Forging Transnational Belonging through Informal Trade

Front matter

Southeast European Studies

FORGING TRANSNATIONAL BELONGING THROUGH INFORMAL TRADE

THRIVING MARKETS IN TIMES OF CRISIS

Contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgements Ix Introduction: šverceri, people like you and me 1

Context and research setting 3

Aims and contributions 4

Part II

The “inner logic” of transnational relations Belonging through the prism of šverc: making

sense of the Yugoslav Succession Wars 66 Synthesis 79

Novi Pazar as a mnemonic nucleus for the transmission of memory Social sites of belonging 84 Social sites and family narratives: chronicles of belonging in Novi Pazar 92 Collapsing the time-space continuum 98 The maintenance of kin relations across space and time 108 Synthesis 109

PART III Recontextualizing narratives of Sverc within

the discourse of economic collapse

A discursive analysis of $verc in Serbia 121

An analysis of ‘discursive qualifications’ about šverc in Novi Pazar 129

Speaking about the practice of šverc Svere as a narrated practice 138 Practicing šverc 143

Anomia 151

Conclusion

Appendix — questionnaire Bibliography

Index

160 164 174 184

Illustrations

Figures 0.1 Sandžak region 0.2 National affiliation 0.3 Citizenship 0.4 National identification 0.5 Native language 0.6 Gender 0.7 Age in range 0.8 How longa resident in Novi Pazar 1.1 Sandžak region including municipalities 2.1 Starinska ruža (antique rose)

2.2 2.3

2.4

3.9

Starinske ruze (antique roses) in jars

Perception toward past empires and supranational collectives

Origin of goods available on the market in Novi Pazar during the 1990s

The town of Novi Pazar

Ottoman fort in Novi Pazar

Isa-Beg hamman in Novi Pazar

Luéna zgrada in Novi Pazar

St. Peter and Paul Church in Novi Pazar

Djurdjevi Stupovi

Pansion Amir-A ga Han in the center of Novi Pazar Ovo je nasa dedovina, banner hanging from the Amir-Aga Han in Novi Pazar

Altun-Alem Mosque in Novi Pazar

3.10 View of Novi Pazar from the Altun-Alem Mosque 3.11 Opinions toward career options and government services 3.12 Transnational connections with Turkey

4.1 4.2 4.3

Coded terms, Vecerne Novosti Vecerne Novosti, December 7, 1994: 7 Vecerne Novosti, December 7, 1994: 7

119 121 122 viii Jllustrations

4.4 Večerne Novosti, May 5, 1993: 9 123 4.5 Dinar Brise Lire, Novosti, September 23, 1994: 4 124 5.1 Transnational connections with Turkey 140 5.2 Potential for development and satisfaction with governmental services 154 Tables

4.] Atlas.ti coefficiency table 120

Acknowledgements

There are a great many people who supported my research project, the result of which is this publication. 1 am deeply grateful to those individuals who participated in this research in and out of the field. The completion of this study would have been impossible without your willingness to invite me to your homes and into your lives.

The Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREES) at the University of Kansas (KU) initially enabled this research financially and logistically. My research was financed by a joint initiative between KU, the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), and the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) scholarship. Just as important was the camaraderie among peers, including Austin Charron who supported me in the creation of a proper questionnaire. I received invaluable academic support from Mehrangiz Najafizadeh, who read countless drafts of my MA thesis which ultimately turned into a PhD dissertation and then this book. Eve Levin supported my efforts at securing funding, and Donald Stull introduced me to the art of doing anthropology.

The Department for Russian Culture and Society at the University of St. Gallen (HSG) enabled all subsequent research trips since 2013, including travel, room and board, and the administration of the questionnaires. Ulrich Schmid was not only an academic adviser but also turned into an important collaborator and friend. His advice and critical assessment of my work continues to shape my academic development.

The Basler Working Group on Southeastern Europe (BASO) invited me to present early chapter drafts and provided an invaluable and much-needed forum to discuss my research. Apart from being a friend, Nataša Mišković turned into an important mentor considering all things to do with Southeastern Europe.

I am grateful to Vladan Jovanovic, with whom I discussed informal practices in the Western Balkans during a workshop on informality that was graciously hosted by the Centre for Advanced Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria. Our discussions continued together with Srdjan Korac at the Association for Nationalities conference in New York, and I am especially grateful to Christian Axboe Nielsen, whose helpful comments and questions improved the manuscript.

