Fixing Relations’: Rethinking Favours (veze/štele) as Political Practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina

How do people in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) access healthcare? How do they get jobs in public institutions? On the basis of ethnographic research conducted in 2009 and 2010, I am currently developing a political reading of favours in BiH. When veze / štele (semi-formal relations that enable people to ‘get things done’) are approached from the perspective of a single domain – the economy, friendships, or party politics – they blur its boundaries and resist further theorisation. Consequently, the ethnographic gaze of this work is directed across multiple domains. It tracks how veze / štele enable people to navigate their way through ‘formal’ procedures and ‘informal’ expectations, in order to move conceptually, socially, and sometimes geographically. In the discussion of this movement, I suggest that veze / štele in BiH are not blurry, but rather different for different people. These relations enable people to move between different orders of knowledge and experience, while the exact shape of this movement – the paths that are available to people – depend on who and where they are socially. Furthermore, veze / štele in BiH have persisted not because people prefer doing things through favours, but because they reproduce a particular kind of power in the form of petty sovereignship. Veze / štele turn the exceptional into the rule and the indefinable into the norm – and this is where their contemporary importance lies.

Čarna Brković is Junior Fellow at the CEU Institute for Advanced Study. She has a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester in 2012. She is the editor of Anthropology Matters journal and author of several articles on healthcare, social security, and humanitarianism in Bosnia and Herzegovina and on nationalism and publics in Montenegro, published in the UK, Germany, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia.