Marek Mikuš | Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (original) (raw)
Papers by Marek Mikuš
Households and Financialization in Europe, 2021
The introduction opens by identifying issues in the scholarship on the financialization of househ... more The introduction opens by identifying issues in the scholarship on the financialization of households that the collection seeks to rectify: atheoretical and unclear conceptualizations of the household; its treatment as a “black box”; and the one-sided focus on Anglo-Saxon cores of the global economy. The second section presents the authors’ approach to financialization in Eastern and Southern Europe, which combines the concept of peripheral financialization with an awareness of the wider semi-peripheral character of these regions. The third section reviews classical and recent debates about the concept of the household, especially in anthropology and feminist economics. The fourth section formulates the authors’ conceptualization of the household as a micro-level social institution oriented to a characteristic set of activities and as the subject of multiple systems of knowledge, social norms and public discourse. The fifth section presents the state-of-the-art of scholarship on household financialization and, synthesizing the insights of the earlier sections, formulates a set of general arguments about transformations of households under financialization in general and in Eastern and Southern European semi-peripheries in particular. The introduction concludes with an outline of the collection.
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Financialization: Relational Approaches, 2020
Debt collection is a crucial stage in the life-cycle of debt, but so far it has been largely negl... more Debt collection is a crucial stage in the life-cycle of debt, but so far it has been largely neglected in the anthropology of credit/debt. Based on publicly available data and interactions with debtors, professionals and activists, the chapter explores Croatia’s unique system of debt collection. Facing demands of European integration and a surge of bad loans after a financialized debt boom, the government authorized a state-owned agency, public notaries and lawyers to collect debts in highly coercive and profitable ways. Foreign-owned debt collection agencies also rapidly expanded their presence. This resulted in public debates and political struggles over debt collection.
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This working paper presents a conceptual framework for GEOFIN’s analysis of the financialization ... more This working paper presents a conceptual framework for GEOFIN’s analysis of the financialization of the state in eleven European Union member states in postsocialist EastCentral Europe (ECE-11) and operationalizes it for the purposes of analysis of internationally comparable secondary quantitative data. The first half of the paper develops a systemic, processual and spatial approach to the financialization of states. The second half of the paper identifies key dimensions of state financialization processes, their forms that scholarship discussed as prevalent in East-Central Europe and/or (semi-) peripheries, and their potential indicators in secondary quantitative data. The following dimensions of state financialization are covered: monetary and fiscal policies (including sovereign debt); public-service provision; lawmaking and regulation; and investment policy.
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Initially understood as a narrowly economic process of financial expansion, the concept of financ... more Initially understood as a narrowly economic process of financial expansion, the concept of financialization has expanded to describe the increasing power of financial actors, practices, logics, and narratives in various domains of social life and the resulting transformations. Anthropologists study financialization as a polyvalent social process that works in and through social relations and encompasses financial expansion and penetration as well as particular forms of morality, governmentality, and subjectivity. They employ ethnography and relational analysis to defamiliarize finance, destabilize its dominant representations, reveal its hidden agendas, and expose the gaps between its promises and actual outcomes. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, Eastern Europe has been one of the most dynamic areas of anthropological research on financialization. The process had a distinct flavor in the region inasmuch as it was part of its wider transition from socialism to capital...
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Social Anthropology, 2016
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Sociální studia / Social Studies
Studie zkoumá možnosti vzájemného obohacení dvou zřídka propojovaných oblastí bádaní - transnacio... more Studie zkoumá možnosti vzájemného obohacení dvou zřídka propojovaných oblastí bádaní - transnacionální antropologie a turistických studií. Soustředí sa na relevanci tohoto spojení pro výzkum identitárních konstrukcí a jejich vztahu k místu, specificky v souvislosti s otázkami "autenticity" domorodých "turistických etnicit" a kulturního kapitálu nízkonákladových nezávislých turistů, který údajně získavají svou transnacionální mobilitou.
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Srdjan Sremac & R. Ruard Ganzevoort (eds) Religious and Sexual Nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe: Gods, Gays and Governments, 2015
In this chapter, I build on my ethnographic fieldwork to examine how Serbian nationalist NGOs and... more In this chapter, I build on my ethnographic fieldwork to examine how Serbian nationalist NGOs and movements used religious nationalist discourse in their struggle against LGBT Pride Parade. In the first part of the chapter, I offer a brief account of their history, organizational practices, and external relationships. I show how these organizations and their supporters, including the Serbian Orthodox Church, fought against an alliance of the state, LGBT NGOs and a broader liberal civil society over which issues and norms had a legitimate presence in the public sphere. I illustrate this further with the example of the anti-Pride “Family Walks” in the second section. In the third part, I focus on the historical roots, social ideology, and current uses of religious nationalist discourse. Finally, I highlight the nationalists’ populist presentation of their anti-Pride campaign as a defense of the collective rights of the Serbian nation, and consider the audience and achievements of this strategy.
