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.
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 Russias Central Asian Labour
Migrants
2. Driving in the Shadows: RuralUrban 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 wont 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
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
