The global ubiquity of informal economic activities has turned informality into a key policy question, not least in international peace- and state-building. This book explores a core aspect of economic informality: its resilience despite comprehensive international anti-informality operations.
Using Kosovo as an illustrative case, Danielsson suggests that to understand the resilience of informality, two distinct areas of practice need to be studied in conjunction rather than separately. The first concerns the professional practices enacted by international organisations in their attempts to formalise the informal economy in Kosovo. The second area of practice concerns the everyday informal economic practices of social agents in Kosovo. To study these areas of practice at their junction, Danielsson uses Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power and argues that in post-conflict Kosovo, the distinct practices have become interwoven and co-constitutive of a novel ordering and meaning of informality. The resilience of the informal thus plays out through – while undermining and reinforcing the need of – the international anti-informality operations.
Including scholarship from global governance, global political economy and social theory, this book’s original perspective on informal economies and power will appeal to scholars and professionals located in peace studies, development studies, and the field of international relations.
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine three explanatory perspectives in the academic literature on informal economies that seek to account for agents' engagement in informal economic practices.
Design/methodology/approach - The paper draws on Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology to interrogate the existing perspectives and to provide a conceptual rethinking of informal economies and informal economic practices.
Findings - The paper reveals an inherent scholastic epistemocentrism in the established perspectives. By privileging either an objectivist or a subjectivist viewpoint, these accounts do not examine the practical knowledge and logic that constitute agents' knowledgeable engagement in informal economic practices. By making use of Bourdieu's thinking tools of "field", "capital" and "the habitus", the paper offers a conceptual rethinking of informal economic practices as the product of a dialectic relationship between socially objectivated structures and subjective representations and experiences.
Originality/value - The paper introduces a reflexive rethinking of informality that draws on but also develops an emergent literature on informal economic practices as relational and context bound.
Informal economies' relevance for peacebuilding is widely acknowledged. By providing an alternative interpretation in relation to the view that informality emerges in post-conflict environments due to the state's institutional weakness, this article contends that in Kosovo the principles of informality and its reproduction are inherent to informality itself. The article turns to the analytics of Pierre Bourdieu in order to reveal aspects of Kosovar informality left unexamined by established approaches. It illustrates how intrinsic inequalities and power relations constitute and reproduce informal economic practices throughout a circular rationale. Rather than a direct function of state weakness, informality in Kosovo is an effect of agents' engagement in knowledgeable and everyday practices. Agents' susceptibility contributes to the temporary fixing of meanings and doings that enable differentiations yet also interdependencies between relatively powerful and relatively powerless businesses. The article reflects on the implications of an intrinsic rationale for the politics of informality within peacebuilding operations.
This article analyses the recent military ‘turn to reflexivity’ in relation to current reflexive commitments in critical studies of the military. With reflexivity, military organizations have begun to inquire into its own role as a producer and user of knowledge, and into the constitutive effects of knowledge in and on the world. A reflexive concern with the conditions and effects of knowledge has thus made militaries sensitive to the epistemic dimensions of military force. The broader socio-political implications of the military’s attention to epistemics, in terms of how knowledge may constitute and bring into being novel socio-political orderings, make it an urgent task to explore this development in relation to the reflexive state of critical research on the military. The first argument that I make in the article is that existing reflexive commitments in critical military studies are conceptually able to target scholarly-military epistemic interactions and the constitutive effects thereof, but less able to address epistemic distinctions in terms of how knowledge is produced and how different conditions shape the content of knowledge. This, however, is what is needed to critically address the military reflexive development. Based on this, I argue secondly that a fruitful broadening and enriching of the reflexive gaze may be achieved by further taking reflexivity in a Bourdieusian direction – a move that ultimately works complementary to existing reflexive commitments in critical military studies.