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Financialization: relational approaches, 2020
Debt collection is a crucial stage in the life-cycle of debt, but so far it has been largely negl... more Debt collection is a crucial stage in the life-cycle of debt, but so far it has been largely neglected in the anthropology of credit/debt. Based on publicly available data and interactions with debtors, professionals and activists, the chapter explores Croatia’s unique system of debt collection. Facing demands of European integration and a surge of bad loans after a financialized debt boom, the government authorized a state-owned agency, public notaries and lawyers to collect debts in highly coercive and profitable ways. Foreign-owned debt collection agencies also rapidly expanded their presence. This resulted in public debates and political struggles over debt collection.
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Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 2015
This article reconsiders established anthropological knowledge about postsocialist “civil society... more This article reconsiders established anthropological knowledge about postsocialist “civil society” through an analysis of recent efforts of Serbian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to reduce their dependence on foreign donors and develop “local fund-raising” from individuals and businesses. These initiatives had to address widespread suspicion toward NGOs, which confirms earlier findings about their donor-driven origins and the class divide between them and the surrounding society. Nevertheless, the article shows that the fund-raising activists strove to overcome suspicion and indigenize civil society. While anthropologists tend to portray NGO workers as a transnationalized elite, they are more adequately described as a middle-class faction currently subject to a process of precarization. The article also shows how the NGO workers' strategies to overcome suspicion, drawing variously on the global models of rational philanthropy, populist modes of self-presentation, or pre-existing ties to new donors, obscured or reduced the relevance of the class divide.
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GEOFIN Working Paper no. 9, 2020
This paper builds on interviews with members of the Croatian financial community (private and cen... more This paper builds on interviews with members of the Croatian financial community (private and central bankers, pension fund managers, regulators, experts), statistical data, and other secondary sources to show that the key channels of state financialization in Croatia were public debt growth and pension system financialization. As a result of these interrelated processes, public debt assessment, management and sustainability, relationships between debt and monetary and fiscal policy, and the implications of pension funds for debt management and pension adequacy became increasingly significant policy considerations. The explosion of public debt and debt servicing costs after the Global Financial Crisis period contributed to a deepening and consolidation of a neoliberal (austerity) policy regime. Sovereign debt management underwent modest development and financialization while remaining characterized by limited competition and transparency and strong influence of a limited set of financial actors. Monetary arrangements conducive to peripheral financialization (informal euro peg) were maintained and perceived as the only realistic alternative. Overall, the Croatian financial community supported a continuation and potentially deepening of state financialization by privileging the interests and rationalities of creditors and other financial actors in policymaking, promoting the development and financialization of pension funds, using financialized debt management techniques, and so forth. At the same time, public debt and pension system issues informed growing concerns over the long-term sustainability of the current policy and politico-economic regime.
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EOFIN Working Paper No. 4, 2019
This working paper makes first exploratory steps in GEOFIN’s empirical study of the financializat... more This working paper makes first exploratory steps in GEOFIN’s empirical study of the financialization of the state in eleven European Union member states in postsocialist East-Central Europe (ECE-11). Following a description of the geographic, historical and political economic context of ECE-11, the core of the paper is a descriptive and comparative analysis of internationally comparable secondary quantitative data of relevance for the financialization of states in ECE-11. Synthetic conclusions draw out the key patterns and trends and suggest a more limited set of national-level case studies to be researched in-depth in the future.
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GEOFIN Working Paper 5, 2019
This working paper offers a brief preliminary analysis of the financialization of the state in Cr... more This working paper offers a brief preliminary analysis of the financialization of the state in Croatia based on the analysis of secondary quantitative data and relevant literature. In general, Croatia tended to follow the dominant patterns and trends of financialization in East-Central Europe (ECE) but with the levels of multiple indicators of state financialization well above the regional average. This refers in particular to high levels and high-risk forms of sovereign public debt. The paper situates this development in the wider peripheral financialization of the Croatian political economy, characterized by the dependence on capital inflows promoting debt, consumption and imports, macroeconomic asymmetries, and marked vulnerability to external shocks due to the openness of the economy, the lack of independent monetary policy, and the dominance of foreign financial capital.
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GEOFIN Working Paper 3, 2019
This working paper presents a conceptual framework for GEOFIN’s analysis of the financialization ... more This working paper presents a conceptual framework for GEOFIN’s analysis of the financialization of the state in eleven European Union member states in postsocialist East-Central Europe (ECE-11) and operationalizes it for the purposes of analysis of internationally comparable secondary quantitative data. The first half of the paper develops a systemic, processual and spatial approach to the financialization of states. The second half of the paper identifies key dimensions of state financialization processes, their forms that scholarship discussed as prevalent in East-Central Europe and/or (semi-) peripheries, and their potential indicators in secondary quantitative data. The following dimensions of state financialization are covered: monetary and fiscal policies (including sovereign debt); public-service provision; lawmaking and regulation; and investment policy.
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Social Anthropology, 2016
This article seeks to contribute to the anthropological analysis of neoliberalism as a hegemonic ... more This article seeks to contribute to the anthropological analysis of neoliberalism as a hegemonic project of capitalist social transformation through a close examination of the ideological legitimation of austerity-driven public-sector retrenchment in Serbia. It shows how long-term continuities of political economy and public discourse create opportunities for market populist elites to sell neoliberalism as a moral project. Persistent structural conditions, especially scarcity of jobs, and an established popular discourse about the excessive and corrupt public sector provide a fertile soil for a moral ideology that justifies neoliberal policies as a redress to an immoral redistribution of societal resources.
