Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism is a trenchant, timely set of essays which make no bones about their political positioning. A majority of the contributors have native-level knowledge of the former Yugoslavia, whether by birth or long acquaintance. For that reason—as well as by virtue of its organization and scope—the volume stands as an exemplar of what Michael Kennedy has identified as “contextual expertise.”Footnote ¹ Whereas such expertise has often been instrumentalized or subordinated to the service of ostensibly universal schemes of human betterment (like “market transition”), it serves here as the basis of a critique of politics-as-normal, and a plea for alternatives to the neoliberal mainstream.

In their introduction, Horvat and Štiks lay out the four contributions they envisage, which serve loosely to organize the volume’s twelve chapters. Part I, with chapters by Vladimir Unkovski-Korica, Andreja Živković, and Marko Grdešić, offers a critical examination of the Yugoslav socialist experience of the period 1944–1992, which rejects easy nostalgia and instead highlights their relevance for contemporary political struggles. Part II includes chapters by Maria Todorova, Tanja Petrović, and Boris Buden, and provides a critique of the implicit assumptions about the region embedded in the discourses of Western diplomats, journalists and pundits, by examining closely their metaphorical language. With contributions from Andrej Nikolaidis, Agon Hamza, and Mitja Velikonja, Part III provides an analysis of post-socialist economic and political transformations, and the patterns of capitalist accumulation and inequality generation they have generated. Finally, Part IV (including chapters by Michael G. Kraft, Jana Baćević, and Ankica Čakardić) describes workers’, students’, and women’s movements in the years 2009–2012 as case-studies in radical politics.

Each of these sections, I suggest, enters into dialogue with different existing bodies of literature. Rather than focus on the content of each chapter, treating them as islands unto themselves, I instead follow the prompts of the editors and authors, and highlight aspects of the relations with other texts that this book conjures or stimulates.

The chapters in Part I flag the enduring importance of analyses of the Yugoslav economic system. One key study that all three cite is Susan Woodward’s magisterial Socialist Unemployment, which advanced the argument that Yugoslavia’s violent disintegration can only be explained by paying close attention to the policies of the country’s ruling League of Communists, the system those policies created, and the impacts of rising unemployment on that system.Footnote ² The detailed history that Woodward laid out has received little or no attention in current conventional wisdom as to the causes of the secessionist wars of 1992–2001; in part, perhaps, from a broad and under-theorized consensus that armed conflict represents a thoroughgoing “reset” of political economic processes. Yet “peace-time” systems of power, privilege, and patronage are in fact highly persistent, shaping both the form and content of violent conflict, as well as “post-conflict” conditions. These chapters illustrate this in their close attention to how the status and effectiveness of unions and strike actions in the present is built on past experience.

Woodward distinguished two contrasting approaches to productive labor in the Yugoslav era. First, the liberal “Slovene” approach, which emphasized worker productivity through investment in technology and training, prioritized production of market-ready goods for export, and gave firms and their managers substantial autonomy in adapting to market demands. Second, the “Foča” approach, which advanced national security and development goals in its commitment to energy production, raw material extraction and infrastructure projects, and cultivated worker buy-in through a virtual covenant to eliminate the kinds of risks to livelihood that come with market reliance.Footnote ³

As Woodward’s choice of names suggests and her historical narrative makes clear, these two approaches were followed with different consistency and effect in different parts of the country. Tensions between these distinct philosophies contributed to the populist blame-shifting and grievance-peddling that fragmented the country. Widespread unemployment in those parts of the country where the “Foča” approach dominated—Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia—fueled social tensions that were later branded as “ethnic hatreds” in those then-underdeveloped and still-stigmatized regions. Conversely, the “Slovene” approach embraced by Republican leaders in Slovenia (and to different degrees elsewhere) appeared to prepare the ground for a “clean” exit from Yugoslavia and entry into a world of competing nation-states. The chapters here examine how the full working out of that “pure” liberal logic—in which firms hire and fire as needed and cut overhead by insisting that individuals shop on the open market for healthcare and pension provisions—has sparked labor activism and dissent in Slovenia and Croatia, the two former republics who have gone furthest in terms of neoliberal transformation. As such, they provide a compelling prompt to readers to revisit and re-examine the empirically-grounded studies of the early 1990s, whose explanatory power was overlooked in all the attention paid to ethnic violence.