The historical colloquium at the University of St. Gallen, the IMISCOE 3CI PhD Winter School *Migration and Urban Change”, as well as members ofthe PhD x Acknowledgements

Peer Group at the University of St. Gallen provided critical insight and thoughts on migration, questions of identification, informal trade practices, memory and social space, and how these phenomena come together in times of precarity. I am indebted to Caspar Hirschi, Marco Martiniello, Suntana Laketa, and Karen Lambrecht, who supported my thinking about this topic, and to Alice Froidevoix and her critical reading of the entire manuscript.

I am beholden to the Swiss National Foundation (SNF) for endowing me with the freedom to ruminate on questions regarding state failure, socialization processes, and informal markets between 2015 and 2018.

Introduction

Sverceri, people like you and me

It was July 2012,' and I was about to return to Novi Pazar, Serbia, illustrated in Figure 0.1.2 Once on the public bus, I stowed away my luggage, settled into my seat, and awaited the bus ride ahead of me. By now, I was familiar with this route. I knew the bus would take about six hours to get from Belgrade to Novi Pazar and how to time the bathroom breaks according to the drivers” preferred places of rest. No surprises — until Čačak, that is. After we had left the bus station, a burly man ran after the bus and motioned the driver to stop with a plastic bag. I guessed the man was middle-aged. He wore a blue tracksuit, a gray T-shirt, and house shoes. Heavy set, though quick on his feet, he got on the bus in a swoop, trailed by strong body odor. After sitting beside me and behind the bus driver, the man immediately apologized for smelling bad. “Sorry guys, I stink,” he said. “I was just released from prison. They don't even let you take a shower there. They locked me up, covece [man]! Can you believe it?” he said to no one in particular. In all, there were about five other people on the bus, a couple of elderly men, a young woman, an even younger man, and an elderly lady. The heat felt suffocating. 1 looked around the bus to gauge the reaction among the other passengers; no one batted an eye. Nobody seemed to care, and neither did the man who had just been released from prison. He was not concerned with the other passengers, or if anybody had listened to his vociferous protest about his detention. After apologizing, he explained that someone had ratted him out. “I know the man who sold me out to the cops, too!” He then leaned over to the bus driver and asked:

Do you remember how easy it was during the war? There was no red tape, we stuck together! Nobody sold you out to save their own skin. Now, they would sell their grandmother to save themselves! And I only trade legal goods, unlike the crook who sold me to the police — I only smuggle cigarettes, coffee and other legal stuff, not guns and drugs like that ‘stoka’!*

After venting, the man borrowed the bus driver's mobile phone. “I need to make a phone call,” the man said. He was obviously agitated when he spoke to the person on the other end of the receiver. “What do you mean you are calling a lawyer? Why?" he asked over and over. “It's not as if I murdered someone! Čoveče boziji!”> He paused and replied, “I am going to see that guy right away as

SERBIA

Sandzak region

Adriatic Sea

Figure 0.1 Sandzak region Source: Map created by Lyubomyr Oliynyk, siteGist.co.

soon as I get back to Raška! That guy owes me some answers!” He repeated the last sentence after hanging up and sunk into silence.

Eventually, the bus ground to a halt. It was one of the bus driver's habitual resting spots. When the driver motioned the end of the break, all of us returned to our seats, except the man who had just been released from jail. *Gdje je ovaj?"* the bus driver asked. “The guy with the plastic bag and the house shoes? He hitched a ride on some guy's truck," someone in the back answered.

The burly man did not care one bit about who was on the bus, and the people on the bus found nothing strange in this episode either. Sverc (smuggling), in other words, was (is) not uncommon in Serbia; the people of Novi Pazar call the business of šverc a javna tajna — a public secret."

Context and research setting

Novi Pazar was a hub of smuggling activities between 1991 and 1995. Tucked in between the southern hills of Serbia that border Montenegro and Kosovo, Novi Pazar was a thoroughfare for goods, and attracted shoppers, traders, and workers from nearby villages, as well as the greater area around Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia, and Montenegro.

Due to the busy market activities, residents of Novi Pazar had at once a commonplace and yet distinct experience of the 1990s war years compared to other citizens of Serbia and those Bosniak and/or Muslim citizens who lived through the siege in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Like other citizens of Serbia, residents of Novi Pazar endured the internationally imposed sanctions. Living within Serbian state borders, however, spared this population from the hardship that Bosniaks of BiH experienced. At the same time, locals in Novi Pazar became benefactors of Turkish charity and development projects during the conflict and after the Yugoslav Succession Wars had ended, as was the case with citizens of Bosnia. This unique in- and out-of-state experience of the local community in Novi Pazar is at the core of this book. Smuggling — or šverc, as the practice is known locally — illustrates this in- and out-of-state experience. Because the informal market connects Novi Pazar to Bosnia, Turkey, and also to Serbia proper, I examine how informal transnational practices between 1991 and 1995 shaped this community ?s collective sense of belonging and social relations locally following the Yugoslav Succession Wars.