In military and academic circles, there is today an acknowledgment that war is urban and, for some commentators, that the urban also is war—in the sense of an ongoing militarization of cities and urban environments. Indeed, that war is (partly) urban has been the case for as long as humans have lived in cities and towns. What is new at present though is the recognized topicality of the manifold links between urban geographies and war. Until the last couple of decades, urban war and urban warfare were considered phenomena either of the past or of the future, but less of the present. It was only in the late 1990s and early 2000s that the significance of urban spaces in and of war became widely acknowledged, partly as an effect of military and everyday wartime experiences from places such as Grozny, Mostar, and Sarajevo. Other coinciding developments involve the post–Cold War revival of geopolitics, as well as emergent scholarly linkages between (critical) urban geopolitics, on the one hand, and studies of the military, war, and peace, on the other hand. However, this is not to say that military organizations themselves have not historically been preoccupied with urban spaces. With a focus on both intrastate and interstate urban conflict and urban war, the contribution at hand offers an understanding both of the academic study of military urban geographies and of military geographical approaches to and imaginaries of urban warfare and urban space (without going into military urban warfare practices as such). This is done over five sections, each with a specific theme that also illustrates the many links between academia and the military when it comes to cities and urban environments. The first section frames the topic. It offers a broad introductory perspective in the sense of an overview of academic literatures that are often combined in the scholarly study of military urban geographies. First are the conventional and the critical approaches, respectively, to military geography, and second is the literature on urban war that to a varying degree targets geographical aspects. The second section addresses in more depth conventional military geographical approaches to urban spaces, in a way that includes both academic works and military treaties and doctrines. The third section develops further conventional military geographical approaches to and imaginaries of urban space. It details some of the more recent military operational and strategic modes of imagining and approaching urban geographies. The fourth section shifts the focus back to the scholarly study of military urban geographies, but from critical perspectives. As further developed here, critical scholarship on the topic shifts attention to the conditions and effects of military presence on cities and urban spaces and to how military operations are both constituted by and constitutive of urban spaces and sites. The fifth and final section introduces a specific subtheme in critical scholarship on urban spaces in and of war: the literature on urbicide.
In this article, I argue that a ‘situated-portable epistemic nexus’ characterizes postwar urban peacebuilding. The concept captures how knowledge in urban peacebuilding is produced by/productive of discursive and material conditions that are both, and simultaneously, situated in a particular urban environment and transnationally emergent and circulating. I illustrate this argument in an analysis of an urban peacebuilding project in postwar Pristina, Kosovo, that relied on the computer game Minecraft as the main technology. Despite a heterogeneous group of actors involved, and a primacy devoted to local perspectives, the at-once-situated and globally portable discourses, technologies and artefacts of the Pristina project conditioned the production of a relatively narrow urban knowledge and space that formed around a purely visual conception of the urban – overall limiting what the situated urban was and could become.
Since the 1970s, the concept of “economic informality” has served as focal point for a comprehensive scholarly thinking and the development of policy initiatives enhanced by international organisations. Yet, informality displays a puzzling resilience. The problematique of this book concerns the lenses through which informality has been constituted, studied and acted upon as an empirical phenomenon. By developing a critical understanding of informality as object of study, the book uncovers the historical, scholarly and practitioner contexts in which contemporary conceptualisations of informality are constituted.
The author argues that three dominant and conventional approaches to informality systematically fail to account for how the reasons behind people's participation in informal economic activities are constituted by an internal and hierarchically structured social order. To transcend the identified shortcomings of the established approaches, the book rethinks informality through a comprehensive power analysis and highlights the importance of hierarchy, covert violence and domination. A central assumption of this rethinking is that informality constitutes a social phenomenon that emerges and is expressed through social practices, which over time and across space have become institutionalised to the point that informality is considered commonsensical and unchangeable. By putting the reconceptualisation to use through the thinking of Pierre Bourdieu, the book performs an empirical analysis of the nexus between resilience, symbolic violence and informal economic practices in Kosovo from the late 1980s until 2011. Based on primary research material, the analysis offers a unique insight into informal dynamics and illuminates the workings of an intrinsic, circular, malleable and ambiguous system of domination that would otherwise remain hidden.
