Charting how Turkish people - both within and outside the state bureaucracy - attempt to personalise the impersonality of the state, this elegant, nuanced ethnography will cause scholars of state institutions across a broad range of disciplines radically to rethink what the entity called 'the state' actually is, the relations that create it, and to acknowledge its materiality, thus taking understandings of the state to an entirely new level.

Located in the world of a former collective farm in Estonia, Sigrid Rausing's book describes the changing identity of the Swedish speaking minority in Estonia under pre-Soviet and Soviet rule, its new post-Soviet dependence on Sweden, and its current attempt to restore a Swedish cultural identity.

This book focuses on the seamy side of market economy in Lithuania and shows how a "market" only becomes established by people, sacrifices, and contestation. It gives a vivid picture of the hardship of the first new entrepreneurs creating the new market economies by travelling to China, Turkey, Poland, and India to buy merchandise for resale, and shows how their ideas slowly develop into more established routines in a more stable market.