consolidate their control even further. We show several instances where this happens.

This could be immodest, but we think that we have made a meaningful contribution that changes the way that political and social change in the region will be understood, and that people might want to know about it.

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