Throughout the first half of the 1990s, Novi Pazar experienced an economic boom for two reasons. First, Novi Pazar's state sponsored industry and biggest employer, the Tekstilni Kombinat Raška (Raška Textile Factory, TKS), collapsed due to the economic downturn and subsequent war in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Second, in order to safeguard their continued income, Bosniaks traveled between Turkey and Novi Pazar and utilized diaspora family connections to acquire material and fabrics for the production of jeans and other apparel with which they set up makeshift clothing factories in their homes, often hidden from officials. As a result, locals who had been employed by the TKS put their skills to use in the informal production of counterfeited clothing. Locals also sold food items, coffee, and cigarettes on the Novi Pazar market, also known as buvljak, to other Yugoslavs who traveled to the city in search of commodities that were in short supply and/or altogether inexistent elsewhere.

The twin processes of existing transnational relations with the local and diaspora community in Turkey, together with the internationally imposed sanctions, created a new class of successful traders in Novi Pazar. At the same time, employment and goods were difficult to come by in other areas of Serbia. Both Serbs and Bosniaks initially profited from this trade. James Lyon noted that “overnight, a new class of wealthy — both Serb and Bosniak — entrepreneurs sprang up, although many Serbs remained in low-paying state sector jobs.” In Novi Pazar, factories produced up to 30,000 pairs of counterfeit jeans a day that included brands such as Levi's, Diesel, and Reply? Because of low wages and the relative ease of tax evasion, the cost of textile production dropped considerably. Residents of Sandžak thus started to capitalize on these advantages to set up textile, shoe, and leather manufacturing companies. Because of the general chaos of the war years, however, no reliable figures exist that could illustrate the exact revenue and production output. Be that as it may, analysts and scholars figure that “several hundred thousand pairs of jeans" and other apparel items were produced in the region while annual revenues were “between $50 and $100 million.” Sandžak, specifically Novi Pazar, attracted thousands of individuals that sought to work in the sprouting textile industry with its up to 500 factories by the end of the 1990s, according to Lyon." Belgrade, too, capitalized on these relations by sending “tax collectors' — commonly referred to as racketeers among the local population — to Novi Pazar.

Ironically, the end of the international sanctions regime also heralded the end of the booming market in Novi Pazar. In 2008, there were only some 50 firms left that produced up to 1 million pairs of jeans a year, and revenues dropped sharply, barely reaching 50,000 euros annually.!? With the exception of the local fish hatchery Vojin Popov,? Novi Pazar's formative industries of cement, textile, and battery manufacturing have not revitalized markedly at the time of writing. Since then, Novi Pazar has slowly sunk into economic ruin. However, the informal market, meanwhile, continues to this day, albeit on a comparatively small scale. While the end of the Yugoslav conflicts foreshadowed the end of the booming market, existing transnational networks continue to connect Bosniaks in Serbia and present-day Turkey.

Aims and contributions

How do economic transnational practices shape one's sense of belonging in times of crisis/precarity? Specifically, how does the collapse of the Ottoman Empire — and the subsequent migration of the Muslim Slav population to Turkey — relate to the Yugoslav Succession Wars during the 1990s? These questions form the core aim of this book, which examines how the Yugoslav Succession Wars influenced transnational relations between the émigré Bosniak community of Turkey and those Bosniaks who remained in Southeastern Europe. Bereft of acceptance among their co-denizens of different religions at the turn of the century, and again in 1991, some Bosniaks turned to Turkey for refuge and then for material aid. In order to show this mechanism, I analyze the case study of Novi Pazar, Serbia, where informal trading practices flourished between 1991/92 and 1995. This book therefore focuses on Novi Pazar's informal market economy during the Yugoslav Succession Wars as a prism through which to analyze the strengthening of existing relations between the émigré community in Turkey and the local Bosniak population in the SandZak region, specifically its urban center that is Novi Pazar. The goal of this book is to demonstrate the interactive nature of relations between the state and local and émigré communities.

