Abstract: During the 1990s, informal trade – or šverc - was wide-spread in the former Yugoslav rump state. Th e following article conceptualizes the mechanisms behind the establishment of informal markets in light of ‘legal failure’ in Novi Pazar, Serbia, where informality produced an alternative, transnational connotation of belonging, leading to a ‘competition between law and social norms’. Trading thus served the purpose of a safety net that generated new and renewed social ties with the diaspora in Turkey, and the Turkish state writ large.

Keywords: Informal practices, Diaspora, Memory, Belonging, Transnational practices, Solidarity

Summary

Among the most inveterate unintended consequences is the sense of distrust that permeates all levels of society in Serbia, including Novi Pazar. Because the Belgrade regime relied on smuggling activities and criminal networks during the 1990s, locals no longer trust the sociopolitical and economic process in Serbia. Distrust of governing institutions cuts across ethnic and theistic boundaries, undermining Belgrade’s credibility in legal terms, and resulting in legal failure. According to popular belief in Novi Pazar, Serbia, there are 3–4 million Bosniaks who live in Turkey. Conventional wisdom there holds that it is this very community of émigrés in Turkey that provided Sandžak Bosniaks with the necessary tools to run and upkeep the textile production that, in part, sustained the informal market during the international communities’ economic sanctions on Serbia between 1992 and 1995. ‘Without the diaspora,’ I heard time and again, ‘we would not have made it.’ This narrative, I contend, provided locals with anticipatory properties. Because Serbia is not a ‘historically discrete sovereign state’, by reconnecting with the Bosniak émigré community in Turkey locals reconceptualized their associative space as post-Ottoman and Turkish, respectively. As such, material encounters shaped social relations that forged a sense of community between local and émigré Bosniaks in Turkey. Th ese connections ought to be understood as meaningful transnational solidarity chains. As such, networks between the local and diaspora community provided Bosniaks in Novi Pazar with social norms by which they were able to circumvent the unreliable, or, according to interlocutors, “criminal regime in Belgrade”.