“Because I Have a Hookup”

This chapter evaluates complex and seemingly contradictory cheating discourses and practices as a lens through which to approach youth's enactments and performances of sovereign agency and (anti-)citizenship in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Cheating practices and discourses should be interpreted as twofold. They constitute a powerful critique of and distancing from the Bosnian “democratic predicament,” a democracy gone wrong. At the same time, they are a historically and socially situated desire for incorporation into the corrupt state. Bosnian student cheaters often described their cheating savvy, purchasing of exams, and use of veze (connections) as a way to be “sovereign.” This is a context saturated with disillusionment, mistrust, corruption, and discontent. As a result, the focus on cheating as sovereign agency shows how the state, however “empty,” becomes operative in part through the affective registers of students' duplicitousness.