Researching the Sandzak region of the former SFRY is particularly valuable because this corner of the Balkans has received scant attention, not least because this cross-border region remained largely untouched by the armed conflicts during the Yugoslav Succession Wars.'* Kenneth Morrison and Elizabeth Roberts published a much-needed and excellent history ofthe Sandzak region that allowed me to situate my findings in a historic frame,'* and I was fortunate to meet and discuss my research with James Lyon, who has published an article on the informal market in Novi Pazar.'* Empirically driven, however, this book is the first longitudinal analysis that examines how the Bosniak community of Novi Pazar in Serbia traded as a means to endure the Yugoslav Succession Wars of the 1990s. The relative peace that characterized the Sandzak during this decade makes it all the more critical that we try to understand how its ethnically and religiously diverse population negotiated this trying period.

The focus on informality and on “making do’ in Sandžak, an ambiguous border region situated between Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina (B1H), is not an isolated case study of an informal market in Novi Pazar. Informal practices are spread across the globe and have been examined in a variety of projects" and publications before. By looking closely at smuggling and other informal practices without prejudice and without being judgmental, I hope to contribute a better understanding about the mechanisms behind the establishment of such markets. The question of how communities frame reconnecting with diaspora populations to re-create belonging in light of crisis and/or precarity through the prism of informality that arrives in the form of aid is of specific interest here.

For a migration scholar, the Western Balkans are a fertile ground to examine the movement of people across lands so as to learn about the social, cultural, and political effects thereof. SandZak epitomizes this transitory and border characteristic of the Balkan region. As such, this book provides an outlook on migration as it spans questions of identification, informal trade practices, memory, and social space and investigates how these phenomena come together in times of precarity. By using a conceptual framework that spans history, sociology, social anthropology, and geography, I hope to go beyond grand narratives of geopolitical alignments between states to uncover a complex web of personal and intimate relationships that suffuse the on-the-ground struggles of “making do”. In doing so, this book contributes to our understanding of how national and transnational communities are forged in times of uncertainty and crisis. At the same time, this book reshapes preconceived notions of ethnicity, nationality, and the state in the Balkan region. Drawing on the field of human geography was particularly fruitful in my effort to understand the region through the very networks in which people operate as opposed to emphasizing ethnicity. Discarding the ethnic frame, to put it in Tim Hall's words, forced me “to think of space not in Euclidian terms, but rather in networked or relational terms."'?

Politicians, residents, journalists, pundits, and academics alike considered ethnicity as a lens through which to understand the collapse of social values during the Yugoslav wars, the reconciliation thereafter, and subsequent questions revolving around minority rights in the newly created states. I, too, traveled to Novi

Pazar with the initial intention of researching interethnic relations and upward social mobility in Southern Serbia. Taking to heart Clifford Geertz, and his advice to “see(ing) things from the native's" point of view, I abandoned this approach upon arriving in the field in May 2012.% As I moved from a text-based understanding of the region to the field site of Novi Pazar, I realized that the ethnic lens was a mental straitjacket I sought to discard. Moving away from the ethnic-lens approach opened fresh possibilities for my understanding of the social experiences of a community as opposed to those of Bosniaks, Serbs, Roma, and so forth. To be sure, I analyze transnational relations between the Bosniak diaspora in Turkey and local Bosniaks, and how social relations in Novi Pazar changed in view of the informal market that flourished there in the first half of the 1990s. Important, however, is that the market benefited and affected the social experience of all individuals in Novi Pazar, not merely the Bosniak community. Aspiring to Jerome Kirk and Marc L. Miller, I sought to “represent the natives’ way of making sense of their experience in a language that transcends the culture-specific experience of the world of either the natives or the readers.”?! Looking beyond ethnicity, in other words, encouraged me to observe a community that lived under the tutelage of a nationalist and an international sanctions regime. Local attitudes do not exist in a vacuum. They are shaped by events from within and outside politically imposed boundaries.

