Ethnographies of the post-Yugoslav region often focus on the production of the ‘state effect’ through narratives of statelessness, namely on the normative imagination evident in the yearnings for ‘normal life’. Drawing from fieldwork research in various after-sites of ‘Zastava’ industrial complex in Kragujevac - from car enthusiasts to the newly unemployed - I explore how such entrenched discursive tropes transform in a context of chronic superfluity in the job market and reliance on the state as the new interventionist hegemon. My interlocutors shared a belief that a significant positive change could only come from the ‘state’, while simultaneously agreeing that those who were excluded from that state were more morally fit to impersonate its key functions than the very statesmen and bureaucrats were. Turning moral superiority into a distributional claim, they described themselves not only as deserving, but as materially valuable for the state. This process elucidates a new hegemonic framework currently reshaping the Serbian welfare apparatus and social actors’ pragmatic adaptations to it.