By engaging the empirical, theoretical and meta-theoretical level at the same time, the book explores the twofold constitution of informality as a social phenomenon and brings to light a new understanding of the resilience of the informal. As such, the reconceptualisation forms a critical intervention into scholarly and practitioner discussions about informality. By revealing mechanisms of domination, the book offers an alternative and fruitful account of the socio-historical weave within which practices of informality in Kosovo crystallise.
Urban wars represent one – perhaps the – phenomenon in which war and cities take particular form in and through each other. With the epistemics of this reciprocal relationship being less studied, this article brings together the discourses on urban war and military interoperability respectively. Both discourses emphasise the question of knowledge. A shared geographic knowledge held by the service branches involved in a joint operation is considered key for interoperability to arise. In the urban wars discourse, the need and difficulty of ‘knowing’ the urban are stressed. However, we know less about whether military services involved in a joint urban operation produce distinct geographic knowledges and, if so, with what effects. With inspiration from critical scholarship on military geographies and from works on the history and geography of knowledge, this article develops a conceptual framework to target the mutually constitutive relationship between military epistemics and urban space in urban war. In it, I make a twofold argument, illustrated with the help of empirical examples from two Israeli joint urban military operations. First, the type of geographic knowledge that military ground and air forces produce as they seek to ‘make known’ particular urban spaces differs due to the services' distinct situatedness and relative distance to the urban environment. The produced types of military geographic knowledge, moreover, do not imply different perspectives on the urban as a pre-existing entity as much as they bring – in distinct fashions – the urban into being.
The epistemologies of international interventions are receiving increased attention. An emerging literature on knowledge production in peace- and statebuilding has questioned any given authority of western epistemologies in conflict contexts. However, this article argues that by not interrogating into the conditions of producing representations, the literature paradoxically leaves interveners’ representations and knowledge forms intact. The article develops a conceptual framework for a reflexive analysis of how phenomena in conflict contexts are made known and representable. The framework’s value is illustrated in an analysis of the epistemic practices and their conditions of possibility that from 1995 to 2015 produced the ‘informal economy’ as interventionary object in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The multifaceted work of production included international standard-setting procedures, survey distributions and a development of calculative techniques. Conditioned by this work, various ‘informalities’ were produced as interventionary object, with distinct stakes brought into the respective object through the acts of producing it.
Peacebuilding debates increasingly revolve around questions about knowledge and expertise. Of particular interest is what (and whose) knowledge(s) ends up authoritative in interventions. This article addresses a problem in the literature on the epistemics and epistemic authority of peacebuilding interventions: the acknowledgement of but lacking attention to plural knowledges, the transgressive character of expertise, and knowledge struggles. It does this by discussing recent suggestions that peacebuilding epistemic authority can be fruitfully analysed as a Bourdieusian field. The article identifies a tension in Bourdieu’s own thinking about fields, which has shaped some of these recent proposals. This tension, nevertheless, also enables a reconsideration of fields and struggles, and thereby an analysis that takes plurality and transgressiveness into account. By developing such an alternative conceptual position, the article sees peacebuilding epistemic authority as object- and struggle-bound; conditioned and dependent on dynamics that go beyond peacebuilding as a distinct field of practice. This position is illustrated in an analysis of the emergence and (temporary) establishment of epistemic authority in peacebuilding interventions on informal economies.
The World Bank has for over a decade tried to formalize the informal economy in Kosovo. However, local journalists and businessmen among others provide an alternative understanding of informality that problematizes the World Bank’s view and actions. Against this backdrop, the article analyses the constitution and the constitutive effects of the World Bank’s anti-informality operations in Kosovo between 1999 and 2014. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s power analytics, the article claims that the Bank’s agenda, and the economic ideas enacted through it, does structure and shape informal economic practices on the ground. Yet this structuring involves two forms of misrecognition. As a result, informality is paradoxically constituted (in novel ways) and reconstituted through the World Bank’s imposed anti-informality agenda. The article concludes with a discussion of how this underlines the need for policy solutions that depart from liberal peacebuilding’s subject–object distinction to form instead around an acknowledgement of informality as emergent and transforming throughout international interventions.
