Serbia

In post-Yugoslav states, intergenerational solidarity networks based on family ties have become a safety net for many citizens, and particularly for women, who are traditionally in charge of child caring and social reproduction, while at the same time being often the main breadwinners in the household. The devaluation of women’s labour and the precarity of women on the labour market in the post-Yugoslav space reinforce women’s dependency on extended family networks. While the importance of family networks in informal economic practices was common during socialism as well, in post-socialist times, however, when job security in the public sphere has largely faded, the family – as well as informal economic practices - have an even stronger significance for everyday survival.

Despite the constitutionally and legally enshrined promise of equality in Kosovo, differentiated citizenship together with a political context defined by an ethnic divide and past structural inequalities, as well as uneven external citizenship opportunities, contributed to the emergence of ‘hierarchical citizenship’, where some groups (communities), or ‘rights-and-duty-bearing units’, are ‘more equal than the others’. In other words, the formal equality of citizens and communities is contradicted by the socio-political reality where some communities are better off, thus leading to the emergence of a hierarchy of communities in Kosovo. 

While it is still too early to speculate about the practical implications of this decree, its adoption together with recent plans to grant citizenship to foreign investors will without doubt transform the conception and configuration of Albanian citizenship and can potentially impact upon the already complex citizenship constellations in the region.  

Citizenship legislation and the associated administrative practices highlight several key points. First, membership in a supranational entity such as the EU has far-reaching effects, erasing to some degree the distinction between citizens and non-citizens but also making Bulgaria a more attractive proposition for various “third-country nationals”. Second, the provision of citizenship via naturalisation has broadened rent-seeking opportunities and exposed institutional weakness, a painfully familiar story in post-communist Bulgaria. Third, and most important, citizenship continues to oscillate between civic and more ethnicised notions. 

The widely hailed agreement reached between Serbia and Kosovo entrenches the power of clientelistic elites and is no real cause for celebration argues Eric Gordy.