Negotiating state and society: the normative informal economies of Central Asia and the Caucasus (original) (raw)
Related papers
Between Border and Bazaar: Central Asia's Informal Economy
Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2019
The disintegration of the Soviet Union spurred a transnational trade in consumer goods. Bazaars, which proliferated across the former Soviet Union, including in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan that is the focus of this article, became nodes in this informal trade. This article makes three arguments: (i) Soviet successor states capitalised on the new informal economy which provided employment to millions when economies were in decline. Conversely, ongoing developments, particularly in Kazakhstan, seek to modernise the bazaars that emerged after the Soviet Union. (ii) The movement of people and goods – between border and bazaar, and in case of re-exports, on to another border – are illustrative of a multi-dimensional informal economy evidenced in rent extraction, regulation of bazaars, and in trader networks. (iii) The bazaar-centred economy relies on checkpoint politics that establish border regimes enabling mobility.
Critical Asian Studies, 2013
The end of the cold war witnessed the emergence of a commercial web sprawling from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in western China and extending into Central Running parallel to the state-managed exchange in hydrocarbons, raw materials, technology, and infrastructure, this new Eurasian trade had an informal component as everyday consumer items manufactured in China were imported into neighboring countries, bypassing formal regulatory mechanisms. This inter-Asian trade began as shuttle trading by itinerant merchants for local markets; by the mid 1990s, shuttle trading was overshadowed by largescale export for national markets in neighboring countries without losing its informal character. This informality extending across national boundaries defined the post-cold war commerce in innermost Asia; at the same time, it also signaled a return to pre-cold war trading structures. Moving away from the "retreat of the state" thesis that found traction following the cold war, the author attributes informality in this inter-Asian trade to three factors: (1) a restructuring of state power where informal trade was a new comparative advantage sought in an evolving geopolitical climate; (2) the actors in this inter-Asian trade-party and regional officials in China, along with traders and intermediaries-who found and exercised agency through this exchange; and (3) a chain of inter-locking, commercial macro-regions, which are economically sustainable and which transcended international boundaries. Working in conjunction, these factors constitute a dynamic inter-Asian trade and challenge static state imaginaries of a "New Silk Road" or "Eurasian Continental Bridge."
Informal economy, informal state: The case of Uzbekistan
In the Soviet Union, the official command structure for economic production and distribution gave rise to, and depended upon, what has been described as a ‘shadow’ economy. In the postsocialist context, the unregulated, often extra-legal activities of production and exchange, encompassing the survival strategies of the poor, the emergence of postsocialist ‘Mafias’, and much entrepreneurial activity, has been described using the concept of the ‘informal economy’. This article argues that what we might think of as informal economic activity in Uzbekistan cannot be understood in relation to a formal economy, but is rather an expression of a more general informalisation of lifeworlds following the end of the Soviet Union. Unlike the situation in the Soviet Union, the informal does not emerge from and exist in relation to formal political and economic structures. The state itself is experienced in personalised terms, as a ‘Mafia’, and the informal is all that there is. If the concept of the informal depends on the existence of the formal, how useful is the term informal economy in a context like Uzbekistan? Where the state no longer provides a formal structure in practice, this is sought in moral ideals of state and community.
This chapter examines the relationship between institutional transformation and the reliance on informality in post-Soviet Azerbaijan and Georgia. While the economic crises, the failure of democratization and numerous other problems of post-communism continued to affect the South Caucasus throughout the 1990s, encouraging the growth of the informal sector, little is known about the effects of economic growth which occurred both in Azerbaijan and Georgia throughout the 2000s, as well as the impact of comprehensive post-Rose Revolution institutional reforms in Georgia, on the importance of informal institutions and practices. Drawing on findings of cross-national surveys and in-depth elite interviews, this chapter demonstrates that the informal sector – both in Azerbaijan and Georgia – remains resilient to change.
Central Asian Survey , 2020
This article analyses the trajectories of two transnational networks present in the Chinese city of Yiwu: Afghan merchants who trade goods in and out Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan, and Uzbek traders (citizens of either Tajikistan or Uzbekistan) who commercialise their merchandise in and out Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia. Our aim is to capture an ethnographically grounded understanding of informal markets and economies by analysing the notion of trade "outside the law" including the contested yet widely used category of "the smuggler". By paying attention to the fluidity of trading practices "outside the law", we also address the uses and limitations of metaphors widely used in scholarly analysis of informal markets: notably those of "lower" and "higher" forms of globalisation, and the transposition of formal-legal and informal-illegal exchanges onto the notions of economic "centres" and "peripheries".