Bosnians and “internationals” alike, at first sight, scratch their heads over the continued prevalence of veze and štele—informal social relations through which people obtain favors or access services—in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH). While the public lament needing such informal practices to obtain what in an ideally-ordered system of social welfare would be everyday entitlements, representatives of the international agencies which have attempted to remake BiH as a neoliberal economy on Europe's periphery decry them as hangovers of Balkan or socialist “mentalities.” The denunciations of “personal relationships … and bribery” in public administration that rippled through anti-nationalist, anti-neoliberal citizens’ assemblies in 2014 (9) are among very few premises the “plenum” protestors and the Office of the High Representative (OHR) might share. Yet even Bosnians who regret society's dependence on veze and štele often resort to them when in need. Čarna Brković’s insightful ethnography resolves this puzzle by arguing persuasively that anthropologists, economists, and reformers have misconceived them: they are neither relics of outdated mentalities nor forms of resistance to global free-market discourses, but claims to be recognized as both citizens and “socially located persons” (11) while meeting one's needs.

Veze and štele, Brković shows, are not calculated manipulations of corrupt systems, or stubborn refusals to “catch up” with modernity, but strategies for negotiating the neoliberally-eviscerated public sphere by relying on one's personal and local social world. The webs of sociality that Brković’s participants (and many other inhabitants of former Yugoslavia) skillfully reconstruct through storytelling and small-talk are illustrated by intricate conversational dances, such as three focus-group participants identifying a mutual connection through remembering who belonged to which grammar-school class, or when a workman, noticing Brković comes from Montenegro, starts exploring how to connect his world to hers by reminiscing about all the older Montenegrins who once lived in the town. Such networks are the channels individuals negotiate, and some even actively manage, when they require things the (idealized) state might once have provided, such as job openings, equipment for disabled relatives, or even attention by professionals who (many believe) only treat clients seriously if they register as “somebody” in the expert's own social world. Those with fewer veze work to build them, such as one woman with heavy caring responsibilities who supplements her income and brings social/humanitarian workers into her network of favors by fortune-telling over coffee. Individuals pursue veze when they cannot rely on state systems to provide or inform them about services: public welfare in contemporary BiH, Brković argues, is not about “citizens” rights’ so much as using personal relationships to activate bonds of “duty and care” (62).

This situation, for Brković, exemplifies BiH's simultaneously post-conflict and postsocialist condition. It is post-conflict because the Bosnian war (when her border-town field-site was subjected to ethnic cleansing by Serb paramilitaries and incorporated into Republika Srpska) violently remade local social fabrics, often detaching social relations from the immediate physical environment that characterized pre-war komšiluk (neighborliness). While anthropologists of BiH have debated whether komšiluk regulates sociality across or between ethnic boundaries, Brković—refusing to assume ethnonational identity must always come first in understanding BiH, even though traces of ethnopolitical violence are inescapable: the fortune-teller's story is inseparable from the fact that she is a Bosniak who believes her lack of veze left her vulnerable to chauvinistic treatment by Serb doctors when giving birth)—suggests komšiluk as physical proximity is not even meaningful for most residents any more. This post-conflict context is simultaneously postsocialist because citizens know (or, if younger, imagine) what state socialism offered or at least promised. That system's destruction by wartime elites who remain in power, and the hollowing-out of social welfare by internationally-driven neoliberal reconstruction, have entangled the instrumental and social functions of veze, and people pursue them to recreate their social selves as well as meet their needs.

Within the literature on postsocialism and clientelism, Brković offers alternatives both to “culturalist” ascriptions of favors and informal practices to historically-predetermined mentalities, and to the “systemic” approach of scholars such as Alena Ledeneva, who have argued that postsocialist informalities compensate for deficiencies in the market economy just as state socialist informalities compensated for the shortages of central planning. She also emphasizes that clientelism should be approached “as a part of transnational, globalized processes” (5), not part of any particular country's social ills: tellingly, the introduction remarks “that clientelism and patronage have a well-established place in the very heart of Europe: the European Commission” (3). A longer book might have traced the transnationality of veze and štele more systematically through the town's social spaces. Yet if, like this and other interventions against Eurocentric temporalities projected onto postsocialist Europe, one sees Eastern Europe as “a region that points to possible global futures” (22), phenomena such as marginalized US internet users having to leverage their social networks to crowdsource medical expenses after suffering accidents or crime seem not so distant from post-Yugoslav practices of funding the care of sick children through the humanitarian actions (humanitarne akcije) Brković set out to study. While neoliberal capitalism may revolve around the fantasy of the rational and empowered individual, Brković shows that negotiating it in practice depends on quite the opposite: the strength and breadth of individuals’ social ties.