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Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe, 2015
"Anthropological work on the integration of post-socialist Europe into the European Union is inch... more "Anthropological work on the integration of post-socialist Europe into the European Union is inchoate and overly focused on the issues of identity. Mikuš offers a historical anthropological analysis of EU integration of Serbia as a political, path-dependent, and simultaneously material and discursive process of social transformation. The focus is on practices through which Serbian 'civil society' helps further this process, such as 'boundary crossing' and 'partnerships' with the state, and on forces and relationships at and between various scales that shape this supporting role. The chapter concludes by reconceptualizing civil society and European integration and discussing methodological and political implications of the approach taken."
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In recent decades, production, distribution and consumption of housing around the world has come ... more In recent decades, production, distribution and consumption of housing around the world has come to be increasingly mediated by finance. Financial actors, credit developers and house-buyers directly invest in housing stock for sale and renting, which generally pushes house prices up and increases their volatility. At the same time, housing is harnessed as collateral for proliferating financial instruments such as mortgage- backed securities and collateralized debt obligations; as the last global financial crisis revealed, stability of entire national and global economies has thereby come to depend on housing markets. Critical scholars theorize these developments as interlocking aspects of the broad tendency of financialization of housing that reconstitutes housing as financial assets and a means of financial value extraction. At the same time, however, housing remains an essential good for households’ survival – and of social reproduction at large. The fact that housing is increasingly central to financial value extraction while constituting a condition for social reproduction gives rises to tensions, struggles and crises at multiple levels, from individual households through local economies to the macro-economy.
We invite papers investigating this growing contradiction in the field of housing in the context of foreign- currency (FX) housing loans in Eastern Europe. The latter is a unique context for housing financialization due to the recent privatization of nearly entire housing stock, extremely high rates of homeownership, relative lack of (public or private) rentals, the relative novelty and fast growth of housing finance, and hierarchical relations between international and domestic finance. ...
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Dialectical Anthropology
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article to be published in Dialectical Ant... more This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article to be published in Dialectical Anthropology. The final authenticated version is available online at: TBA.
Abstract: Croatia has experienced a marked boom in household debt in the 2000s. Much of this lending took high-risk and predatory forms that transferred significant risks to debtors, which in turn became the target of contestation by debt activists. This paper uses the Polanyian idea of "double movement" to show how the Croatian debt contestations responded to the distinctively peripheral form of financialization in Eastern Europe, characterized by hierarchical international relationships and an intensified expropriation of debtors. This framework further highlights the importance of money in contemporary credit/debt relationships and their contestation, which has so far received insufficient attention in relevant anthropological scholarship. Instead of the currently fashionable credit theories of money, the paper uses the Marxian concept of the fetishism of money to unpack the roles of money in these processes. The analysis of discourses and practices of two groups of debtors and activists reveals how they used nationalist ideological frameworks and institutional channels such as litigation, again largely ignored by existing anthropological literature, to challenge the geographic inequalities of peripheral financialization and the expropriation of debtors through the lenders' predatory manipulations of the money fetish.
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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
This article analyses the discourse surrounding, implementation of, and struggles over the new di... more This article analyses the discourse surrounding, implementation of, and struggles over the new disability policy in Serbia to show how its founding principles of human rights became partially co-opted by neoliberal welfare restructuring. As a result, it sought to make disabled people not only equal but also economically ‘independent’ in the sense of relying on wage labour instead of welfare. Owing to its inadequate assumptions and instruments, the policy has largely failed to deliver on these objectives. Disabled people mobilized against neoliberalization by defending material welfare entitlements inherited from Yugoslav socialism. At the same time, they appropriated the register of human rights to demand a substantive political and civic equality. This points to the possibility of rights-based projects that fuse rather than oppose the politics of recognition and redistribution.
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The burgeoning work on " everyday finance " or " popular finance " attends to the increasing invo... more The burgeoning work on " everyday finance " or " popular finance " attends to the increasing involvement of ever-wider, non-elite sections of society with financial devices, markets and narratives. This literature tends to evoke " the household " as a prominent but under-theorised category of analysis. This is particularly problematic since mainstream economics and financial expert knowledge treat households as self-evident and bounded units of economic statistics and modelling, risk assessment and management, further aggregated as the " household sector ". Economic anthropology and economic sociology, on the other hand, see the household as the unit of social reproduction in which individuals pool resources and adopt common strategies that are informed by socially constructed dispositions. Building on these traditions, this workshop aims to unpack the mutually and dynamically constitutive relationships between socially, historically and geographically situated households and financial markets, including the shifting articulation of increasingly financialised real-estate assets with social relations of interdependence in the household. Taking stock of the variegated nature of financialisation, we propose acknowledging multiple patterns of peripheral financialisation − such as those in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, and super-financialised small economies like Ireland or Iceland − and exploring both their similarities and divergences. While under-represented in the everyday finance literature and shaped by diverse historical trajectories, these societies exhibit patterns of financialisation different from those of Anglo-Saxon and European core countries, such as extraversion, dependence on capital inflows, high rate of foreign ownership in financial sector, and a recent expansion of household debt from a relatively low base and often in high risk forms such as FX loans. ...
