State and border imaginaries and transformation of customs work : analysis of narratives of customs officers in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina

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State and border imaginaries and transformation of customs work:

analysis of narratives of customs officers in Serbia and Bosnia and

Herzegovina

Master Thesis in Mater Program

International Migration and Intercultural Relations (IMIB)

Erasmus Mundus Master in International Migration and Social Cohesion (MISOCO) at the University of Osnabrück

By Dejana Kostić Student ID Number: 965781

Supervisors:

Prof. Dr. Andreas Pott (University of Osnabrück)

Assist. Prof. Dr. Polly Pallister-Wilkins (University of Amsterdam) Dr. Diana Mata Codesal (University of Deusto)

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Abstract

Early debate often read globalization as a powerful tendency destined to make borders and the state obsolete. Recent research challenged this view by suggesting that globalization is accompanied by proliferation of borders and transformations of the state. But somewhat neglected in this recent wave of research is how these changes are perceived by people who are involved in these processes. Focusing on narratives of customs officers in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina this research aims at partially redressing this oversight. The research will examine how customs officers perceive their work of policing the borders and their imaginaries of the state.

Key words: customs work, borders, state, transformation, imaginaries, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina

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1. Introduction

It can be observed that far from spelling the demise of state and borders, globalization can be associated with the reassertion of territoriality and the proliferation of border forms and functions. Only a small part of the vast scholarship in border studies deploys ethnographic methods or other qualitative research techniques to elicit the perspectives of people involved in these processes. I would like to bridge this gap by analyzing the narratives of customs officers working in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Customs regimes have long been central to the operation of the modern state. The operations of customs authorities enfolded within mundane modalities of commerce, policing, territoriality, and taxation, are elements of a state’s bureaucratic apparatus that are largely taken for granted (Chalfin, 2006, p.246). However, being a definitive component of the state apparatus in its modern manifestation, customs is emerging anew as a strategic space of state making. Through everyday procedures of customs work (counting, coding, and calculating) and shaping the sorts of objects, attributes, transactions, and geographic transpositions that are deemed “legible or illegible,” visible or invisible, to the state these protocols have significant implications for the epistemological and ontological premises of state authority (cf. Chaflin, 2006, p.248). Having this in mind, I argue that customs serve as an important site for investigation of the state authority.

Moreover, because customs are invested in the policing of borders, studying customs can provide insights into transformations of borders. Borders play a strategic role in the

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2 fabrication of the world. We are confronted not only with a multiplication of different types of borders but also with the reemergence of the deep heterogeneity of the semantic field of the border (Mezzadra & Nielson, 2013). While ample scholarship highlighted that borders constitute an important site for policing of migrant mobilities, less consideration has been given to borders as sites of trade. Studying customs redirects our attention away from the potential for inequitable treatment of migrants towards the border policing of goods. Empirically sound research about customs work has potential to contribute to knowledge about the reworking of borders. As Bigo (2014) points out, understanding transformations in global policing regimes requires studying security actors’ cultural and technical worldviews.

1.1. Research questions

This study has three sets of research questions.

1) How customs officers perceive their work? I would like to analyze how customs officers perceive technological and organizational change of customs work and what we can learn about transformations of borders and the state from these narratives.

2) How customs officers perceive borders? I will focus on how customs officers imagine borders and how they understand their function. Additionally, I am interested in how customs officers apprehend changes of state borders in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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3 3) How customs officers perceive the state? How changes of state territory throughout the years influenced their perceptions of what the state is? Thus, I would like to examine customs officers’ subjective experience of the state.

This defined topic does not start from a hypothesis, but rather focuses on an analysis of the ethnographic material. In order to explore all the possibilities to answer these questions satisfactorily, I have put aside the ex-ante formulation of any set of hypotheses, so the complexity of the phenomena of study is not dismissed or simplified in the research process.

1.2. Very brief historical and political context

Taking into consideration the context in which a study is conducted is of great importance. Since the 1990s the borders and state territory continually changed in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia started in the late 1980s and culminated with the secessions of Slovenia (1991), Croatia (later in the same year), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992), and Macedonia (later in the same year). Finally, the union of Serbia and Montenegro, as a Yugoslav successor state, abandoned the name Yugoslavia in 2001 and Montenegro declared its independence in 2006. The Serbian province of Kosovo declared its independence in February 2008.

After the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, former republics established their national customs administrations. This led to a large reduction in number of customs offices in both countries (i.e. in Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia the

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number was reduced from 40 to 141). New border crossings were opened at the borders

between the former Yugoslav republics. Until 2001 the customs service in Serbia was a federal level authority and directly accountable to the federal government. Today the

Customs Administration is part of the Ministry of Finance. Thecurrent customs law has

been enacted in 2012. In Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2004 customs administration of entities2 and district Brčko were merged into the unitary customs administration. Customs administration started working as a single entity on the entire territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2005. Currently, the customs administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a part of Indirect Taxation Authority, the biggest state level institution. The current customs law was enacted in 2004.

1.3. Organization of the thesis

This study has five chapters. In the Introduction, the main focus, research questions and methodology are explained. In the methodology section details of the fieldwork are provided (access to the field and research sample, data collection and data analysis, ethical issues and limitations of fieldwork).

The second chapter is dedicated to outlining the theoretical framework of the study. The theoretical framework is divided into two sections: literature review and conceptual framework. While literature used in literature review and conceptual framework overlap on certain issues, I propose this structure because of analytical clarity. Literature review

1_{http://www.upravacarina.rs/en/AboutUs/CustomsServiceHistory/Pages/HistoryoftheCustomsService.asx} 2_{Bosnia and Herzegovina are divided into entity of Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and entity of}

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5 is outlined in order to summarize existing knowledge about customs work and to discover potential gaps and shortcomings of the studies. I use the term conceptual framework to refer to the approaches and perspectives that I will employ in understanding the phenomena I study. In the conceptual framework I aim to explore how the state and borders have been conceptualized in academic literature. This section is divided into two subsections: state literature and border literature.

