Abel Polese

Between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ temperatures: introducing a complication to the hot and cold ethnicity theory from Odessa

The end of the cold war prompted most of the former Soviet republics to face ethnic issues that had remained latent or intangible for decades. Whilst some ethnic groups were actively campaigning for their rights, some others seemed uninterested in being represented politically. The recent theory of hot and cold ethnicity has been conceived to explain modalities of ethnolinguistic vitality so to identify a pattern and reasons behind activism of an ethnic group in contrast with another. This paper engages with the debate in two ways. First, it questions how to measure ethnolinguistic vitality in order to get a picture that reckons not only with official narratives of a state but also gives an idea of how things are happening in practice. Second, it tries to answer the question by presenting a case study based on the city of Odessa. It will be suggested that informal policies, and informal engagement with policies, may be as relevant as formal ones and have an equally important impact. This paper advocates for a broader, and more inclusive, approach to data collection and analysis. This, in the end, will contribute to a better understanding of what ethnolinguistic vitality of a group means.

Strategies of legitimation in Central Asia: regime durability in Turkmenistan

ABSTRACT Located in current debates on one party dictatorships and regime durability, this article explores continuity and disruptions within the Turkmen political elite in their transition from presidents Saparmurat Niyazov (1991–2006) to Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov (2007-). We are particularly interested in how the change from an idiosyncratic system, based mainly on president Niyazovs personality cult and visible repression of potential opponents, evolved into a more refined system under his successor, Berdymuhamedov. We will thus look at regime efforts to re-brand Turkmenistan without substantially changing the domestic political structures and dynamics. These include the manufacture of ‘opposition parties’ and holding of formal elections every five years while retaining absolute control over the most important political aspects of the country. We suggest the existence of a two-fold strategy to maintain the status quo based on authoritarian tendencies and learning. Whilst the shift from the first to the second president has brought significant changes, it also demonstrates essential continuities that helped the formation of an official domestic and international narrative proclaiming commitment to a number of international standards and national values; and strict control of most, if not all, aspects of national political life.

Introduction: Informality and power in the South Caucasus

ABSTRACT Introducing this special issue of Caucasus Survey, this article emphasizes the dual importance of studying informality in the South Caucasus: to reveal processes previously dismissed from the purview of academic enquiry, and to elaborate the informality concept as an innovative prism through which to understand norms and regulations structuring social life and power relations. The special issue addresses two clear gaps in the existing literature: the dearth of research into informality in general, and the specific lack of informality studies that do not take a normatively negative view of their subject. In this introduction, we first give an overview of the current research field in the study of informality. Then we discuss research on post-socialist informality, indicating the absence of the Caucasian cases in this literature. Third, we elaborate further the purpose of this special issue and end by offering brief overviews of the contributions herein.

Liberalism and shadow interventionism in post-revolutionary Georgia (2003–2012)

ABSTRACT This article looks at the informal governance practice of Georgia’s post-revolution (2003-2012) reformers. Empirically, we argue that the deployment of informal governance strategies became necessary for the Georgian government precisely because its official liberal reform course was politically constraining and incapacitated it from coping with the social costs of marketization and political-economic crisis. The analysed case, we submit, has major implications for theories of governance and informality. As it stands now, the literature is predominantly preoccupied with improvements in the state’s institutional quality. The Georgian case, in contrast, highlights the importance of institutional design. Utilizing perspectives from Polanyian institutionalist analysis, we problematise the ongoing propagation of market-enhancing institutional design and underline the importance of market-constraining and social regulation. Arguing that reliance on informality cannot be reduced to profit seeking, or even to formal systemic institutional weakness, we attempt to shift the focus of the literature on governance and institutions from quality of institutional performance back to the once dominant question of development studies, namely the content of institutional design.

“States” of informality in post-socialist Europe (and beyond)

Abstract This article explores the main debates and works that underpin the theoretical conceptualization of this special issue and documents the exponential growth of literature on informality both globally and, especially, in post-socialist spaces. In spite of this growth, informality is still relatively understudied considering how widespread and significant a phenomenon it has become. In particular, if we go beyond a merely economistic view of the phenomenon, one could argue that an understanding of informality explains a variety of social responses and the number of cases where we have been able to apply an informality framework is perhaps very telling. Debates remain too bounded by one of two paradigms: either recourse to geographic particularism or exceptionalism or ongoing debates on transition or transformation (the appropriateness of ‘posting’ socialism). To break with this attitude, we suggest with this special issue that study of informality needs to build into itself a middle-field theory explaining its endurance which acknowledges both specificities of social action arising from common(ish) pasts and experience of change after 1989/91 leading to translatable presents, as well as these societies’ positioning as mediating sites of neocapitalism between the Global North and South, with such a theory being a key articulation of the multiple modernities thesis.