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International development actors have promoted ‘public advocacy’ in post-Milošević Serbia as a fo... more International development actors have promoted ‘public advocacy’ in post-Milošević Serbia as a form of NGO intervention that they expected to strengthen ‘community’ participation in local-level decisions and support the policies of ‘civil society building’ and ‘democratisation’. The introduction of public advocacy was underpinned by the nesting model of a double semiperiphery (Serbia in relation to the West, the ‘local community’ in relation to the national centre), in which the centre is imagined as dynamic, active, and the source of innovations, whereas the semiperiphery is static, passive, and receiving those innovations with some delay. By analysing both the transmission of public advocacy knowledge through textbooks and training sessions and the actual unfolding of several advocacy campaigns, I show how doing advocacy in Serbia involved an active and creative process of multi-stage translation between the meanings and interests of ‘communities’, ‘decision makers’, foreign donors, and NGO workers. These findings complicate the ideological underpinnings of advocacy: the spatial model of the centre/semiperiphery, the scalar model of the local/national, and the institutionalist dichotomy of the state/society. At the same time, it is shown how the theoretical framework of ‘policy translation’ may benefit from a closer focus on brokers and brokerage.
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Households and Financialization in Europe, 2021
The introduction opens by identifying issues in the scholarship on the financialization of househ... more The introduction opens by identifying issues in the scholarship on the financialization of households that the collection seeks to rectify: atheoretical and unclear conceptualizations of the household; its treatment as a “black box”; and the one-sided focus on Anglo-Saxon cores of the global economy. The second section presents the authors’ approach to financialization in Eastern and Southern Europe, which combines the concept of peripheral financialization with an awareness of the wider semi-peripheral character of these regions. The third section reviews classical and recent debates about the concept of the household, especially in anthropology and feminist economics. The fourth section formulates the authors’ conceptualization of the household as a micro-level social institution oriented to a characteristic set of activities and as the subject of multiple systems of knowledge, social norms and public discourse. The fifth section presents the state-of-the-art of scholarship on household financialization and, synthesizing the insights of the earlier sections, formulates a set of general arguments about transformations of households under financialization in general and in Eastern and Southern European semi-peripheries in particular. The introduction concludes with an outline of the collection.
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Financialization: Relational Approaches, 2020
Debt collection is a crucial stage in the life-cycle of debt, but so far it has been largely negl... more Debt collection is a crucial stage in the life-cycle of debt, but so far it has been largely neglected in the anthropology of credit/debt. Based on publicly available data and interactions with debtors, professionals and activists, the chapter explores Croatia’s unique system of debt collection. Facing demands of European integration and a surge of bad loans after a financialized debt boom, the government authorized a state-owned agency, public notaries and lawyers to collect debts in highly coercive and profitable ways. Foreign-owned debt collection agencies also rapidly expanded their presence. This resulted in public debates and political struggles over debt collection.
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This working paper presents a conceptual framework for GEOFIN’s analysis of the financialization ... more This working paper presents a conceptual framework for GEOFIN’s analysis of the financialization of the state in eleven European Union member states in postsocialist EastCentral Europe (ECE-11) and operationalizes it for the purposes of analysis of internationally comparable secondary quantitative data. The first half of the paper develops a systemic, processual and spatial approach to the financialization of states. The second half of the paper identifies key dimensions of state financialization processes, their forms that scholarship discussed as prevalent in East-Central Europe and/or (semi-) peripheries, and their potential indicators in secondary quantitative data. The following dimensions of state financialization are covered: monetary and fiscal policies (including sovereign debt); public-service provision; lawmaking and regulation; and investment policy.
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Initially understood as a narrowly economic process of financial expansion, the concept of financ... more Initially understood as a narrowly economic process of financial expansion, the concept of financialization has expanded to describe the increasing power of financial actors, practices, logics, and narratives in various domains of social life and the resulting transformations. Anthropologists study financialization as a polyvalent social process that works in and through social relations and encompasses financial expansion and penetration as well as particular forms of morality, governmentality, and subjectivity. They employ ethnography and relational analysis to defamiliarize finance, destabilize its dominant representations, reveal its hidden agendas, and expose the gaps between its promises and actual outcomes. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, Eastern Europe has been one of the most dynamic areas of anthropological research on financialization. The process had a distinct flavor in the region inasmuch as it was part of its wider transition from socialism to capital...
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Social Anthropology, 2016
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Sociální studia / Social Studies
Studie zkoumá možnosti vzájemného obohacení dvou zřídka propojovaných oblastí bádaní - transnacio... more Studie zkoumá možnosti vzájemného obohacení dvou zřídka propojovaných oblastí bádaní - transnacionální antropologie a turistických studií. Soustředí sa na relevanci tohoto spojení pro výzkum identitárních konstrukcí a jejich vztahu k místu, specificky v souvislosti s otázkami "autenticity" domorodých "turistických etnicit" a kulturního kapitálu nízkonákladových nezávislých turistů, který údajně získavají svou transnacionální mobilitou.
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Srdjan Sremac & R. Ruard Ganzevoort (eds) Religious and Sexual Nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe: Gods, Gays and Governments, 2015
In this chapter, I build on my ethnographic fieldwork to examine how Serbian nationalist NGOs and... more In this chapter, I build on my ethnographic fieldwork to examine how Serbian nationalist NGOs and movements used religious nationalist discourse in their struggle against LGBT Pride Parade. In the first part of the chapter, I offer a brief account of their history, organizational practices, and external relationships. I show how these organizations and their supporters, including the Serbian Orthodox Church, fought against an alliance of the state, LGBT NGOs and a broader liberal civil society over which issues and norms had a legitimate presence in the public sphere. I illustrate this further with the example of the anti-Pride “Family Walks” in the second section. In the third part, I focus on the historical roots, social ideology, and current uses of religious nationalist discourse. Finally, I highlight the nationalists’ populist presentation of their anti-Pride campaign as a defense of the collective rights of the Serbian nation, and consider the audience and achievements of this strategy.
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Financialization: relational approaches, 2020
Debt collection is a crucial stage in the life-cycle of debt, but so far it has been largely negl... more Debt collection is a crucial stage in the life-cycle of debt, but so far it has been largely neglected in the anthropology of credit/debt. Based on publicly available data and interactions with debtors, professionals and activists, the chapter explores Croatia’s unique system of debt collection. Facing demands of European integration and a surge of bad loans after a financialized debt boom, the government authorized a state-owned agency, public notaries and lawyers to collect debts in highly coercive and profitable ways. Foreign-owned debt collection agencies also rapidly expanded their presence. This resulted in public debates and political struggles over debt collection.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 2015
This article reconsiders established anthropological knowledge about postsocialist “civil society... more This article reconsiders established anthropological knowledge about postsocialist “civil society” through an analysis of recent efforts of Serbian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to reduce their dependence on foreign donors and develop “local fund-raising” from individuals and businesses. These initiatives had to address widespread suspicion toward NGOs, which confirms earlier findings about their donor-driven origins and the class divide between them and the surrounding society. Nevertheless, the article shows that the fund-raising activists strove to overcome suspicion and indigenize civil society. While anthropologists tend to portray NGO workers as a transnationalized elite, they are more adequately described as a middle-class faction currently subject to a process of precarization. The article also shows how the NGO workers' strategies to overcome suspicion, drawing variously on the global models of rational philanthropy, populist modes of self-presentation, or pre-existing ties to new donors, obscured or reduced the relevance of the class divide.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
GEOFIN Working Paper no. 9, 2020
This paper builds on interviews with members of the Croatian financial community (private and cen... more This paper builds on interviews with members of the Croatian financial community (private and central bankers, pension fund managers, regulators, experts), statistical data, and other secondary sources to show that the key channels of state financialization in Croatia were public debt growth and pension system financialization. As a result of these interrelated processes, public debt assessment, management and sustainability, relationships between debt and monetary and fiscal policy, and the implications of pension funds for debt management and pension adequacy became increasingly significant policy considerations. The explosion of public debt and debt servicing costs after the Global Financial Crisis period contributed to a deepening and consolidation of a neoliberal (austerity) policy regime. Sovereign debt management underwent modest development and financialization while remaining characterized by limited competition and transparency and strong influence of a limited set of financial actors. Monetary arrangements conducive to peripheral financialization (informal euro peg) were maintained and perceived as the only realistic alternative. Overall, the Croatian financial community supported a continuation and potentially deepening of state financialization by privileging the interests and rationalities of creditors and other financial actors in policymaking, promoting the development and financialization of pension funds, using financialized debt management techniques, and so forth. At the same time, public debt and pension system issues informed growing concerns over the long-term sustainability of the current policy and politico-economic regime.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
EOFIN Working Paper No. 4, 2019
This working paper makes first exploratory steps in GEOFIN’s empirical study of the financializat... more This working paper makes first exploratory steps in GEOFIN’s empirical study of the financialization of the state in eleven European Union member states in postsocialist East-Central Europe (ECE-11). Following a description of the geographic, historical and political economic context of ECE-11, the core of the paper is a descriptive and comparative analysis of internationally comparable secondary quantitative data of relevance for the financialization of states in ECE-11. Synthetic conclusions draw out the key patterns and trends and suggest a more limited set of national-level case studies to be researched in-depth in the future.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
GEOFIN Working Paper 5, 2019
This working paper offers a brief preliminary analysis of the financialization of the state in Cr... more This working paper offers a brief preliminary analysis of the financialization of the state in Croatia based on the analysis of secondary quantitative data and relevant literature. In general, Croatia tended to follow the dominant patterns and trends of financialization in East-Central Europe (ECE) but with the levels of multiple indicators of state financialization well above the regional average. This refers in particular to high levels and high-risk forms of sovereign public debt. The paper situates this development in the wider peripheral financialization of the Croatian political economy, characterized by the dependence on capital inflows promoting debt, consumption and imports, macroeconomic asymmetries, and marked vulnerability to external shocks due to the openness of the economy, the lack of independent monetary policy, and the dominance of foreign financial capital.