Part II, similarly, urges readers to think beyond the certainties of Western journalists, commentators and politicians. I take as illustrative counterpoint a 2008 Washington Post op-ed by the late Richard Holbrooke, entitled “Lessons from Dayton for Iraq.”Footnote ⁴ Holbrooke used the format of a “grade sheet” for the Dayton agreement, 13 years after its signing.Footnote ⁵ Holbrooke assigned high grades to those aspects of Dayton he had prioritized as the agreement’s chief architect (most specifically, bringing an end to armed conflict and genocide), while criticizing Europe, Russia, and the Bush regime for their failure to follow through, especially with regard to political and economic integration.

Holbrooke’s op-ed serves as shorthand example of the enduring utility and relevance of Maria Todorova’s work on Balkanism.Footnote ⁶ Like other western policy-makers before and after him, Holbrooke casts Bosnia and the wider western Balkans as a region defined by “deep ethnic or religious differences,” and cursed by self-serving political leaders who pursue “retrogressive policies.” For Bosnia to move on, what is required is “vigor” and “strength” from the international community, making optimal use of the powers that Dayton established to ram through the kind of self-sustaining power-sharing arrangement that non-unitary states demand.

The three chapters in Part II provide a critique of the implicit assumptions embedded in texts like Holbrooke’s op-ed, and still pervasive among self-styled “experts” on “conflict-prone” countries. I confess to doubt that the book will bend the debate; the associates and heirs of Holbrooke continue to be tone-deaf to critiques of this kind, in part because so many of them overvalue their own “witnessing” of the period 1992–1995. The echo chamber created by ignorance and disinformation, and by selective sampling from historical accounts informed by similar or even more pernicious stereotypes, has proved incredibly robust. Its inmates style themselves as pragmatists and realists, and this volume’s sophisticated efforts to lay bare the ideological content of their metaphors will not, I think, change any minds.

The editors’ third goal for the volume, to analyze post-transition patterns of capitalist accumulation and inequality generation, is perhaps most passionately declaimed in Andrej Nikolaidis’s jeremiad on the “new” elites of Montenegro and Agon Hamza’s argument that elite self-enrichment, not ethnic tension, is the key dynamic at work in perpetuating Kosovar insecurity. Here and throughout the volume, there is space for closer productive dialogue with generalizable Marxian analysis like that of David Harvey. Post-Yugoslavia provides key evidence to support Harvey’s distinction between territorial and capitalist logics of power. “Territorial logic” is the domain of political leadership in the world of nation-states: “Capitalist logic” is that of CEOs and their firms.Footnote ⁷ The post-Yugoslav process of “appropriation by dispossession” was profoundly shaped by the preservation (by conflict and other means) of national limits on markets in the process of privatization. In Macedonia, for example, prices of Yugoslav “social property” were set by insiders (the managerial elite), rather than by internationally accredited valuators; the market to buy was also restricted. The outcome was an accumulative process that created poverty for the majority, generating persistent anger and frustration among many citizens against the new oligarchs (Mattoli 2016).Footnote ⁸

And this is a key aspect of the forms of political engagement described in Part IV, provocatively titled “Towards a Balkan Spring?” The discussions here of student and union activism, in particular, and their connections with the wider “occupy” and anti-capitalist movements, complement a wealth of new ethnographic work documenting expressions and logics of dissent and solidarity across the region.Footnote ⁹

By sequencing the volume in this way, concluding with these empirically grounded chapters on concrete cases of progressive political action, the editors have curated a volume with enormous potential for critical social science in and beyond southeastern Europe. They remind and educate readers about the Yugoslav experience in grappling with the governance challenges created by socio-economic and ethnic diversity; the invidious effects of entrepreneurial parochialism, especially when reinforced by the soft racism of international elites; the wealth of data about the differentiating impacts of market transition, always shaped by power dynamics; and the reality of the re-emergence of participatory politics through citizen assemblies and plenums. Besides regional specialists, the book will be of interest for anyone interested in the future of “market socialism” in China; the European project (and the unity of the UK) in the wake of Brexit; and, especially, the prospects for progressive coalition-building to confront or turn back the dispossession and disenfranchisement that comes with crony capitalism.