In the fourth chapter of the study, I will present the ethnographic data gathered during the interviews in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. My aim while conducting the interviews was to explore how customs officers perceive their work, borders and the state. The purpose of this chapter is to show how people who are state employees and whose job is the management of borders understand and imagine the borders and the state. This chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section I will explore how customs officers perceive technological and organizational change of customs work. In the next section named “The quest for border imaginaries” I seek to investigate how

customs officers imagine borders and their change. In the last section named “The quest for the state imaginaries” I will analyze how my informants discursively constructed the state through their narratives. Specifically, I will focus on narratives about Yugoslavia and shady business3.

Finally in the conclusion, in addition to recapitulating the main findings of the study I also propose some ideas for further research related to the theme.

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1.3. Methodology of the study

Qualitative methods are typically used for providing an in-depth understanding of the research issues that embraces the perspectives of the study group or population (Hennink, Hutter & Bailey, 2011, p.10). This means that qualitative researchers should attempt to interpret phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them. By employing this research approach, the important insights from theoretical discussions about borders and the state can be examined. Therefore, the argument presented in this thesis is based on field research conducted in February and March 2016, in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. During this research, I had the opportunity to carry out eight semi-structured, in depth interviews with customs officers working on different borders and customs outposts.

Access to the field and research sample

Negotiating access was of crucial importance for my research, especially since it was difficult to find people willing to take part in the study. Although issues of secrecy color almost any fieldwork endeavor, this condition was compounded by the climate of suspicion in which customs officers across Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina operated. Most of the customs officers were not uncomfortable with my curiosity about their work and their perceptions of state and borders. However, by dint of personality or political disposition, some customs officers were at ease with revealing and reflecting on these issues.

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7 Laura Nader states that the most usual obstacle to ‘studying up’4_{is gaining access. The} problems with government agencies and institutions are problems of confidentiality: the desire for secrecy, the fear of all but self-fashioned publicity and refusal to discuss questions on their operations (Nader, 1972, p.19). Furthermore, researchers who are considered outsiders to an organization or institution are often not welcomed, especially if they ask questions that are considered to be sensitive and awkward (Okumus et. al., 2007). Thus, the continuity of the research was dependent on building trust with participants while talking to them and maintaining good and balanced relationships. My initial research plan was to recruit several participants through my personal networks and then to adopt a snowball strategy to recruit more participants through the social networks of the participants interviewed. However, this proved to be impossible because interviewees were very concerned that someone will find out that they took part in the research. Thus, gaining access to the study population involved drawing only on different intra-personal networks. This is reflected in the diverse research sample.

In the philosophy of science, the variety-of-evidence thesis seems to be truism of scientific theorizing. For Stephan Hartman (2008) as for other scholars, the more varied evidence corroborates better than less varied evidence. Hence, interviewing customs officers from different states and working on different borders and customs outposts can provide better insights into prevailing understanding of borders, state and customs work. This does not mean that I provide a more truthful generalization about customs work,

4_{In her influential article “Up the Anthropologist – Perspectives Gained from Studying Up” (1972), Nader}

argues that anthropologists should not only study down, namely study disadvantaged, the poor and the colonized, but also study up – investigate institutions and those who control and partake institutional structures.

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8 state and borders. My argument is instead that a diverse research sample provides a better understanding of potentially general trends in specific contexts.

In September 2015 I did a preliminary interview with customs officer working on Serbian-Hungarian border. This interview was conducted at the border checkpoint where this officer was working. I had opportunity to gain insights into some practices of customs. However, in February this customs officer moved to a different border checkpoint where I did not have opportunity for observations.

During my fieldwork I conducted interviews with two customs officers from Bosnia and Herzegovina who were working on Serbian-Bosnian border. I also conducted the interview with one customs officer from Serbia who was working on the same border, but not on the same border checkpoint as his colleagues from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Furthermore, one participant in the study was working on Serbian-Hungarian border and one was working at an airport in Serbia. During my research I found out that besides customs officers working at the borders, there are customs officers who work in the outposts in bigger cities. Thus, in order to have a better grasp how customs work I conducted interviews with officers .who work in such outposts. I managed to conduct two interviews with customs officers who were working in customs outposts in different cities in Serbia. In addition, I conducted one interview with a customs officer who was retired for two years and who had experience working on several borders. It is important to note that all of the study participants had experience working at different borders and in different work positions. Some of them even worked as customs officers in post offices and border check points for trains. Most of the interviewed customs officers were employed as customs officers for more than twenty years.

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9 Data collection and data analysis

As I have already mentioned, I conducted eight semi-structured, in-depth interviews. The in-depth aspect of the method is important because it reinforces the purpose of gaining a detailed insight into the research issues from the perspective of the study participants themselves. I used a list of specific topics to be covered (i.e. an interview guide), but interviewees had a great deal of leeway in how to reply. The emphasis was on how interviewees framed and understood issues and topics. Interviews were organized around three main themes: (1) professional experience as customs officer and perception of customs work, (2) perception of borders, and (3) perception of state.

Out of eight interviews only one was recorded using a digital voice recorder. During all the other interviews I was taking notes because interviewees did not want interviews to be recorded. It is interesting to note that during several interviews, participants suggested me not to take notes on some of the issues that we were discussing because they found them too problematic and controversial. All of the interviews were conducted in the Serbian language. It is important to note that Bosnia and Herzegovina has three official languages: Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. However, before the dissolution of SFR Yugoslavia they were treated as a unitary Serbo-Croatian language. Thus, there were no difficulties in communication during the interviews conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In the analysis of the data I used the broad principles of grounded theory. Grounded theory provides a set of flexible guidelines and processes for data analysis. Nevertheless, grounded theory is not a theory itself: it is a process for developing empirical theory from

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10 qualitative research that consists of a set of tasks and underlying principles (Hennink et. al., 2011, p.208). The analytic tasks included: preparing verbatim transcripts, anonymizing data, developing codes, defining codes in a codebook, coding data, categorizing and conceptualizing (Hennink et. al., 2011, p.209). The process of coding and data analysis was done manually, without the use of computer packages for managing textual data.

