Rustamjon Urinboyev

Living Law, Legal Pluralism, and Corruption in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

This paper aims to explore the multifaceted meaning, logic, and morality of informal transactions in order to better understand the social context that informs the meaning of corruption and bribery in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. It will be argued that the informal transactions in Uzbek society reflect different cultural and functional meanings from those in most of the Western world, and hence transactions that from a Western-centric perspective would be labelled as bribes can be morally accepted transactions in the Uzbek cultural context. If this is true, there may be reasons to re-evaluate the relevance of the Western-centric interpretations of corruption in the context of Uzbekistan, and possibly other Central Asian countries. These issues will be investigated with reference to observations and informal interviews from post-Soviet Uzbekistan. This study is based on three periods of ethnographic field research between 2009 and 2012 in the Ferghana Province of Uzbekistan. It draws on concepts of ‘living law’ and legal pluralism to provide a theoretical framework.

Welfare as a means for political stability : a law and society analysis

There have been extensive discussions in academic circles of why some countries develop into welfare states while others do not. Two main factors mentioned in these discussions are economic growth and the need for political stability. In these discussions, the example of Sweden, where the welfare state allegedly emerged from a ‘culture of consensus’, has often been treated as an historic exception. In this article we discuss the relevance of the two main factors suggested in the literature, and investigate whether Sweden is a rare case of a country where welfare arose out of a culture of consensus or if welfare in Sweden emerged as a product of strategies that aimed at promoting political stability, and thereby followed a similar pattern to other Western European countries. In undertaking this task, we have conducted a review of the literature and used Migdals ‘state-in-society’ perspective and the ‘institutional approach’ as a theoretical framework. Our results can be summarised under three headings: (a) until the mid-twentieth century, Sweden was a highly unstable, conflict-ridden class society, and thereby a followed similar pattern to other Western European countries; (b) welfare reforms in Sweden were introduced as a means of addressing political and social instability; (c) Sweden is therefore no exception to the theory that deep political crises trigger welfare reforms.

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.

Child Rights, Classroom and School Management: A Systematic Literature Review

This paper provides a systematic review of scholarly literature concerning the enforcement of children’s rights in the classroom context and school management. The literature review is based on a systematic review methodology the authors developed drawing on the methods and guidelines used in the medical sciences over the last 15 years. Forty-two articles published between 1990 and 2014 were selected and analysed. The paper presents both a descriptive analysis and a thematic analysis in order to provide the state-of-art of international literature on child rights, classroom and school management. The descriptive analysis highlights the main characteristics of the articles included, such as type of study and methods used, classification of literature based on the geographical and thematic focus, article citation frequency, and chronological development of the subject in question. The thematic analysis synthesises the main findings extracted from the literature and highlights the main trends and gaps in research.

Negotiating Spaces and the Public–Private Boundary: Language Policies Versus Language Use Practices in Odessa

While the so-called “end of public space” literature, focusing on encroachment of private interests and state surveillance, has contributed to critical thinking of access (or the lack thereof) to public space, and the loss of publicity of public space, the conceptual tools such literature offers to understand contestations in and over public space have remained underdeveloped or, at best, underexplored. This article builds on the above debates to provides further empirical evidence on the way actors of a country compete over, and negotiate, the use of public space and the way it should be regulated. Empirically, it illustrates competition and negotiation of the use of language in Odessa, the third largest city of Ukraine, where Ukrainian should be the official language but Russian is widely used. Theoretically, starting from the way public and private are negotiated, and the extent to which this happens, we will suggest that resistance to state measures, and policies, that do not suit a considerable portion of a population may happen not only formally but also informally. The practices, tactics, and mechanisms used may, however, remain “invisible” for some time and then surprise everyone by emerging, all of a sudden, one day. A possible way to notice these dynamics is to engage with an “everyday” approach, thus acknowledging that everyday practices are a meaningful, and useful, site for understanding sociopolitical developments in the process of the construction of “the political.”

Migration and Transnational Informality in Post-Soviet Societies : Ethnographic Study of Po rukam (‘handshake’) Experiences of Uzbek Migrant Workers in Moscow

The concept of ‘informality’ has become a trendy topic of research in the scholarly literature about post-Soviet societies. The amount of literature focusing on informal practices and networks in post-Soviet space has grown rapidly over last two decades, producing theoretically and empirically grounded accounts of different forms and manifestations of informality, such as clans and regional patronage networks, clientelism, blat networks, bribery, embezzlement, cronyism, kickbacks, etc. One idea common to these aforesaid previous studies is that bulk of them focus on informal practices and their regulatory structures that take place within the boundaries of a single nation-state, thereby confining informality to particular place, field or people, not taking into account the increased (transnational) links between different places and people. Another factor that adds to this complexity is the growing use of information and communication technologies in post-Soviet region, which may reduce the importance of distance between different countries and people, possibly leading to ‘transnationalization‘ of informal practices and power relations. This paper situates itself in these ‘informality‘ debates by suggesting that the nature of informal practices in post-Soviet societies is changing, not only in terms of content, form and magnitude, but, more importantly, in terms of geographic scope due to ongoing large scale migratory processes, e.g. massive inflow of migrant workers from Central Asia and Caucasus to Russia. Migrant workers, living their lives across the border of two nation-states, become part of the fabric of everyday life and social relations in their home state, while simultaneously becoming part of the socio-economic processes in their receiving state, thereby facilitating daily flow of ideas, social practices and cultural symbols between migrant sending and receiving societies. Moving beyond methodological nationalism still prevalent in much informality research, I argue that informal practices in post-Soviet societies are becoming increasingly transnational. These processes are especially visible in the construction sector in Moscow, Russia where informal employment of migrant workers is widespread and carried out through so-called ‘po rukam’ (handshake-based) work contracts, which involve multiple formal and informal actors with very different kinds of power and locations of power: migrant workers, posrednik (informal middlemen), construction companies, Russian police officers, protection rackets, family members and village actors (e.g. local community (mahalla) leader and residents, imam, local police) from migrants home state. Hence, this paper, through ethnographic study of ‘po rukam’ experiences of Uzbek migrant workers in Moscow, aims to show how the interaction of the aforesaid actors across borders (via smartphones and Internet) serve as a governance mechanism of the informal migrant labour market in migrant Moscow. (Less)