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GEOFIN Working Paper 3, 2019
This working paper presents a conceptual framework for GEOFIN’s analysis of the financialization ... more This working paper presents a conceptual framework for GEOFIN’s analysis of the financialization of the state in eleven European Union member states in postsocialist East-Central Europe (ECE-11) and operationalizes it for the purposes of analysis of internationally comparable secondary quantitative data. The first half of the paper develops a systemic, processual and spatial approach to the financialization of states. The second half of the paper identifies key dimensions of state financialization processes, their forms that scholarship discussed as prevalent in East-Central Europe and/or (semi-) peripheries, and their potential indicators in secondary quantitative data. The following dimensions of state financialization are covered: monetary and fiscal policies (including sovereign debt); public-service provision; lawmaking and regulation; and investment policy.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Social Anthropology, 2016
This article seeks to contribute to the anthropological analysis of neoliberalism as a hegemonic ... more This article seeks to contribute to the anthropological analysis of neoliberalism as a hegemonic project of capitalist social transformation through a close examination of the ideological legitimation of austerity-driven public-sector retrenchment in Serbia. It shows how long-term continuities of political economy and public discourse create opportunities for market populist elites to sell neoliberalism as a moral project. Persistent structural conditions, especially scarcity of jobs, and an established popular discourse about the excessive and corrupt public sector provide a fertile soil for a moral ideology that justifies neoliberal policies as a redress to an immoral redistribution of societal resources.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe, 2015
"Anthropological work on the integration of post-socialist Europe into the European Union is inch... more "Anthropological work on the integration of post-socialist Europe into the European Union is inchoate and overly focused on the issues of identity. Mikuš offers a historical anthropological analysis of EU integration of Serbia as a political, path-dependent, and simultaneously material and discursive process of social transformation. The focus is on practices through which Serbian 'civil society' helps further this process, such as 'boundary crossing' and 'partnerships' with the state, and on forces and relationships at and between various scales that shape this supporting role. The chapter concludes by reconceptualizing civil society and European integration and discussing methodological and political implications of the approach taken."
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In recent decades, production, distribution and consumption of housing around the world has come ... more In recent decades, production, distribution and consumption of housing around the world has come to be increasingly mediated by finance. Financial actors, credit developers and house-buyers directly invest in housing stock for sale and renting, which generally pushes house prices up and increases their volatility. At the same time, housing is harnessed as collateral for proliferating financial instruments such as mortgage- backed securities and collateralized debt obligations; as the last global financial crisis revealed, stability of entire national and global economies has thereby come to depend on housing markets. Critical scholars theorize these developments as interlocking aspects of the broad tendency of financialization of housing that reconstitutes housing as financial assets and a means of financial value extraction. At the same time, however, housing remains an essential good for households’ survival – and of social reproduction at large. The fact that housing is increasingly central to financial value extraction while constituting a condition for social reproduction gives rises to tensions, struggles and crises at multiple levels, from individual households through local economies to the macro-economy.
We invite papers investigating this growing contradiction in the field of housing in the context of foreign- currency (FX) housing loans in Eastern Europe. The latter is a unique context for housing financialization due to the recent privatization of nearly entire housing stock, extremely high rates of homeownership, relative lack of (public or private) rentals, the relative novelty and fast growth of housing finance, and hierarchical relations between international and domestic finance. ...
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Dialectical Anthropology
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article to be published in Dialectical Ant... more This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article to be published in Dialectical Anthropology. The final authenticated version is available online at: TBA.
Abstract: Croatia has experienced a marked boom in household debt in the 2000s. Much of this lending took high-risk and predatory forms that transferred significant risks to debtors, which in turn became the target of contestation by debt activists. This paper uses the Polanyian idea of "double movement" to show how the Croatian debt contestations responded to the distinctively peripheral form of financialization in Eastern Europe, characterized by hierarchical international relationships and an intensified expropriation of debtors. This framework further highlights the importance of money in contemporary credit/debt relationships and their contestation, which has so far received insufficient attention in relevant anthropological scholarship. Instead of the currently fashionable credit theories of money, the paper uses the Marxian concept of the fetishism of money to unpack the roles of money in these processes. The analysis of discourses and practices of two groups of debtors and activists reveals how they used nationalist ideological frameworks and institutional channels such as litigation, again largely ignored by existing anthropological literature, to challenge the geographic inequalities of peripheral financialization and the expropriation of debtors through the lenders' predatory manipulations of the money fetish.
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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
This article analyses the discourse surrounding, implementation of, and struggles over the new di... more This article analyses the discourse surrounding, implementation of, and struggles over the new disability policy in Serbia to show how its founding principles of human rights became partially co-opted by neoliberal welfare restructuring. As a result, it sought to make disabled people not only equal but also economically ‘independent’ in the sense of relying on wage labour instead of welfare. Owing to its inadequate assumptions and instruments, the policy has largely failed to deliver on these objectives. Disabled people mobilized against neoliberalization by defending material welfare entitlements inherited from Yugoslav socialism. At the same time, they appropriated the register of human rights to demand a substantive political and civic equality. This points to the possibility of rights-based projects that fuse rather than oppose the politics of recognition and redistribution.