Codes refer to an issue, topic, idea, opinion, etc., that is evident in the data (Hennink et. al., 2011, p.216). Code development involved both deductive and inductive strategies. Some of the codes were derived from the conceptual framework of the study (deductive), while other codes were developed by directly reading the data themselves (inductive). Deductive codes included: the border of the state, the state, customs laws, and organization of customs work. However, most of the codes were inductive and included: security, border line, undefined borders, private security, abolition of borders in the EU, Yugoslavia, new technologies, harmonization and shady business (this is in vivo code). After developing codes, the data is coded. The process of coding involved carefully reading the data, considering which codes are discussed in that section of data and then labeling this section with relevant codes.

Next task in data analysis was categorization and conceptualization. Categorization involved identifying codes with similar characteristics and grouping these together into meaningful categories. They are related to the main research topics (borders, state and customs work). These categories are used for organization of the analysis into subsections. Conceptualization involved considering the relationship between these

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11 categories, to view the data as a whole and develop a conceptual understanding of the issues which led to developing overarching conceptual and theoretical framework.

Ethical issues

A frequent concern about ethnographic research is that involves making public things that are done in private (Hammersly & Atkinson, 2007, p.212). Confidentiality refers to not disclosing information that is discussed between researcher and the participant (Hennink et. al., 2011, p.71). However, it is difficult to ensure complete confidentiality in qualitative research because the researcher needs to report the study findings. I did not include in the study all information that my informants required to be confidential. Because my informants did not speak in an official capacity, it was important to ensure complete anonymity. For anonymity purposes, all interviewees are referred to in this article as ‘officers’ and have been given fictional names. All identifiable information is removed from the interview transcripts or quotations used, so that no individual participant can be identified from these documents (see Hennink et. al., 2011, p.71). Ensuring anonymity was important due to the necessity of minimization of any possible social or economic harm to participants involved in the research.

Limitations of fieldwork

In analyzing the perceptions of customs officers and the ways they present and give meaning to their own work, consideration must be paid to the limits of analyzing practices through the way practitioners talk about their work. Didier Fassin suggests that in studying law enforcement personnel “secrecy and opacity are the rule, disclosure, and transparency the exception” (Fassin, 2013, p.14). Merje Kuus claims that the same is true

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12 for the bureaucrats. Bureaucrats are designed to guard information with little allowance made to transparency or public engagement (Kuus, 2013, p.118). The issue of guarding information and secrecy appeared in almost every interview.

Additionally, Kuus observes on researching foreign policy actors that these actors are trained to give charming interviews that do not reveal information but feed it (Kuus, 2013, p.118). In approaching the methodological aspects of my research, a question remains as to which extent I have been able to engage in “open-ended conversations that reach beyond the reiteration of rehearsed talking points” (Kuus, 2013, p.116). However, I argue that important conclusions could be drawn from rehearsed talking points because they say something about prevailing discourses among customs officers. My research aim was to understand prevailing discourses among my informants, rather than to find the “truth”.

With some of the participants it was difficult to build a trusting relationship with such a short timeframe. Due to the limited amount of time available for my fieldwork, it was not possible to conduct multiple interviews with the same people or spend additional time with them, which would have been helpful for having a better insight into the field. Additionally, having an opportunity to gain insights into practices of customs officers would be beneficial for the study, but it was impossible to achieve.

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2. Theoretical framework

This chapter is divided into two sections: literature review and conceptual framework. In the first section I will summarize and evaluate several studies about customs work in order to sum up existing knowledge about customs work and locate potential gaps. The second section, conceptual framework, is divided into subsections about state literature and border literature. In that section I will present lenses, perspectives, and approaches which I will use in order to explain the patterns found in my material.

2.1. Literature review

Ample scholarship has highlighted how borders constitute a privileged site for policing of migrant mobilities (Anderson 2014, Pallister Wilkins 2015, Walters 2011). Less consideration has been given to borders as sites of trade. This is surprising given that customs, centrally concerned with ordering trade, i.e. what goods and services can and cannot flow across state borders, is invested in defining both what the borders are and what the state is. In this section I will summarize and evaluate four papers (Cote Boucher 2015, Chaflin 2006, Chaflin 2007, Chaflin 2008) about the surveillance of supply chains through borders – that is, about the operation of customs.

Although these works differ in some important ways, they all share the basic premise that during the past twenty years the policing of cross-border trade underwent a veritable transformation. The customs regimes are restructured because of the ascendance of supranational bodies, transnational commerce and national security threats. Countries have entered a series of bilateral and regional free trade agreements. Furthermore, many

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14 countries have adopted new preclearance and trusted trader programs that rely on the private sector for risk management data. Novel technological schemes have been implemented, leading to unprecedented redistribution of border policing and intelligence-led tasks between series of policing actors.

Based on research of Canadian ports of entry, the article by Karine Cote Boucher investigates how customs officers envision current transformations in customs work processes. Specifically, this article shows how changes in customs operation have led to both an expansion and a decline in customs officers' hold on decision making at the border (Cote Boucher, 2015, p.1). The liberalization of cross-border trade during the 1990s — with the implementation of NAFTA — removed many fiscal barriers to trade in the continent and changed how goods, trucks and drivers were policed at the border (Cote Boucher, 2015, p.5). Canadian border authorities progressively acquired new technologies to process customs data. Using indirect control by private actors and increasingly relying on information technologies, the Canadian border agency entered a period of restructuring based on a customs-at-a-distance model aimed at facilitating the circulation of commodities in a deregulated market economy (Cote Boucher, 2015, p.6).

These changes are also observed by Brenda Chaflin in her analysis of customs operations at the Port of Rotterdam. Relying on Beatrice Hibou’s concept of indirect government5

5_{Hibou argues that while state shares are sold off, the recipients are kept in such a state of uncertainty by}

the authorities as to what they can and cannot do with their new-found assets that the state continues to maintain a hold over them. Hibou calls this ‘private indirect government’. She writes: Privatization [for which we can insert equitisations] is in no way synonymous with the retreat of the state, or even the primacy of the private over the public…beyond the expanding role of so-called private bodies, privatization involves constant negotiation between dominant actors (whether they be public or private); the constant redrawing of frontiers between public and private; and the persistent hold of political relations and power more generally. Negotiations are always at the centre of this process of delegation and control which characterizes this mode of increasingly private indirect government (Hibou, 2004, p.15).

