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.

Rano Turaeva is a senior scholar affiliated with the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich and an associated senior researcher at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle Saale in Germany Rustamjon Urinboyev is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology of Law at Lund University and Senior Researcher in Russian and Eurasian Studies in the Aleksanteri Institute at University of Helsinki

Introduction: Labour, Mobilities and Informal Practices in Transnational and Digital Spaces Part I Labour in times of uncertainty 1. The Struggle for Formal Work: The Everyday Experiences of Russia's Central Asian Labour Migrants 2. Driving in the Shadows: Rural-Urban Labour Migrants as Informal Taxi Drivers in Post-Socialist Tashkent 3. Deportation Regimes in the Post-Soviet Space: Producing Deportable Migrants in the Russian Federation 4. The Migration Infrastructure of Posting: Transnational informality Part II Mobility as blurring national, transnational and digital boundaries 5. Smartphone Transnationalism in Non-Western Migration Regimes: Transnational Ethnography of Uzbek Migrant Workers in Russia 6. Central Asian Female Migrants' Transnational Social Spaces: Straddling Illegality and Tradition 7. Spiritual Mobility: Alternative Healing Practices amongst Central Asian Migrants in Moscow 8. Roadsides of Mobility: Informal Socioeconomic Strategies in Suburban Western Poland Part III: Informality as state practice dealing with mobility 9. Symbolic State Imagery. Informal State Practice. 10. Informal Practices and the Rule of Law: Russia, Migration and the Arctic Route 11. Ask us decently, and we won't reject anybody!' - Providing Informal Healthcare in a Kazakh Medical Space 12. Dual-citizenship, two-fold informality: the interstices of state power and transnational lives amongst Meskhetian returnees in Georgia