This article diagnoses a representational bias in current scholarshipon the materiality and spatiality of urban peacebuilding. The biasreduces peacebuilding knowledge production to situatedprocesses that unfold in urban environments but that are notconstituted by them. To counter this, the article draws on ‘morethan-representational’ thinking to develop a research agendathat reframes the study of urban peacebuilding epistemics. Theagenda reconceptualises post-/conflict urban environments as‘governance objects’ that need to be made known and made‘governable’. Further, the agenda approaches the peacebuildingproduction of such objects as a process in itself situated in and(co-)constituted by urban environments.
In light of the recent turn to ‘inclusivity’ in peacebuilding practice, this article problematises established ways of ‘doing critique’ in peacebuilding scholarship. Inclusivity refers to the building of peace as a situated and co-constituted process. This entails what can be termed a new epistemic commitment: the acknowledgement that peacebuilding as a dynamic and emergent phenomenon is also an epistemically co-constituted process. In the article, I make two arguments. First, the move towards inclusivity places currently dominant modes of scholarly critique at an impasse. Persistent ontological and epistemological binaries preclude a productive investigation and challenging of inclusivity projects and their epistemic commitment. Second, I argue that, by returning to historical conditions that were formative in the very emergence of the category of ‘the local’, the conceptual basis of an alternative mode of critique (re)appears. This alternative critical project allows for an analytical sensibility to peacebuilding as emergent and adaptive. It makes it possible to disentangle power relations as these emerge between different and possibly unexpected configurations of actors and knowledge claims in inclusivity projects.
This article explores the question of human agency in military targeting. Targeting is one of the key drivers of war. When studied by academic disciplines, much interest has been devoted to the ethics and effects of military targeting. Less debated, but focused here, is the question of the conditions of human agency within military targeting. In the literature that does exist on this topic, there is a questioning of the traditional conception of human agency but at the same time a lack of closer conceptualisation of different kinds of articulations of human agency in the targeting process. In this article, we propose a recentring of human agency in critical scholarship on military targeting. With inspiration from Theodore Schatzki's work on ‘practice’, by analytically approaching targeting as a practice, and through various examples from Operation Iraqi Freedom, the article develops and illustrates a framework for the conceptualisation of human agencies in targeting. This framework distinguishes articulations of agency based on whether they furthered the (temporary) ordering of the targeting practice or challenged its internal organising elements. The study of military targeting is significant not least since the phenomenon is one of the key ‘engines’ and drivers of war's constant becoming.
Under de senaste åren har eskalerande urbanisering och väpnade konflikter i städer kommit att uppfattas som en allt viktigare global säkerhetsfråga, både bland forskare och praktiker. Samtidigt är det empiriskt välbelagt att städer alltid har formats av krig och krigföring, och krig och krigföring alltid har formats av städer. Trots detta är samtida krigsvetenskapliga och västerländska militärstrategiska diskussioner om krig, fred och säkerhet i relation till städer och det urbana ofta onyanserade och baserade på ett binärt tänkande. Syftet med den här artikeln är att genom en bred forskningsöversikt belysa och exemplifiera den ömsesidiga relationen mellan krig och städer, och därmed bidra till en fördjupad och mer nyanserad samtida diskussion om krig i och mot städer, samt till en fördjupad förståelse för stadens dubbla konstruktion och funktion som en miljö som både är konstituerad av och konstituerande för militärt våld. Dylik fördjupad förståelse är angelägen även i relation till samtida fredsforskning rörande post-konfliktstäder och urbant fredsbyggande.