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15 she is pointing out the role of auxiliary agencies and intermediaries which often blurs the boundary between private and public actors. The conception of indirect government that Chaflin discusses dwells primarily on the enrolment of private or externally based bodies and agents in the planning and execution of essential state services (Chaflin, 2007, p.1613).

Although both authors discuss the dynamics of indirection, a phenomenon increasingly intertwined with governance in the face of global commercial expansion and acceleration (Chalfin, 2007, p.1613), Cote Boucher analyzes how customs officers negotiate and engage with these transformations, while Chaflin’s article focus on the role of the state in

commercial flows in regard to these changes. Cote Boucher argues that border agencies have removed from ports of entry many of the tasks traditionally placed under the purview of customs officers thus impeding their capacity to decide and apply regulations in the way they judge best (Cote Boucher, 2015, p.16). She concludes that such alterations in customs operations have reconfigured discretion in convoluted ways: customs officers emphasized their extended legal powers as a symbolic compensation for their loss of discretion, and increasingly view themselves as part of a reserve army protecting the border in case of emergency (Cote Boucher, 2015, p.13). According to Chaflin, forms of indirect governance have a similar impact on the state. She claims that shifting the substance and subject of rule, they amplify the reach of the state in some ways and restrict it in others (Chaflin, 2007, p.1625). One consequence of these processes according to Chaflin is that in the work of guarding, customs authorities in the Port of Rotterdam are thoroughly dependent on auxiliary agents, effectuating forms of indirect governance (Chaflin, 2007, p.1620-1621). In the end Chaflin concludes that in

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16 Rotterdam, what appears to be at stake as much as the question of facilitation versus control is also the unsettled relationship between forms of control that rely on the direct expression of oversight and those that govern at a distance through approximations, auxiliaries, and impermanent arrangements (Chaflin, 2007, p.1616).

In her analysis of the encounters and interactions between travelers and customs officers at the Kotoka International Airport (KIA) in Ghana, Chaflin further explores the role of the state in transnational flows of goods. Findings from KIA challenge the idea that the rise of trans- and supranational engagements and the concomitant expansion of bureaucratic administration are necessarily widening the divide between the subjects and agents of rule (Chaflin, 2007, p.522). According to Chaflin, the encounters and interactions between travelers and customs officers at the airport suggest that the retooling of sovereign authority in contexts of neoliberal reform rests on the production of new sorts of intimacies — whether social identifications, fantasies, emotions, or notions of self (Chaflin, 2007, p.522). For instance, in the rendering of sovereignty at the airport, it is transnational actors — namely, Ghanaians by birth or citizenship who have invested themselves in the circuitry of international trade and travel — who present the greatest challenge to the substance and distribution of state authority and are the targets of state intervention (Chaflin, 2007, p.532).

Chaflin suggests that the proliferation of supranational regulatory rubrics and transnational flows within the airport do not undermine state authority (Chaflin, 2008, p.532). She argues that they provide means for state officials to intensify their scrutiny of mobile subjects in ways both highly technocratic and deeply personalized (Chaflin, 2008, p.532). Through the extraction, imposition, and assimilation of various forms of intimate

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17 knowledge, customs officers simultaneously gain mastery over and identify with a traveling citizenry (Chaflin, 2008, p.532).

Taking various methodological approaches in her analysis of global customs regimes and new forms of statehood Chaflin has arrived at the same conclusion about the role of the state. Data for this article includes interviews and discussions with high ranking officers of the national customs administration, corporate service providers, and representatives of international organizations shaping customs standards worldwide, as well as archival research on the history of customs programs and analysis of customs laws and literature (Chaflin, 2006, p.244-245). However, Chaflin argues that since her article is focused on embedded logics of customs policies in operation at a economic and macro-political scale, her study intends to be anthropological rather than explicitly ethnographic (Chaflin, 2006, p.245). This approach allows her to grapple with the productive ramifications of global efforts toward standardization for state practice generally. However, this methodological approach also contributes to some weaknesses of her study, which I will discuss later.

After the exploration of large-scale institutional and conceptual conditions shaping the form and the formation of the contemporary state, Chaflin concludes that the political transformations involve changes both in what state does and what the state is (Chaflin, 2006, p.243). According to Chaflin, melding the intensifying drive for security and proliferation of commercial flows that characterize the contemporary era, customs speak to the possibilities of statehood in a distinctively neoliberal age and at the same time represent a site of sovereign contention (Chaflin, 2006, p.260). Chaflin ends her analysis about global customs regimes with the conclusion that while upholding the authority of

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18 individual nation-states, national customs administrations have come to depend on supranational regulatory orders or customs services provided by private firms which enables customs regimes to pursue a bifurcated mode of governance: direct and indirect, immediate and remote (Chaflin, 2006, p.260-261).

The insights in the studies that I have presented in this section provide important understanding of the character of customs regimes. However, these studies also not fully address certain issues. Authors rightly emphasize the technological and privatization trends (and their implications), but often understate the power politics and power dynamics that drive them. Discussion of the geographical-historical context would be important in establishing the global power relations that are both constraining and providing opportunities for the different actors involved in the transformations of customs regimes. Some sense of the geographical-historic context of the changes being examined must be presented to locate or situate actors. Additionally, placing the practices and discourses of individuals and institutions in a structural context makes it easier to address the multiplicity of meanings of their actions.

One important issue is a tendency in Chaflin’s article about global customs regimes, which is also evident in globalization literature, to portray macro processes as something other than humanly conducted activity. Chaflin in her analysis of global customs regimes occasionally slips into the trap of anthropomorphizing of the state that “knows”, “acts” and “recognizes” other states. In order to avoid this trap it is necessary to pay close attention to social processes of implementing and negotiating customs policy and practice. Thus, it is important to consider how human actors engage with changes in

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19 policies and technologies in order to see the slips, contestations and unintended consequences.

I would like to contribute to the knowledge about customs work presented in this literature review. Having in mind important insights, but also shortcomings of the studies elaborated in this section, I would like to explore the customs officers’ perception of the transformation of state, borders and customs work. I want to learn about implementing and negotiating customs practice. This would not only contribute to the understanding of customs work, but also to the understanding of how borders and the state are constructed and negotiated.

2.2. Conceptual framework

I consider that the theoretical approaches that I will summarize in the remainder of this chapter can help interpret how customs officers perceive borders and the state. Although most of these texts develop frameworks to deal with theoretical issues, I argue that they are also suited for ethnographic research. Most importantly, they help highlight the fact that borders and the state are not autonomous and concrete entities, but rather something that is produced.

2.2.1. State literature

This century opens on two sets of contradictory images: the power of the national state sometimes seems more visible and encroaching and sometimes less effective and less relevant. Countering assertions that the accelerated flows of persons, goods and capital, as well as the insistent presence of multi-, trans-, and supranational entities signal the

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20 demise of the state (see Appadurai 1996, Hannerz 1996), scholars from a wide range of fields have come to recognize that the states remain important in ordering of social, political, and material life. The analytical problem has shifted from a search for state survival to tracking substantive shifts in state form and function (Ferguson & Gupta 2002, Simić 2014).

The problem of studying the state as a concrete ethnographic entity has been noticed quite early in writings of Radcliffe-Brown. In the introduction to the book “African Political Systems” published in 1940, Radcliffe-Brown argues that the state does not exist as an empirical entity, but rather as a philosophical fiction and that therefore there is no sociological significance in studying it (Radcliffe-Brown 1995 [1940]). Almost forty years later, Philip Abrams sheds new light on the study of the state, claiming that Radcliffe-Brown missed an important issue in his analysis: reification of the abstract character of the state is a key element of what the state is.

Abrams distinguishes “state system” and “state idea” (Abrams, 1988, p.58). The “state system” represents a palpable nexus of practice and institutional structure centered in government and more or less extensive, unified and dominant in any given society: while the “state-idea” is the reification of that system, creating an illusion that the state is a coherent unified whole which exists separately from society (Abrams, 1988, p.58). Abrams argues that the state comes into being as a stucturation within political practice: it starts its life as an implicit construct: it is then reified – as the res publica (Abrams, 1988, p.58).

Abrams was critical of the state being taken for granted as an object of political analysis while it remained unclear what the state is. Consequently, Abrams proposes that the state

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21 as a material object of study should be abandoned while continuing to take the idea of the state extremely seriously. According to him, the internal and external relations of political and governmental institutions (the state-system) can be studied effectively without postulating the reality of the state (Abrams, 1988, p.75). Thus, Abrams’s proposal is not to simply accept the idea that the state is an abstraction which has its coherent manifestations, but rather to try to articulate an analytical framework that integrates both concrete and abstract properties of the state.

However, the epistemological value of the distinction between the material forms of the state from the ideological ones, or of the real ones from the illusory ones, or that of the “state-idea” and the “state-system”, has been contested as well. Timothy Mitchell questions Abrams’s analytical assumptions and claims that the “state-idea” and the “state-system” are better seen as two aspects of the same process. According to him, the phenomenon we name “the state” arises from techniques that enable mundane material practices to take on the appearance of an abstract, nonmaterial form (Mitchell, 2006, p.77).

Mitchell’s positive account begins with the assumption that the elusiveness of the boundary between state and society should not be understood as a problem of conceptualization but as a clue to the nature of the phenomenon (Mitchell 1991). The distinction between the state and society must be taken not as the boundary between two discrete entities, but as a line drawn internally within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a social and political order is maintained (Mitchell, 1991, p.78). This means that we should not be mislead into accepting the idea of the state as a coherent object clearly separated from the society. Conceived in this way, the state is no

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22 longer to be taken as essentially an actor, with the coherence, agency, and subjectivity this term presumes (Mitchell, 1991, p.90). Thus, in order not to reify the state as a concrete object, the state needs to be analyzed as a structural effect. That is to say, it should be examined not as an actual structure, but as a powerful, metaphysical effect of practices that make such structures appear to exist (Mitchell, 1991, p.94). Mitchell states that by approaching the state as an effect, one can both acknowledge the power of the political arrangements that we call the state and at the same time account for their elusiveness (Mitchell, 1991, p.94-95).

Moreover, Michel-Rolph Trouillot contributed to the thesis that the state should be analyzed as a structural effect by stating that state power has no institutional fixity on either theoretical or historical grounds (Trouillot, 2001, p.126). Within that vision, although linked to a number of apparatuses not all of which may be governmental, the state is not an apparatus but a set of practices, processes and their effects (Trouilllot, 2001, p.127). The state is not necessarily bound by any institution, nor can any institution fully encapsulate it. Thus, Trouillot argues that its materiality resides much less in institutions than in the reworking of processes and relations of power so as to create new spaces for the deployment of power (Trouilllot, 2001, p.127).

Further contribution to this line of understanding of the state as reification of its effects has been the analysis and elucidation of another aspect of the state, namely, of the state subjectivity. Begoña Aretxaga asks how the state becomes a social subject in everyday life, examining the subjective experience of state power and tracing its effects on territories, populations, and bodies (Aretxaga, 2003, p.393). She argues that the state cannot exist without its subjective component. According to Aretxaga, we can see on the

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23 one hand that there are the subjective dynamics that link people to states, and on the other hand there is what one could call the subjectivity of state being (Aretxaga, 2003, p.395). Asking how the state becomes a social subject in everyday life means asking about bodily excitations and sensualities, powerful identifications, and unconscious desires of state officials; about performances and public representations of statehood; and about discourses, narratives and fantasies generated around the idea of the state (Aretxaga, 2003, p.395).

For Aretxaga, as for other scholars like Abrams, the mystifying illusion of a center of power called the state must be unmasked for the reality of disparate relations of power to emerge (Aretxaga 2003, Abrams 1988). But to talk of the state as fiction does not necessarily mean falsity but rather, as Clifford Geertz (1973) said long ago, a certain genre of representation, a particularly powerful one. Thus, fantasy here is not meant as a purely illusory construction but as a form of reality in its own right (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1989). Fantasy in this sense belongs to the “objectively subjective” (Zizek,

1997).

