Dreams of wealth: finance and dystopia in the European periphery

Abstract

Materialized by the ten-year urban expansion known as Skopje 2014, launched and guided by Nikola Gruevski (exiled since 2018), financial expansion gave to most North Macedonian construction workers debts leading to a slow social death. Drawing on rich ethnographic, historic and economic data, Mattioli chronicles the financial disenchantment of male construction workers of the company Construx. The book is an important contribution to a broad number of disciplines focused on the conversations engaged between the EU, finance and authoritarian regimes in peripheral European countries.