Labour Mobility And Informal Practices In Russia Central Asia And Eastern Europe

This book explores the daily survival strategies of people within the context of failed states, flourishing informal economies, legal uncertainty, increased mobility, and globalization, where many people, who are forced by the circumstances to be innovative and transnational, have found their niches outside formal processes and structures. The book provides a thorough theoretical introduction to the link between labour mobility and informality and comprises convincing case studies from a wide range of post-socialist countries. Overall, it highlights the importance of trust, transnational networks, and digital technologies in settings where the rules governing economic and social activities of mobile workers are often unclear and flexible.

This open access book contributes new theoretical and comparative insights on migrant agency, undocumentedness and informality in non-Western, non-democratic migration regimes. The book is conceived as a critical reflection on the contemporary migration regime scholarship, and, more generally, on comparative migration studies, which primarily focus on migrants’ experiences and immigration policies in the context of liberal democracies in North America and Western Europe. Addressing this gap is particularly important when considering the fact that many new migration hubs are nondemocratic, which in turn requires us to revise or produce new frameworks of analysis beyond existing and dominant Western-centric migration regime typologies. This book takes up the case study of Central Asian migrants in Russia and Turkey--two archetypal non-Western, nondemocratic regimes and key migration hotspots worldwide--and investigates how migration governance outcomes are shaped by the informal power geometries and extralegal processes in physical and digital landscapes in which migrant workers, employers, middlemen, landlords, street world actors and street-level bureaucrats negotiate the contemporary migration system. This lively ethnography presents new empirical material, a comparative perspective and methodological tools for studying migrants’ experiences and migration governance processes in non-Western migration regimes. Rustam Urinboyev is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology of Law at Lund University, Sweden and Senior Researcher in Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Finland. Sherzod Eraliev is Academy of Finland postdoctoral fellow at Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, Finland.

The book outlines post-Soviet style of health management in Central Asia. Regional studies on Central Asia to date have focused on states, politics, religion and inter-ethnic relations but not on the health system within the region. Soviet-style policies have also covered only other aspects relevant for the region. This book highlights the public health situation of the region with a focus on drug abuse, HIV/AIDS in the context of increased mobility, and drug trafficking routes which became even more porous after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Based on a qualitative study, the empirical data in the book was collected during long-term fieldwork conducted in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan in 2010-2011 as well as shorter stays in Uzbekistan between 2012-2016. The analysis of the empirical material largely draws on the works of Foucault, particularly his concept of biopolitics when analyzing Soviet-style health management that is still practiced in the region. Applying the Foucauldian genealogical method, this study has been structured to trace the genealogy of epidemics to understand the historical path of drug abuse in the region as well as the discursive genealogy of drug politics and drug abuse. Applying the same genealogical method of Foucault, the formative and discursive trajectory of the institution of Uchyot was traced to contextualize the health governance methods that have historical legacy of Soviet-style governance and control of the total population. Drugs and Public Health in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Soviet-Style Health Management is a unique resource for academic specialists, practitioners/professionals, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students in public health, as well as a range of scholars and professionals in sociology, political science, anthropology, and anyone with an interest in the Central Asia region, drug addiction, or HIV. The book also could appeal to international donors in the field of HIV/drug addiction who are working in the region.

For a post-human hitchhiker, human life – with its anxiety, ageing, illness and constant need for problem-solving – may look unviable. Yet, for humans, the life struggle is softened by human touch, human emotion and human cooperation. The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3 continues the journey of the two previous volumes into the world’s open secrets, unwritten rules and hidden practices. It focuses on issues of emotional ambivalence and pressures of the digital age. The informal practices presented in this volume demonstrate the urgency of alleviating tensions between continuity and all-too-rapid change and the need to tackle the central problem of modern societies – uncertainty. The volume takes a reader on a ‘biographical’ journey through elusive, taken-for-granted or banal ways of getting things done from over 70 countries and world regions. It offers innovative understanding of the significance of fringes, and challenges the assumption that informality is associated exclusively with poverty, underdevelopment, the Global South, oppressive regimes or the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It also maps the patterns of informality around the globe; identifies specific informal practices in a context-sensitive way; and documents their ambivalent impact on people engaged in problem-solving, on societies in which these problems arise, and on humanity overall. Praise for The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3 ‘This book tells a story of human cooperation. It is not the narrative you’ll find in books teaching you how to solve problems. It is an assemblage of something much more endemic, fundamentally human, and much more pervasive than we tend to think of informality. It involves money and power, but also the alternative currencies of gaining advantage or gaming the system.’ Bruce Schneier, author of A Hacker's Mind ‘Alena Ledeneva’s latest database of rule bending is a goldmine for documentary makers and storytellers. Entries from 70 countries, covering a human lifespan from Chinese “anchor babies” to funeral feasts in Azerbaijan, offer remarkable insights into the way the world really works.’ Lucy Ash, journalist

This book presents a new perspective on how Russia projects itself to the world. Distancing itself from familiar, agency-driven International Relations accounts that focus on what ‘the Kremlin’ is up to and why, it argues for the need to pay attention to deeper, trans-state processes over which the Kremlin exerts much less control. Especially important in this context is mediatization, defined as the process by which contemporary social and political practices adopt a media form and follow media-driven logics. In particular, the book emphasizes the logic of the feedback loop or ‘recursion’, showing how it drives multiple Russian performances of national belonging and nation projection in the digital era. It applies this theory to recent issues, events, and scandals that have played out in international arenas ranging from television, through theatre, film, and performance art, to warfare.

This book examines how Russia’s entrepreneurs operate in a business environment beset with risk and uncertainty. The challenges they may encounter include an unreliable judicial system, insecure property rights, arbitrary interference from officials, as well as corruption, harassment, suspicion and violence. Based on extensive original research, including fieldwork within three businesses, this book explores how entrepreneurs survive and some thrive. It focuses on the kind of obstacles they face from day to day, details their motivations, rationale and methods, and describes the actual relationship between ordinary entrepreneurs and the state, providing new insights into business-state relations.

This book examines why, when the conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014, fighting broke out in the Donets’k region, whereas it did not in Kharkiv city, despite the city, like the Donets’k region, being geographically proximate to Russia and similar in ethnic and linguistic make up. Based on extensive original research, the book argues that a key factor was the nature and behaviour of local elites, with those in Kharkiv having diffuse ties to the centre and therefore being more capable of adapting to sudden, profound regime change at the centre, whereas the elites in the Donets’k region had much more concentrated ties to the centre, were dependent on one network, and therefore were much less able to cope with change. The book thereby demonstrates how crucial for Ukraine are patronal politics, patronage networks, and informal centre-region relations, and that it was these local political circumstances, rather than Russia, which brought about the conflict.

In the last twenty-five years, the explosive rise of car mobility has transformed street life in postsocialist cities. Whereas previously the social fabric of these cities ran on socialist modes of mobility, they are now overtaken by a culture of privately owned cars. If Cars Could Walk uses ethnographic cases studies documenting these changes in terms of street interaction, vehicles used, and the parameters of speed, maneuverability, and cultural and symbolic values. The altered reality of people’s movements, replacing public transport, bicycles and other former ‘socialist’ modes of mobility with privatized mobility reflect an evolving political and cultural imagination, which in turn shapes their current political reality.