Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes : Navigating the Legal Landscape in Russia

While migration has become an all-important topic of discussion around the globe, mainstream literature on migrants' legal adaptation and integration has focused on case studies of immigrant communities in Western-style democracies. We know relatively little about how migrants adapt to a new legal environment in the ever-growing hybrid political regimes that are neither clearly democratic nor conventionally authoritarian. This book takes up the case of Russia—an archetypal hybrid political regime and the third largest recipients of migrants worldwide—and investigates how Central Asian migrant workers produce new forms of informal governance and legal order. Migrants use the opportunities provided by a weak rule-of-law and a corrupt political system to navigate the repressive legal landscape and to negotiate—using informal channels—access to employment and other opportunities that are hard to obtain through the official legal framework of their host country. This lively ethnography presents new theoretical perspectives for studying immigrant legal incorporation in similar political contexts.Peer reviewe

Corruption in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

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Smartphone Transnationalism in Non-Western Migration Regimes : Transnational Ethnography of Uzbek Migrant Workers in Russia

There is an extensive research that explores the reproduction of transnational communities and relations, with a particular focus on locality, identity and culture. However, the existing research emanates from the case studies of immigrant communities in Western-type democracies, while we know little about migrant transnationalism in non-Western migration regimes such as Russia, where migrant workers are subjected to numerous human rights abuses and cannot publicly and overtly engage in transnational practices. Moreover, the role of new media, such as smartphones and social media, in migrant transnationalism remains under-researched. Given the socio-political and cultural differences between Western and post-Soviet societies, we cannot assume that the methodological tools and theoretical perspectives developed in Western contexts are necessarily applicable to Russia, where the repressive socio-political environment, the lack of democratic culture and arbitrary law enforcement leave little room for migrant legalization, transnational activism and collective mobilization. The above considerations inform my position in this chapter, which is intended to contribute to the debates on migrant transnationalism and informality literature in two distinct ways. I present the results of extensive multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in Moscow, Russia, and Ferghana region, Uzbekistan. My case study looks at Uzbek migrants in Moscow and their families and communities in Shabboda village in Ferghana. Unlike in Western countries, where migrants establish relatively functional transnational communities, there is little in the way of ‘Uzbek transnational community’ in Russia due to the restrictive legal environment and anti-migrant sentiment. Even though Uzbek migrants’ transnational activism is hardly visible in public places, I argue that rapid improvements in communication technologies (e.g. smartphones and social media) have enabled Uzbek migrants to stay in touch with their home societies, as well as create permanent, smartphone-based translocal communities in Moscow, usually centred around migrants who hail from the same mahalla or village in Uzbekistan. The existence of this smartphone-based transnational environment helps migrants cope with the challenges of musofirchilik (being alien) and avoid or manoeuver around structural constraints such as complicated residence registration and work permit rules, social exclusion, racism and the lack of social security.Peer reviewe

Islamic legal culture in Uzbekistan

There was a widespread euphoria in the 1990s that introducing Western-style legal institutions and traditions would play a pivotal role in promoting the rule of law and democratization in post-Soviet societies. Like other post-Soviet states, Uzbekistan has become a ‘laboratory’ for testing various global (Western) good governance and rule of law initiatives. As a result of these interventions, Uzbekistan’s legal system represents a peculiar blend of Western and Soviet legal cultures: Western” from the “law in books” perspective (when we analyze its written laws and regulations) and “Soviet” from the “law in action” perspective (when observing how laws are applied and enacted by state institutions and officials). However, one dormant but highly salient legal order overlooked in the literature on Uzbekistan is the legacy of Islamic legal culture. With this in mind, this article explores the legacy and context of Islamic legal culture in Uzbekistan. I argue that the more the focus moves from state-centered understandings of law to ethnographic analyses of everyday life and micro-level social processes and structures, the more it becomes discernible that Islam serves as a legal order in Uzbekistan. These processes will be explored through the ethnographic study of mahallas (neighborhood communities) in Ferghana, Uzbekistan

Ethnicity, Migration and Digital Labour: Mobile Phone Technology Use Among Uzbek Migrants

Smartphones and social media have become inextricable parts of our daily lives. The everyday lives and communication practices of migrant workers are particularly affected by these global technological developments. Such global developmental trends are especially visible within the growing body of scholarly literature on migrant transnationalism and technology, where mobile phones are examined as central drivers of migrant transnationalism. However, the bulk of the existing literature on “migration and mobile phone technology” focuses on the case studies of immigrant communities living in Western democracies (e.g., the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia). Given the socio-political and cultural differences between Western and post-Soviet contexts, we cannot assume that theoretical insights and tools developed in Western contexts are fully applicable in the Russian context. The Russian context provides intriguing insights to “migration and mobile phone technology” debates given its undemocratic regime, xenophobic environment, corrupt legal system, and draconian immigration laws and policies that leave little room for migrant transnational activism and collective mobilisation. Notwithstanding these structural barriers and xenophobic environment, migrants in Russia are resilient actors and have developed alternative coping strategies by producing smartphone-mediated transnational communities and identities, usually centered around migrants who hail from the same village and community. Accordingly, within the Russian context, smartphones and social media serve not merely to maintain daily transnational communication (i.e., being “here” and “there”), but, more importantly, represent tools for building a tight-knit community and are crucial to migrants’ daily survival and livelihoods in a repressive and xenophobic environment. These processes encompass not only coping strategies and communicative practices that take place within the migrant labour market (“outside world”) but also touch upon the lives of migrants serving prison sentences in Russia’s penal institutions (“inside world”). In this sense, smartphones provide a virtual platform for various risk-stretching activities and establishing social safety nets otherwise unavailable from the migrants’ home and host countries

Local Government in Uzbekistan

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