In Southeast Europe, there is a growing disjunction between “the way the world is” and the world that is described by law. The informal practices that address problems when formal institutions fail can be celebrated as spaces of creative problem-solving, or criticized as spaces for favouritism and corruption. When ruling political parties control informal networks, they consolidate the hold of unaccountable actors on power, moving from state capture to societal capture.
This book presents findings from a collaborative, multidisciplinary research project. Over three years, a group of forty researchers examined informal practices in nine Southeast European states, adopting a mix of qualitative and quantitative methodologies.
This close look at the Balkans illuminates persistent deficits in state legitimacy and capacity. The evidence allows a critical assessment of “Europeanisation” processes that produce only superficial formal changes, and of ways that networks of mutual assistance turn into instruments of social control and closure.

A journey through the informal and taken-for-granted ways of getting things done across the world.

For a post-human hitchhiker, human life–with its anxiety, aging, illness, and constant need for problem-solving–may look unviable. Yet, for humans, the life struggle is softened by human touch, human emotion, and human cooperation.

The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3 continues the journey of the two previous volumes into the world’s open secrets, unwritten rules, and hidden practices. It focuses on issues of emotional ambivalence and pressures of the digital age. The informal practices presented in this volume demonstrate the urgency of alleviating tensions between continuity and all-too-rapid change and the need to tackle the central problem of modern societies—uncertainty.

The volume takes the reader on a biographical journey through elusive, taken-for-granted, or banal ways of getting things done from over seventy countries and world regions. It offers an innovative understanding of the significance of fringes and challenges the assumption that informality is associated exclusively with poverty, underdevelopment, the Global South, oppressive regimes, or the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It also maps the patterns of informality around the globe, identifies specific informal practices in a context-sensitive way, and documents their ambivalent impact on people engaged in problem-solving, on societies in which these problems arise, and on humanity overall.