Introduction: Informal Economies as Varieties of Governance

The growing body of research on informality, that has its origins in the work of Hart (1973) in Ghana, and which has resulted in a burgeoning literature comprising thousands of new articles ever year, has moved in recent years a long way from the monodisciplinary approach and lack of dialogue between disciplines that conventionally plagued the study of the informal sector. Initially approached from the perspectives of economic anthropology (1973) and labour studies (ILO 1972) that dealt, respectively, with informal economy and informal labour, studies on informality have increasingly broadened in terms of disciplines and geographical scope.

Adjusting social welfare and social policy in Central and Eastern Europe: growth, crisis and recession

Despite the shared history of socialist welfare state adaptation, there is consensus among scholars that Central and Eastern European (CEE) welfare states do not conform to either a putative post-socialist welfare state type or to Esping-Andersen’s (1990) welfare regime typology developed for advanced capitalist welfare states (Deacon 2000; Fenger 2007; Aidukaite 2009; Inglot 2009). This is not surprising considering that welfare states in CEE are but a few years younger than their Western neighbours (Haggard and Kaufman, 2008; Inglot 2008; Mares and Carnes 2009) and that their historical evolution – despite their Bismarckian foundations, the homogenizing influence of the soviet model and the emergency, ad hoc and inconsistent institutional adjustments during the first two decades of post-socialism – has been as complex and diverse as that of their advanced capitalist counterparts (Inglot 2008, 2009; Cook 2010). This diversity is observable not only in terms of variations in the salience of institutional legacies from different historical periods across welfare domains, the timing, dynamics and direction of welfare reforms after the dissolution of state socialism and welfare state size, but also variations in the resulting architectures of mixed economies of welfare across policy domains and in the structure of inequalities and social outcomes. We agree, therefore, with Cerami’s (2009, p. 51) assessment that welfare states in the European post-socialist and post-soviet space are best understood as ‘unique hybrids’, moreover, likely on diverging paths of development (see also Cook 2010; Deacon and Standing 1993; Orenstein and Haas 2002; Potucek 2008; Haggard and Kaufman 2008). As such, these welfare states may be grouped together at best only on the most general grounds and without sensitivity to differences in magnitude and kind. The shared Bismarckian and soviet-inspired institutional legacies are one broad similarity which might invite arguments of greater similarity than dissimilarity, although Inglot (2008) convincingly outlines the institutional variations that persisted despite these. The experience of welfare state adjustment during the 1990s, characterized by ad hoc, emergency institutional and policy transformations (Nunberg 1999; Deacon 2000, p. 149; Sotiropoulos and Pop 2007; Inglot 2009) and a highly volatile, cyclical expand-then-retrench, stop-and-go reform process during this period (Sotiropoulos et al. 2003; Inglot 2009; Szikra and Tomka 2009; Cook 2010) may also be cited as another shared feature of CEE welfare states, although again, scholars have highlighted variations certainly in degree (see Cerami and Vanhuysse 2009). Those emphasizing similarities over differences could also cite a propensity towards cushioning social policy adjustments in the early stages of post-socialist welfare state reform, although selective in scope, followed by path-departing institutional innovations during the late 1990s and 2000s (Vanhuysse 2006; Cerami and Stănescu 2009; Cook 2010) and the role played by international organizations in designing policy options

Informality currencies: a tale of Misha, his brigada and informal practices among Uzbek labour migrants in Russia

Abstract This article explores the role of informality among Uzbek construction workers in Russia. We start from a relationship that is based on economic reward and common interests and go on to explore the non-economic components of this relationship. Economically, the workers entrust their supervisor and agree to work for him for a given amount of money. However, this decision is also embedded in a non-economic dimension. All workers, and their master, come from the same village so that an additional layer of social obligations are involved. First, workers are able to receive a treatment that goes beyond economic relations, with favours or more mild attitudes when needed. Second, they are also able to put pressure on the line manager through their families in case things do not work out the way they expected. We use the case study to propose the existence of a non-monetary currency (or even currencies) that complement formal currencies. Money, its symbolism and the power attached to it still play a major role in the relationships and dependencies analyzed here. These points help us in suggesting that relations encompass a wide range of transactions and rituals that go beyond mere economic interest and that cannot be neglected when understanding informality.

Exploring the Practice of Making Informal Payments in the Health Sector: Some Lessons from Greece

This chapter explores the prevalence of informal payments in public healthcare services in Greece. To evaluate the relationship between extra payments or valuable gifts (apart from official fees) and the level of acceptability of corruption, as well as the socio-spatial variations in the tendency to offer informal payments, data from a 2013 Eurobarometer survey is reported. Using logistic regression analysis, the finding is that patients with a high acceptability of corruption, those considering corruption as a very widespread phenomenon and those located in rural areas are more likely to offer, apart from official fees, extra payments or valuable gifts for healthcare services. The chapter concludes by discussing the health policy implications.