New title from CEU Press

Captured Societies in Southeast Europe: Networks of Trust and Control edited by Eric Gordy , Alena Ledeneva, and Predrag Cvetičanin is out now! You can purchase a copy here. This title is part of our Critical Approaches to Southeast Europe: A Cross-Disciplinary Series.

The volume is also available Open Access, thanks to our Opening the Future initiative. You can download a free copy here.

In Southeast Europe, there is a growing disjunction between “the way the world is” and the world that is described by law. The informal practices that address problems when formal institutions fail can be celebrated as spaces of creative problem-solving, or criticized as spaces for favouritism and corruption. When ruling political parties control informal networks, they consolidate the hold of unaccountable actors on power, moving from state capture to societal capture.

Eric Gordy is Professor of Political and Cultural Sociology at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.

Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London and a founder of the Global Informality Project (in-formality.com).

Predrag Cvetičanin is Profesor of Sociology of Culture at the Faculty of Arts, University of Nis, Serbia and the director of the independent research institute The Centre for Empirical Cultural Studies of South-East Europe.