Profiting from help

This article ethnographically explores the widespread practices of guarantorship in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in order to investigate the persisting practices and rhetoric of mutual, private help that support value extraction in postwar financialization. Approaching warfare as an accelerating mechanism for neoliberal restructuring in the country, it addresses the structural transformations by which wartime dependence on transnational humanitarianism has been replaced by postwar dependance on loans provided by foreign multinational banks. In this framework, “financialized vernacular humanitarianism” is interpreted as an essential strategy that enables banks to access a vast postwar subprime market. Furthermore, this strategy reproduces a hierarchical form of governance and situated extraction through which finance seeks to profit from global warring and other social emergencies caused by crises of contemporary capitalism.