Managing Ambiguity: How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina (EASA Series Book 31)

Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Exploring the role of favors in social welfare systems in postwar, postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, this volume provides a new theoretical angle on links between ambiguity and power. It demonstrates that favors were not an instrumental tactic of survival, nor a way to reproduce oneself as a moral person. Instead, favors enabled the insertion of personal compassion into the heart of the organization of welfare. __Managing__ __Ambiguity__ follows how neoliberal insistence on local community, flexibility, and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and back, and how this fostered a specific mode of power. La 4e de couverture indique: "Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Challenging widespread views of favors as means of survival in transitioning contexts, this volume demonstrates that these contemporary globalized forms of flexible governance are not contradictory to one another, but often mutually constitutive. "Managing Ambiguity" follows how citizenship was redefined as an ethical category during transformations of social protection in Bosnia and Herzegovina, showing how favors offered people a way to navigate the resulting ambiguity over welfare responsibilities. Rather than being the result of a "transitioning" and "flawed" statehood, favors evinced global tendencies to insert individual ethics and compassion into the heart of organization of welfare. " Čarna Brković. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.