Aretxaga’s analysis highlights another important issue for the understanding of the state: the existence of the strange intimacy between the state and the people. She argues that the state excises from the polis those subjects and practices that question or threaten homogeneous models of territorial sovereignty and heterosexual forms of political control, which are fundamental to national narratives of harmonious domesticity (Aretxaga, 2003, p.403). The mirroring dynamics between the imaginary relation of those embodying the state and those who encounter their effects in everyday life emerges indirectly from studies of the state (Taussig, 1993). This idea suggests a subjective

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24 dynamics that produces and reproduces states as objects of fear and attachment, of identification or disavowal, as subjects of power, elusive, unlocatable, ever present, immensely powerful, or impotent (Artexaga, 2003).

In order to understand all the different, elusive aspects of the state and the processes that generate it – the ethnographic approach provides the right level of analysis. Through analysis of narratives, the processes of reaffirmation, construction and reproduction of the state can be captured. The final goal is not to find a simple answer to the question of what the state is, but rather to provide insights into the ways in which the state emerges as historical construction, the temporary result of different social, political and symbolic processes. Thus, it is important to pay attention to how the state comes into being, becomes “real” through narratives and representations. Relying on the conceptual framework described in previous lines, I would like to focus on how state employees understand what the state is.

2.2.2. Border literature

Similarly to assertions that globalization signals the demise of the state, globalization was initially seen as a phenomenon that will make borders obsolete (Andrijašević &Walters, 2011, p.977). However, it can be observed that – far from spelling the demise of state borders – globalization can be associated with the reassertion of territoriality and the proliferation of border forms and functions (Blake, 2000). Far from culminating in the erosion of borders, globalization is seen to be accompanied by a diffusion, dispersal and networking of borders such that border function and border effects are proliferating in proportion to political dynamics of fear, unease and insecurity. Border controls now work

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25 like a matrix or a global regime, a grid spread across transnational spaces of production, communication and mobility (Andrijašević &Walters, 2010, p.978).

It is known that what we understand as a modern frontier – that is not a disputed region or a zone of control, but a line– only became widely established in the eighteenth century (Hirst, 2005, p.37). The fact that it became a common and defining feature of statehood and modern territoriality might be attributed to the inception of the “Westphalian” system of international relations (Walters, 2011, p.148). More concretely, the linear frontier was only able to emerge once states began to acquire particular forms of knowledge, and administrative capacity which allowed them to survey, map and mark their frontiers (Hirst, 2005, p.37).

Constituting borders through geographical barriers or in terms of other taken-for-granted physical referents presents them as “primordial, timeless, as part of nature” (Khosravi, 2010, p.1), thereby concealing their histories and their contested character. As Mezzadra and Nielson argue, the articulation between global lines of colonial and imperialist expansion and the drawing of linear boundaries between European and Western states has constituted for several centuries the dominant motif of the global geography organized by capital and state (Mezzadra & Nielson, 2013, p.4). Such a traditional image of borders is inscribed onto maps in which discrete sovereign territories are separated by lines and marked by different colors. This image has been produced throughout the modern history of the state, and it is important to be aware of its complexities. Historicizing the development of linear borders means to be aware of the risks of naturalization of a specific image of the border and that naturalization does not assist in understanding the

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26 most salient transformations in the contemporary world (Mezzadra & Nielson, 2013, p.3). Today borders are not merely geographical margins or territorial edges.

Thus, the recent research in critical border studies provides a skeptical and nuanced image of the functions of borders. Once attention turned toward borders themselves, some researchers rapidly began to redefine borders as an ongoing project, an activity, and a process, rather than as an entity or object (Walters 2011, Mezzadra & Nileson 2013). Borders regarded as objects, whether symbolic or material, are imagined as having thing-like qualities and are most often understood as mental or physical barriers or bridges (Green, 2013, p. 348). The borders-as-process approach argues instead that borders are, in effect, a technique: bordering, or the process of classifying and ordering space and relations between here and elsewhere in the world (Green, 2013, p.350). Hence, rather than treating the concept of the border as a territorially fixed, static line, borders should be understood as a series of practices. This move entails a more political, sociological, and actor-oriented outlook on how divisions between entities appear, or are produced and sustained (Parker & Vaughan-Williams, 2009).

The single word border conceals a multiplicity and implies constancy where genealogical investigation uncovers mutation and descent (Walters, 2011, p.138). Individual borders have their own specific histories, and the policies designed to defend them are shaped by local as well as global factors. As Pratt (2005, p.185) reminds us: “The border is an ongoing accomplishment, yet the processes by which it is continually produced are erased by its apparent self-evidence”. In an influential essay titled “What Is a Border?” Etienne Balibar writes of the “polysemy” and “heterogeneity” of borders, noting that their multiplicity, their hypothetical and fictive nature does not make them any less real

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27 (Balibar, 2002, p.76). According to Balibar, borders are always overdetermined, meaning that no political border is ever the mere boundary between two states, but is always sanctioned, reduplicated and relativized by other geopolitical divisions (Balibar, 2002, p.79). But aside from its geographical, political, and juridical dimensions, the concept of the border has an important symbolic dimension, which has come to the fore with the multiplication of the tensions that invest the classically modern configuration of the border as a separating line between sovereign state territories.

Borders serve as important sites for examining transformations of sovereign power because they represent one characteristic of the modern state. By establishing a territorial boundary and exercising control over movement across it, state practices define and help constitute itself as an entity (Mitchell, 1991, p.94). National borders have become increasingly detached from sovereign territory as the late modern state expresses its power to control entry both within and beyond its territorial limits (Weber & Pickering, 2011, p.4). Contemporary borders can be thought of as complex performances of state power staged at multiple locations. It can be argued that states continue to be the main stakeholders in emerging border regimes (Mezzandra & Nielson 2013, Chalfin 2006). Nevertheless they are increasingly (although differently in different parts of the world) confronted with an elusive environment of governance, within which a multiplicity of stakeholders play crucial and not always predictable roles. Because borders are sites where multiple governmental actors come into play, they represent an important site for examining alternative or additional modalities of statehood. Borders are becoming finely tuned instruments for managing, calibrating, and governing global passages of people, money, and things. Thus, far from serving simply to block or obstruct global flows,

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28 borders have become essential devices for their articulation (Mezzadra & Nielson, 2013, p.3). They are undergoing complex transformations that correspond to what Saskia Sassen (2007, p.214) has called “the actual and heuristic disaggregation of ‘the border”. In so doing, borders have not just proliferated. They also went through process of heterogenization (Mezzadra & Nielson, 2013, p.3).