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The burgeoning work on " everyday finance " or " popular finance " attends to the increasing invo... more The burgeoning work on " everyday finance " or " popular finance " attends to the increasing involvement of ever-wider, non-elite sections of society with financial devices, markets and narratives. This literature tends to evoke " the household " as a prominent but under-theorised category of analysis. This is particularly problematic since mainstream economics and financial expert knowledge treat households as self-evident and bounded units of economic statistics and modelling, risk assessment and management, further aggregated as the " household sector ". Economic anthropology and economic sociology, on the other hand, see the household as the unit of social reproduction in which individuals pool resources and adopt common strategies that are informed by socially constructed dispositions. Building on these traditions, this workshop aims to unpack the mutually and dynamically constitutive relationships between socially, historically and geographically situated households and financial markets, including the shifting articulation of increasingly financialised real-estate assets with social relations of interdependence in the household. Taking stock of the variegated nature of financialisation, we propose acknowledging multiple patterns of peripheral financialisation − such as those in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, and super-financialised small economies like Ireland or Iceland − and exploring both their similarities and divergences. While under-represented in the everyday finance literature and shaped by diverse historical trajectories, these societies exhibit patterns of financialisation different from those of Anglo-Saxon and European core countries, such as extraversion, dependence on capital inflows, high rate of foreign ownership in financial sector, and a recent expansion of household debt from a relatively low base and often in high risk forms such as FX loans. ...
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International development actors have promoted ‘public advocacy’ in post-Milošević Serbia as a fo... more International development actors have promoted ‘public advocacy’ in post-Milošević Serbia as a form of NGO intervention that they expected to strengthen ‘community’ participation in local-level decisions and support the policies of ‘civil society building’ and ‘democratisation’. The introduction of public advocacy was underpinned by the nesting model of a double semiperiphery (Serbia in relation to the West, the ‘local community’ in relation to the national centre), in which the centre is imagined as dynamic, active, and the source of innovations, whereas the semiperiphery is static, passive, and receiving those innovations with some delay. By analysing both the transmission of public advocacy knowledge through textbooks and training sessions and the actual unfolding of several advocacy campaigns, I show how doing advocacy in Serbia involved an active and creative process of multi-stage translation between the meanings and interests of ‘communities’, ‘decision makers’, foreign donors, and NGO workers. These findings complicate the ideological underpinnings of advocacy: the spatial model of the centre/semiperiphery, the scalar model of the local/national, and the institutionalist dichotomy of the state/society. At the same time, it is shown how the theoretical framework of ‘policy translation’ may benefit from a closer focus on brokers and brokerage.
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Under the 2008-2012 government with its slogan of 'European Serbia,' Europeanisation became synon... more Under the 2008-2012 government with its slogan of 'European Serbia,' Europeanisation became synonymous with a reform of the Serbian state and society as such. In this presentation, I examine Serbia's EU integration through the ethnographic case study of the NGO-implemented ‘Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund.' My data show liberal civil society in the role familiar from the late 1990s and early 2000s – the one of the advocate of Serbia's integration into the EU and global capitalist economy. However, the state has since positioned itself as the leading actor of these processes (with rather disappointing results) while a selective rapprochement and personnel circulation has occurred between it and NGOs. The relationship of liberal civil society to Europeanisation and EU in this new context is shown to be more complex and contradictory than is routinely assumed, and continuities are suggested between EU integration and past state-led modernisation projects in Serbia, conditioned by its peripheral position in European politics and global economy.
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The processes of democratisation of postsocialist governance have been associated with civil-soci... more The processes of democratisation of postsocialist governance have been associated with civil-society building through international development. Anthropologists criticised what they described as depoliticisation and 'NGO-isation' of civil society and called for grass-roots movements and flexible networks rather than formalised and donor-driven ‘project society’. This literature treats civil society organizations (CSOs), in the form promoted by mainstream liberal theory and development policies, as easily co-optable by formal governance institutions. Thus, the practice of 'public advocacy', one of the current development buzzwords in Serbia, seems rather paradoxical. Based on neoliberal mantras of 'decentralisation' and 'participation', CSOs are required to represent an opposition and corrective to the centralised and insufficiently democratic state, yet they are simultaneously made to approach it. However, I wary of assuming indiscriminately that CSOs are willing or even actively aspiring to get co-opted by donors and the state. Stemming in the 'anti-politics' tradition of dissent in communist Eastern Europe and present neoliberal and poststructuralist ideologies of civil society, many of these CSOs strive to become 'independent' from the state and big international donors. In Serbia, the anticipated departure of the latter instigates the nascent practice of 'fundraising from local sources', i.e. from ‘individuals and businesses in the community’, as one of the key ways of attaining the sought independence.
In my anthropological work-in-progress, I study public-advocacy and fundraising initiatives of the Balkan Community Initiatives Fund (BCIF), a Belgrade re-granting foundation, and its grantee organizations in Serbia. I draw on participant observation of daily life at BCIF, trainings for the grantees and their projects implementation, and on interviews and textual data. Studying the discourse and practice of public advocacy enables a move beyond simple (civil) society/state binaries toward an analysis of the ways in which state and civil-society actors mobilize political-economic and political-cultural resources to form political alliances for the implementation of intersectoral governance processes. The performative 'cultural constitution' of the boundary between the state and civil society is a condition rather than contradiction of such alliances. It enables CSOs to define themselves and their role so that they can integrate the requirement of independence with the need to work with the state. Similarly, CSOs receive fundraising trainings and attempt to develop individual and corporate philanthropy in their communities in a quest to construct liberal subjects of the conscious philanthropist and the independent civil-society actor. Nevertheless, the autonomy of these subjects is integrative rather than fragmenting as the subjects are (to be) produced by participating in a self-regulating moral community – the democratic nation. I conclude by arguing that the interlinkages of public advocacy and local fundraising do represent a strong potential for bottom-up democratisation, but in Serbia they face the legacies of radically different socialist and authoritarian policies oriented to the construction of socialist and ethnonational subjects. Serbia’s current neoliberal preference, shaped by the ongoing IMF involvement, for austere fiscal rather than developmental policies poses further constraints for the democratic nation-building.
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The European project is ostensibly associated with democratisation, but how socio‐political disco... more The European project is ostensibly associated with democratisation, but how socio‐political discourses and practices in countries aspiring to the EU accession reflect this link is often poorly understood. My anthropological work‐in progress suggests that the prevalent preoccupation with normative ideas, legal harmonisation and formal institutions proves profoundly unsuited for interpreting the whole range of representations of the EU and their political uses in Serbia. In the revealing case of the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade, EU-promoted values such as LGBT rights ended up presented and approached as something foreign while the violent protesters approximated more closely a mass‐based and culturally entrenched nationalist movement. The European Commission applauded that the militarisation of the Parade kept participants from harm, but this also limited its transformative impact and enabled politicians to play up the governmental‐technological rhetoric of the state’s monopoly of power. Thus, the democratic principles equated with the EU may be positioned as alien and limited to alliances of particular civil‐society and state elites. I elaborate by analysing “political subjectivities” of civil‐society actors who could be assumed to be the prodemocratic and pro‐European avant‐garde, but whose often ambiguous understandings of the EU and European integration encompass modernity, tolerance or order alongside ideas of centralisation, partiality, or incoherence. The EU’s democratisation efforts should move beyond top‐down legal and formal‐institutional channels toward a dialogue with local political culture, in order to destabilise seemingly natural divisions which block a broad, grassroots societal transformation. Such processes may be already in progress: Jelena Karleuša, a pop‐singer whose music and private relationships place her closer to the conservative‐nationalist pole of the dichotomous folk model of “two Serbias”, surprisingly condemned the expressions of homophobia with a forcefulness which triggered and mainstreamed a lively public debate.
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Liberal Western-supported NGOs seemed to be the victors of the 2000 regime change in Serbia and t... more Liberal Western-supported NGOs seemed to be the victors of the 2000 regime change in Serbia and the last decade of (unsteady) 'democratisation' and 'Europeanisation.' This self-professed 'Other Serbia' of urban middle class and intellectuals has been locally equated with 'civil society.' However, in the general discontent of ever-transitional Serbia, nationalist groups seem competent to mobilise popular support and influence formal politics. The literature has labeled such groups as 'uncivil society,' but interestingly, they adopt many NGO practices. They present themselves and sometimes act as populist and revolutionary national fronts opposed to the state, but most of them have university-educated middle class leaders and strive to participate in state-sanctioned institutional politics. Drawing on sixteen months of fieldwork in Belgrade and other sites, I propose to address these apparent paradoxes by conceptualising 'civil' and 'uncivil' societies as structurally similar but ideologically different kinds of the plurality of 'civil societies.' I define civil societies as scenes of associational life, i.e. types and social complexes of associations as classified by actors themselves, which emerge in a relationship of mutual constitution with the state and which generate divergent 'fantasies of the state' and 'fantasies of society.' I will show that the ideas of tolerance and civility are variously developed in the two civil societies rather than fully present in one and absent in the other, but more importantly that different key themes inform their fantasies of the state and society. 'Civil' and 'uncivil' society thus channel and serve as a model for social antagonism in post-conflict Serbia about the polity's essential meanings while reproducing a 'messy' democracy.
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Forthcoming in Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics.
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Programme for the workshop: Households and Peripheral Financialisation in Europe (Max Planck Inst... more Programme for the workshop: Households and Peripheral Financialisation in Europe (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany, 22-23 February 2018)
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In Serbia, as elsewhere in postsocialist Europe, the rise of “civil society” was expected to supp... more In Serbia, as elsewhere in postsocialist Europe, the rise of “civil society” was expected to support a smooth transformation to Western models of liberal democracy and capitalism. More than twenty years after the Yugoslav wars, these expectations appear largely unmet. Frontiers of Civil Society asks why, exploring the roles of multiple civil society forces in a set of government “reforms” of society and individuals in the early 2010s, and examining them in the broader context of social struggles over neoliberal restructuring and transnational integration.
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