Dissenting Consciousness: A Socio-Legal Analysis of Russian Migration Cases before the European Court of Human Rights

This paper conceptualizes dissenting consciousness based on a qualitative case study of migrants’ and human rights lawyers’ everyday experiences of pursuing claims before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) from Russia. Dissent as a theoretical concept is traced to judicial literature and modern social conflict theories. Dissenting consciousness heuristically captures a degree of agency rooted in the critique of law as illegitimate, yet short of active resistance. Drawing on recent developments around ‘under the law’ legal consciousness, disempowerment, and legal alienation, this perspective comes useful to unpack the ‘negative diagonal’ between ‘isolation/fatalism and the dissenting collectivism’, as core to this orientation of legality. Dissenting consciousness of migrants-litigants airs voices of challenge to the mainstream just as the subversive stories told by the past applicants and lawyers before the Strasbourg Court inject subtle heterodoxy into the legal process

The lawyers as guardians of the case file: on human-material encounters in immigration law in Russia

This paper looks at the human rights and immigration lawyers in Russia inspired by the approach that embraces both human and non-human objects in shaping the everyday experiences of the law. Drawing on five months ethnographic fieldwork in Russian legal aid NGOs that represent asylum seekers and interviews with the immigration lawyers who worked there, this paper casts more light on the file-based model of delivering justice, whereby refugees and their stories cannot be constructed differently than through the materiality of the case file. This paper argues that the specific relationship between the immigration lawyers and their clients’ case files has not developed in a vacuum, but can be traced back to the traditions of the legal profession in Russia. It is also illustrative of three specific traits of the broader Russian legal culture: legal formalism, the inconsistency of the legal process and the hyperbolic reality-mediating function attached to documentary evidence

Can statelessness be legally productive? The struggle for the rights of noncitizens in Russia

Nearly 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, there are still people who have never in their lives held any passport other than that of the Soviet Union. They are de jure stateless. However, their statelessness can also be legally productive if strategically challenged. This legal productivity arises from the mobilization of human rights protections embedded in de jure statelessness by local legal actors in a given, national immigration context, and extending them to secure the rights of de facto stateless: undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. I illustrate this using a case study of the recent litigation for the rights of Mr Mskhiladze – a stateless person born in the Georgian USSR – before the Russian Constitutional Court (2017) and the European Court of Human Rights (2018). Conceptually, my paper testifies to a productive relationship between a de jure and de facto statelessness in the post-Soviet context

Efficiency of WLAN 802.11xx in the multi-hop topology

The article presents the research results of the performance of wireless multi-hop networks. The analysis of the decrease in performance of such networks depending on the number of hops was performed for three popular transmission techniques used in mesh networks: Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (default routing protocol for 802.11s), Optimized Link State Routing Protocol and Wireless Distribution System. Based on the measurements results, mathematical models for the decreasing of network transmission parameters depending on the number of hops were developed

Migration systems, pioneers and the role of agency

The notion of a migration system is often invoked but it is rarely clearly defined or conceptualized. De Haas has recently provided a powerful critique of the current literature highlighting some important flaws that recur through it. In particular, migration systems tend to be identified as fully formed entities, and there is no theorization as to how they come into being. Moreover, there is no explanation of how they change in time, in particular how they come to decline. The inner workings – the mechanics – which drive such changes are not examined. Such critiques of migration systems relate to wider critiques of the concept of systems in the broader social science literature, where they are often presented as black boxes in which human agency is largely excluded. The challenge is how to theorize the mechanics by which the actions of people at one time contribute to the emergence of systemic linkages at a later time. This paper focuses on the genesis of migration systems and the notion of pioneer migration. It draws attention both to the role of particular individuals, the pioneers, and also the more general activity of pioneering which is undertaken by many migrants. By disentangling different aspects of agency, it is possible to develop hypotheses about how the emergence of migrations systems is related to the nature of the agency exercised by different pioneers or pioneering activities in different contexts.migration systems, agency, emergence, pioneer migrants, migrant networks, social capital