Balibar argues that the theorist who attempts to define what a border is in danger of going round in circles, as the very representation of the border is the precondition for any definition (Balibar, 2002, p.76). Thus, my intention is not to define or find the answer to the question of what is a border, but rather to understand how it is imagined and narrated. Employing the border-as-process approach developed by critical borders studies, I will examine how borders are constructed in narratives of people whose job is the management of borders. This approach helps avoid the trap of reifying borders because it insists on viewing the border as an ongoing project.

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3. Analysis of ethnographic data

The following part will dive into the analysis of the empirical data collected during the fieldwork. I will use the findings to answer the research questions I proposed in the introduction. In order to answer these questions, this part will be structured according to the three subsections. In the first subsection I will analyze how customs officers in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina perceive transformations of customs work caused by technological and organizational changes. In the second subsection I will focus on how my informants imagine and talk about borders. Finally, in the last subsection I investigate how two tropes about Yugoslavia and shady business were used in stories of customs officers to say something about the state. It is important to note that there were no differences between narratives of Serbian and Bosnian customs officers. Thus, analysis is organized according to topics that were reiterated by customs officers.

3.1. Technological and organizational change of customs work

As I have already mentioned, the policing of cross-border trade has undergone a veritable transformation in many countries (see Cote Boucher 2015, Chaflin 2007). These changes include using new technologies for policing of goods and reorganization of customs work. In the case of Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, changes in operations of customs are even more pronounced than in other places given the fact that these states were socialist republics of the same country, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The change of political and social system enforced changes of borders and the policing of the borders. However, customs officers have not only been at the receiving end of technological and organizational change (Cote-Boucher, 2015, p.4).

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30 Customs officers actively negotiate and engage with these transformations. In this section, I will discuss how customs officers envisioned the purpose and nature of their work in the context of technological and organizational changes.

Some of these changes could be understood by taking into account William Walters's insights about mobile worlds. Walters states that mobile worlds are open worlds, but this openness, i.e. this form of freedom that is associated with the political construction of extended social and economic spaces renders them vulnerable (Walters, 2004a, p.245). The danger is posed by the proliferation of illicit and clandestine mobilities—the movement of “illegal” immigrants, drugs, biohazards, contraband, weapons, terrorists,

and so on. This concern with clandestine movement is evident in the stories of customs officers whom I interviewed. Elaborating why customs work is important, Zoran, who is currently working on the Serbian-Bosnian border, said:

Primarily, customs is important because of security. On the one hand you need to protect the state against terrorism. There are dangerous materials, drugs and weapons which terrorists could use. On the other hand you need to protect the health of its citizens.

I would like to make two points here. First, if we see securitization as pervasive throughout society as Choutin (2014, p.3) suggests, we could see how the reasoning of these customs officers reflects it. Williams explains securitization as a social process through which issues become “securitized”, treated as security issues, through these

speech-acts which do not simply describe an existing security situation, but bring it into being as a security situation by successfully representing it as such (Williams, 2003, p.513). I do not want to speculate whether customs officers really believed that their duty is protection of the state against terrorism. Following Walters, my argument is that

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31 through describing the importance of their duties primarily in terms of security, customs officers discursively constructed the security issue as a social problem. Not only did customs officers discursively construct security as social problem, they also legitimized their work through the discourse of security.

Another point that I would like to highlight is that the customs officers perceived potential threats as threats to the society and the state. Ole Waever and his colleagues speak of “societal security” emphasizing that the focus of insecurity has shifted from the geopolitical space of interstate relations to the threats to society itself (Waever, 1996). In Zoran’s quote we could see that the potential threats are not coming from other states.

The focus is put on the threats to society and state coming from dangerous goods and terrorists who could use those dangerous goods.

In helping fight these threats, technology was often mentioned as very important. Various electronic devices and gadgets have been introduced into the work of the customs officers. These devices include different scanners for the goods, optic cameras, Geiger counters, etc. Most of the customs officers praised the technological advances, claiming that it made their jobs easier. As an interviewee put it:

Technology progressed, informational systems progressed, electronic devices too, and all of that helped in carrying out security measures. There are devices for scanning the goods, optic cables, so that we don’t need to open every truck on the border. I have an

optic camera which I can use to examine goods on the border and make the flow of goods faster.

From this quote we could see that customs authorities need to strike a balance between the dual mandates of facilitation and trade on the one hand and control and security on

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32 the other. We find these modes of governance in combination, operating in tandem, and also in tension with each other. As Branko, who is currently working at a customs outpost in one city in the north of Serbia, told me:

We have those new scanners, they are very dangerous. And they don’t even tell us that they are dangerous. You can get really sick if you use them. They are also very complicated for using sometimes. Sometimes they make procedures very long. So you need to choose: you're either gonna make the flow of goods faster or control it. But let’s be honest, you can’t control everything. Nevertheless, what you control – you reaaally control.

This answer does not only illustrate tensions between the facilitation and the control of goods, but also changes in customs oversight. Customs substitutes one sort of oversight — knowing generally and vastly — for knowing deeply and specifically. The goods that are checked are going through serious controls. What emerges here is a new way of looking “over” — a gaze much more lateral than vertical, further confounding the

conventions of governmental oversight (cf. Ferguson & Gupta, 2002).

Customs work has not been transformed only because of the new technological devices that customs officers use, but also by introducing new computer and informational systems. I would argue that way more than scanners or optic cables, new computer networks changed the customs border management and opened up new possibilities in facilitation of border controls. I would like to list two ethnographic examples that could support that argument.