International sanctions did not materialize out of thin air but were a direct result of the proxy war Belgrade had waged in Croatia and Bosnia. As Belgrade engaged in a violent surrogate war to enlarge its political territory, the government in Belgrade alienated the population within its borders. In light of the prewar propaganda barrage against Muslims of SFRY and the mounting violence in BiH, politicians and representatives from the cultural and religious sphere in Novi Pazar, the urban center of the SandZak region, sought to gain autonomy from Serbia. Organized by Sulejman Ugljanin, head of the Democratic Action Party (SDA),? together with the umbrella organization under the name of Bosniak National Council of Sandžak (BNVS), the Muslim enclave of Sandzak adopted a referendum demanding autonomy from SFRY in 1991. The referendum was put to a vote and accepted by 187,473 (70.19 percent) of all 264,156 eligible voters in the SandZak region. Belgrade, meanwhile, denied the validity of the referendum and charged Ugljanin with an attempt to overthrow the Serbian constitutional order and terrorism.” Besides indicting Ugljanin, 25 additional members of the Bosniak community were imprisoned and charged on the grounds of violating the territorial integrity of SRFY.” Ugljanin fled to Turkey, while the trial against these individuals has been postponed 108 times.?

In short, I argue that the foundation of the once existing social solidarity among the former Yugoslav peoples disintegrated by way of the economic crisis, the Yugoslav Succession Wars, and subsequent sanctions. While the social disintegration affected all citizens of the former state, Bosniaks of Novi Pazar had a valve to relieve this pressure. And yet, trading with the diaspora community in Turkey was not only a means to an economic end but a practice that forged new and renewed social ties with the Muslim Slav diaspora community in Turkey and the Turkish state writ large.

Europe in the head, Turkey in the heart

Turkish involvement in the Western Balkans received much attention since Ahmet Davutoğlu devised the “Zero Problems with Neighbors’ doctrine. According to Davutoglu, formerly the minister for foreign affairs and member of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey was prone to assume greater geopolitical responsibilities in world affairs, in part due to its history and geographic location. The Balkans, too, fall into the former category owing to the Western Balkan inclusion in the former Ottoman Empire, especially since the Yugoslav Succession Wars during the 1990s. Since then, a number of Turkish state-sponsored and non-state actors finance a variety of projects in the Western Balkans, including the Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA),” the presidency for religious affairs called Diyanet,” and the Yunus Emre language institute.” Bahar Baser, Erdi Oztiirk, Samim Akgónül, and Kerem Otkem examined these cultural and political institutions and the encroaching authoritarian tendencies under the AKP presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdogan” and its support of cultural and educational institutions in the region extensively?! Simon P. Watmough and Oztürk examined the Gulen Movement as a “transnational network” that utilizes diaspora communities to strengthen its *parapolitical organization”.*? These authors provide us with much-needed and critical insight regarding not only the transformation of the Turkish state under the AKP but also a fundamental understanding about how the AKP utilizes diaspora communities to proliferate its geopolitical relevance.

Turkish investments in the region loom large, to be sure, but appear trifling compared to the involvement of the European Union. To put it in the words of one interlocutor, “Turkey is in people's hearts while Europe is in their heads.” Indeed, financial, cultural, and political investments dwarf those of Turkey when compared with those of the European Union, as illustrated by Matteo Bonomi and Milica Uvalić.” Moreover, Turkey is not the sole investor in the Western Balkans. Instead, Florian Bieber and Nikolaos Tzifakis,* and Dimitar Bechev* examine myriad state and non-state sponsored actors that variously engage with the Western Balkans. Their respective research builds an important frame for the present study in which I situate my question of how transnational practices shape one's sense of belonging in times of crisis/precarity.

John F. Freie makes an intriguing argument regarding the human desire for genuine communities and social relations in Counterfeit Community — The Exploitation of Our Longing for Connectedness.** Counterfeit communities, according to Freie, appeal to real needs and concerns of people and their desires for association, but instead of creating environments and relationships that meaningfully satisfy those desires, they provide only the appearance of community and are, therefore, never fully satisfying.?”

Freie posed the question of community-building in an American context that he perceived as rampant with selfish individualism and greed. Instead of partaking in a consensus-making, participatory democracy, US citizens gather at shopping malls or other community-like places that are void of communal experiences. As a result, Americans no longer associate the necessity of governance in their everyday lives, with the consequence that “citizens (who) claim to be a part of a community [but] feel no sense of social responsibility other than paying dues.”** Freie's contemplations on community-building are compelling, with a view toward the social disruption brought about by the Yugoslav Succession wars and local desire for a continued sense of community in all of Serbia, particularly in Novi Pazar. Did the local buvljak (“flea market”, colloquially understood as a market containing smuggled goods) in Novi Pazar create a renewed sense of community with the émigré community in Turkey in retrospect of the Ottoman Empire? Freie compels us to consider this question regarding this community's real and/or desired connection with the Turkish state.

Local connections with the diaspora, as well as the Turkish state, are undisputed and very real. Interviewees repeatedly asserted that Novi Pazar belonged to a Turkish sphere of influence based on the historically constituted cultural realm of the former Ottoman Empire and filial relations. Yet does a common religion, kin relations, and historic memory suffice the act of forging a common bond across time and space, as 1s the case of Novi Pazar and Turkey?

Magnus Marsden sheds light on this question and invites us to assess narratives with an overt historic dimension with caution in Trading Worlds — Afghan Merchants Across Modern Frontiers.” Trading Worlds is a supreme examination of Afghan merchants because Marsden analyzes ordinary material encounters and their significance for social encounters in Central Asia, the Black Sea region, and Europe. I build on Marsden's idea, and most of all, I heed his advice on ethnic historic determinism. In Marsden's words:

Such images of the present's relationship to the past are embedded in and arise out of political economies; they are actively constructed by both local and global actors. It is important, therefore, that scholarship is critical of the ways in which such images of pre-modern forms of trade are deployed in order to understand contemporary realities. By rendering the region's modern history as inauthentic to its historic cultural composition and wider global significance, these images foreclose any attempt to explore the unique ways in which people are forging relations across cold war boundaries.

The present study follows Marsden's cautionary note in its exploration of how locals construct and reconstruct the past based on the present in a fixed geographic space. Revisiting Fry's argument on the human desire for community in light of Marsden's advice then directs our attention toward the possibility that locals construct historicized narratives to cope with the present.

The question that arises is how locals navigated and experienced this two-tiered pressure of living within a nationalist-dominated government and internationally imposed sanctions. The gray and informal market itself thus serves as a prism that highlights the narrative accounts of locals and their proximity to Turkey.

During my time spent in the field of Novi Pazar, I filtered out two story lines that dominate the narrative sense-making process of locals in retrospect of the 1990s and the second market. As such, locals transpose a two-dimensional tale about šverc and transnational family relations onto a historical plane. At the core of the primary narrative lies an emphasis on the close-knit connections between Novi Pazar and the diaspora community in Turkey. “Without the diaspora,” I heard time and again, “we would not have made it.” On the surface of this first narrative is the diaspora community that saved Novi Pazar from descending into the economic chaos that people in other towns of Serbia experienced. Yet this narrative also serves as a “sense-making tool? that provides locals with a chronological continuity that bypasses the cruel experience of the war years.“ Trade with the Bosniak diaspora created an atmosphere that allowed locals to make sense of their new situation in economic and social terms by which they were able to “anticipate the future based on retrospection,” to frame it in Paul Ricoeur’s words."

Repeated probing over the course of four years in and out of the field slowly revealed a second narrative, namely a local deterioration of values and a deep-seated feeling of anomie because of this market. It is crucial, however, that locals might not have reconnected with the Bosniak diaspora in Turkey, the Turkish state, and their history to the extent they did in the absence of this war. The Yugoslav Succession Wars that enabled this market, one may thus pose, permitted the creation of the primary narrative. Only by illuminating the 1990s in general and the market that created and/or strengthened these links between the local and the diaspora community specifically, in other words, can one understand the process of revitalized relations between the local and diaspora community.

The significance of this question goes far beyond the limited space of Novi Pazar, exactly because locals repeatedly associate(d) the gray market with the Bosniak diaspora in Turkey.

It is important to emphasize that I do not examine transnational actors as dangerous, criminal, and/or intentionally malicious traders, even though they enabled the initial practice of šverc. I conceptualize transnational networks as a solidarity chain that enabled locals to make a living but also as a system of connections within which locals cohere the transmutation of their existence in the former Yugoslav state.

Methodological considerations and data

Upon arriving in Novi Pazar in 2012, I first took up residence in an informal *student dorm' that was located in a private residence. I have since chosen to stay at the hotel, each time in the same place. Staying at the hotel allowed for a distance between me and the field to evaluate my daily impressions in private. Both options constituted considerable drawbacks and/or advantages as I preserved my freedom of movement by staying at the hotel. On the contrary, the proximity to residents in the informal student dorms allowed for instant contact with residents and, significantly, the host family. And yet, having established relations with the hosts of the informal dorm during the pilot project in 2012 meant I was able to approach family members whenever I returned to Novi Pazar and surrounding areas. In Istanbul, I talked with merchants in the Kapalıçarşı (Grand Bazaar) in 2016, and met with interlocutors in Sarajevo in 2014 and 2016. In 2017, I resided in Belgrade to view newspaper collections and archival material at the National Library and the Yugoslav Archive, respectively.