ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |16 pages

Introduction

Labour, mobilities and informal practices in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe
Size: 0.34 MB

part I|70 pages

Labour in times of uncertainty

chapter 1|17 pages

The struggle for formal work

The everyday experiences of Russia's Central Asian labour migrants
Size: 0.34 MB

chapter 2|15 pages

Driving in the shadows

Rural–urban labour migrants as informal taxi drivers in post-socialist Tashkent
Size: 0.32 MB

chapter 3|18 pages

Deportation regimes in the post-Soviet space

Producing deportable migrants in the Russian Federation
Size: 0.39 MB

chapter 4|18 pages

The migration infrastructure of posting

Transnational informality
Size: 0.43 MB

part II|86 pages

Mobility as blurring national, transnational and digital boundaries

chapter 5|25 pages

Smartphone transnationalism in non-Western migration regimes

Transnational ethnography of Uzbek migrant workers in Russia
Size: 0.43 MB

chapter 6|19 pages

Central Asian female migrants' transnational social spaces

Straddling illegality and tradition
Size: 0.40 MB

chapter 7|16 pages

Spiritual mobility

Alternative healing practices amongst Central Asian migrants in Moscow
Size: 0.38 MB

chapter 8|24 pages

Roadsides of mobility

Informal socioeconomic strategies in suburban western Poland
Size: 0.43 MB

part III|76 pages

Informality as state practice dealing with mobility

Size: 0.40 MB

chapter 10|22 pages

Informal practices and the rule of law

Russia, migration and the ‘Arctic route’
Size: 0.74 MB

chapter 11|18 pages

‘Ask us decently and then we will not reject anyone!’

Providing informal healthcare in a Kazakh medical space
Size: 0.41 MB

chapter 12|17 pages

Dual citizenship and twofold informality

The interstices of state power and transnational lives amongst Meskhetian returnees in Georgia
Size: 0.36 MB