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33 During the interview Zoran took my notebook and started drawing the organizational structure of customs administration in Serbia. In the smallest circles he put the names of different border crossings, he linked them to bigger circles in which he wrote names of customs outposts (he linked each border crossing with the customs outpost under which jurisdiction it was). In the central and the biggest circle he wrote customs administration and HOST. When I asked him to specify what HOST is, he told me that it is a computer network which connects all customs outposts and customs offices. According to him, HOST makes all documentation regarding customs easily available for the control. This created a sense that not only technology made the flow of goods easy and simple to control, but also strengthened the control of customs work. As one of his colleagues put it:

The informational system is connected on the state level. I need to use my personal password and number to log into the system. I need to put in the information about what I have done during my shift: how many cars or trucks I checked, what I checked, what I found. All of that needs to be available to my superiors.

In addition, information technology created possibilities for the new form of governing at a distance. By using and increasingly relying on information technologies, Serbian and Bosnian customs administrations entered a period of restructuring based on a customs-at-a-distance model. During the preliminary interview, I had an opportunity to have a glimpse into how the informational system works. As Dane showed me, all the information needs to be received before the arrival of trains at the border. The introduction of electronic declarations in customs work transformed everyday work routines. ‘Commercial’ officers now spend several hours a day in front of computer

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34 screens, reviewing customs declarations. Although increasing the scope of customs’ power, this is very much a form of government at a distance (Chaflin, 2007, p.1615). The pre-arrival information requirement extends customs’ authority outward in time and space as importers are made responsible to customs even before goods reach the borders. Here, the bounds of customs’ authority are enlarged, moving beyond the territory of the state, even as customs officers remain within it.

After explaining to me how the informational system works, Dane told me:

It is a very good system. We sold this system to the Dutch customs and to someone else, I can’t remember to whom. But I think it functions better there than here.

These comments indicate that border management is turned into a commodified service within market economy. What we have here is the transformation of sovereignty – specifically sovereignty service wrapped into an e-customs product – into an alienable and transactable commodity (cf. Chaflin, 2006, p. 260). When talking about similar programs being developed and later sold in the case of Senegal, Chaflin states that the state of origin, in the course of transferring a component of its own sovereign capacitation, takes on a multinational corporate form (Chaflin, 2006, p. 258). The means of making a state sovereignty emerge as fungible entities whose value is realized in the course of exchange and deliberately produced by a state for the transfer to other states for profit (Chaflin, 2006, p. 258).

Technology has not only influenced the border management on the borders inscribed on maps, it also caused the proliferation of border controls in other places, such as post offices. One of the Bosnian customs officers whom I interviewed, told me:

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35 I was working at the post office too. You have customs controls in all the major post offices. Of course, you are not supposed to open letters or look at postcards. But you need to open packages. Nowadays, more and more people order stuff online, you need to control it. You can’t control everything on the border and now technology created

opportunities to do it somewhere else. So we have these new x-ray machines, assessments of chemical compositions that enable customs control in post offices.

In addition to border controls established in the post offices, new customs laboratories have been established. If customs officers are unsure or suspicious about the chemical compositions of the goods, they send it to a laboratory where it is thoroughly examined.

While writing about the proliferation of borders was mostly in context of migration regimes (cf. Mezzadra & Nielson, 2013), we could see that borders also proliferated in context of customs regimes. It is not that only people who try to cross borders that encounter new forms of border control, it happens to goods as well. Mezzadra and Nielson argue that borders not only proliferated, but that they also went through the process of heterogenization (Mezzadra & Nielson, 2013, p.3). Far more than we are witnessing proliferation of borders of new sovereign states, as we could see in the case of former Yugoslavia, we are witnessing the proliferation of new forms of border controls. As the two examples about the customs control in post offices and customs laboratories show, border controls not only appeared at new places, e.g. proliferated, they are also taking new forms.

Customs work has not been changed only due to technological advances, but also because of reorganization of the service. After the war and the dissolution of SFR Yugoslavia,

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36 Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina have established their own national customs administrations. Consequently, new national customs laws were introduced. Speaking about these changes Dane, who works at the Serbian-Hungarian border, told me:

Well, customs law changed, border controls changed according to the new law. Customs law is changing depending on the position of the state. Before we had one principle. If the state is liberal, then the border controls are more liberal. If the organization of state is stricter, then the border controls are stricter. In accordance with the changes in the state, the border controls are changing.

While in some cases the changes in customs work were perceived as a result of the influence of trans- and supranational organizations (Chaflin, 2007), for customs officers whom I interviewed these changes were the results of changes in the state system primarily. According to the new laws customs service and work had been reorganized. Sloba, a retired customs officer, told me:

In Yugoslavia everyone was doing everything. Every customs officer was checking goods, checking documentation, conducting investigations against smuggling and so on. But later I changed multiple positions. I was customs supervisor, inspector against smuggling, I was reviewing documents.

The new laws also introduced new branches of customs such as protection of intellectual property, customs investigations, risk analysis and internal controls. Although some of the initial changes were the result of the changes in the state system, such as protection of private property, I would argue that the subsequent changes were the result of influences of various supra- and transnational organizations. Customs operations are being

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37 synchronized with wider transnational trends. Customs is responsible for implementing the accords of an array of supra- and international organizations, ranging from the World Customs Organization (WCO) to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Health Organization (WHO). Both Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina are also partners in numerous bilateral customs and trade agreements. To become familiar with globally sanctioned procedures, Customs officers at all levels of the service commonly participated in international initiatives. In order to make customs officers familiar with the new procedures and organizational structures of customs various lectures and seminars were organized for them. These seminars and lectures were held by representatives of organizations to whose standards Serbian and Bosnian customs were supposed to comply. International protocols were very much perceived by customs officers to demonstrate their membership in a supranational order and to legitimate the state authority. Srdjan, who is currently working at a customs outpost, told me:

Our customs administration is a signatory of cooperation [agreements] with different national customs administrations and international organizations. We need to follow procedures that they prescribe. If the World Customs Organization changes tariff numbers of certain goods, we need to accept that. If the state wants to function it needs to follow other states and organizations.

As we can see from Srdjan’s quote, standardized forms of practices serve as a language

of recognition between states. In addition, we could also see that while upholding the authority of the state, customs administration have come to depend on supranational and transnational regulatory orders for the standards they pursue. Here, the authority of the

State and border imaginaries and transformation of customs work : analysis of narratives of customs officers in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina