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- Convenor:
-
Sherzod Eraliev
(Lund University)
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- Chair:
-
Chekhros Kilichova
(Lund University)
- Discussant:
-
Chekhros Kilichova
(Lund University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Theme:
- Sociology & Social Issues
Abstract
This panel brings together members of the EU-funded MARS project to examine how Central Eurasian migrants navigate legal precarity, shifting governance regimes, and crisis contexts across Russia, Kazakhstan, and the Nordic region. Moving beyond state-centric and policy-driven accounts of migration governance, the panel foregrounds migrant agency, micro-legal practices, and informal infrastructures that structure mobility across non-Western and hybrid regimes.
The papers collectively interrogate how law is experienced, negotiated, and reconfigured in everyday life. Rustamjon Urinboyev analyses the transformation of migrant legal precarity in wartime Russia, tracing how foreign nationals move from administrative marginality to carceral and military frontlines. His paper conceptualises the production of “disposable lives” at the intersection of migration control, penal governance, and militarisation.
Albina Aidarkhankyzy examines Kazakh migrants’ “micro-legalities in motion,” highlighting how formal migration rules are mediated by informal orders, brokerage networks, and everyday negotiations. Her contribution demonstrates how legality is not a fixed status but an ongoing process shaped by relational governance and situational compliance.
Sherzod Eraliev explores “vernacular legal navigation” among Uzbek migrants in Nordic migration regimes. Focusing on Finland and Sweden, the paper analyses how migrants interpret, anticipate, and tactically engage with welfare institutions, residence rules, and labour regulations. It argues that migrants develop situated legal consciousness shaped by prior mobility experiences in Russia and Turkey, translating these into adaptive strategies within highly bureaucratised welfare states.
Madina Ishkibayeva’s paper shifts attention to digital infrastructures and psychological resilience. Studying Uzbek migrants in Astana, she introduces the concept of the “Digital Brigada” to capture smartphone-mediated brotherhood networks that provide moral support, information, and collective coping mechanisms in conditions of economic uncertainty and social marginalisation.
Together, the panel advances a relational and multi-sited understanding of migration governance across Central Eurasia and Europe. It highlights how legal precarity is produced across diverse political contexts—authoritarian, hybrid, and welfare-democratic—while also showing how migrants craft subversive, adaptive, and solidaristic practices in response. By centring everyday legality, digital connectivity, and crisis governance, the panel contributes to ongoing debates on mobility, sovereignty, and the political economy of migration in and beyond the Central Eurasian region.
Accepted papers
Abstract
This paper examines how Kazakhstani labour migrants navigate heterogeneous legal and political environments in Western and non-Western migration destinations. Drawing on twenty-three qualitative interviews with Kazakh migrants working in the United Kingdom, United States, Turkey and South Korea, I show that migrants’ lived experiences of legality transcend formal regime classifications. Regardless of whether they encounter democratic, transparent, rule-of-law institutions or hybrid/non-democratic, informalised governance systems, migrants rely on a combination of formal rules and socially embedded informal practices to sustain mobility, access employment and avoid legal vulnerability. I conceptualise these adaptive repertoires as micro-legalities: emergent, small-scale, socially distributed normative orders migrants construct and mobilise to interpret, supplement or navigate formal law. The paper situates these practices within the broader political economy of Kazakhstan’s migration system, shaped by long-standing mobility traditions, contemporary labour-market drivers, state regulation, fraudulent recruitment schemes and diasporic infrastructures. We argue that micro-legalities constitute an essential yet overlooked dimension of migration governance, revealing how migrants themselves co-produce functioning legal orders within opaque regulatory landscapes across political regime types.
Abstract
This paper examines how Uzbek migrants in Finland and Sweden navigate increasingly restrictive and bureaucratically complex Nordic migration regimes. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025—including interviews, focus groups, and digital ethnography—it explores how migrants with precarious or transitional legal statuses respond to administrative opacity, discretionary enforcement, and shifting residence and labour regulations.
The presentation advances the concept of subversive mobilities to capture how migrants strategically use cross-border movement, timing, and jurisdictional differences to manage risk and sustain legal presence. It also introduces vernacular legal navigation as a conceptual framework for understanding how migrants engage with law as a plural, culturally mediated field rather than a coherent and transparent system. Through informal knowledge networks, peer advice, digital platforms, and performative compliance, migrants reinterpret and tactically respond to institutional constraints.
By foregrounding everyday practices of legal reasoning and adaptation, the presentation highlights tensions between formal legal frameworks and lived legality within Nordic welfare states. It argues that migrant agency is not simply oppositional or rights-based, but adaptive, relational, and situated within the moral and bureaucratic complexity of European migration governance.
Abstract
This paper examines the condition of coercive in-betweenness experienced by Central Asian migrant workers in Russia since the onset of the war in Ukraine. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research and recent cases of migrant detention, penal recruitment, and military enlistment, the paper shows how migrants are increasingly positioned between labour exploitation, deportability, imprisonment, and exposure to war. Rather than moving through clearly bounded legal categories—worker, detainee, civilian, soldier—migrants inhabit an unstable zone where these statuses overlap and collapse into one another. Everyday encounters with police raids, document checks, and migration detention produce prolonged states of suspension, in which continued access to work is contingent on silence, risk-taking, and legal vulnerability. Wartime governance has intensified this condition by transforming workplaces, detention centres, and prisons into recruitment sites, where “choice” is structured through threat, exhaustion, and economic desperation. Migrants describe their lives as being neither fully free nor formally imprisoned, neither outside nor inside the war. By conceptualizing this condition as coercive in-betweenness, the paper challenges spatial imaginaries of the “Global East” and instead foregrounds Russia as a site where migration control, penal governance, and war-making converge to produce new forms of migrant disposability.
Abstract
Building on the work of Rustamjon Urinboyev (2020), this study explores the "Digital Mahalla" among Uzbek migrants in Astana, Kazakhstan. While existing research focuses on the "home-host" link, this paper investigates how digital networks facilitate mediated brotherhood within the culturally proximate environment of Astana. The research examines how platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp reconstruct traditional kinship and hashar (mutual aid) in a city that shares Turkic roots and similar social structures with Uzbekistan. By framing the smartphone as a "psychological exoskeleton," the study proposes that this digital brotherhood provides ontological security, helping migrants navigate the nuances of the Kazakh capital. This article seeks to understand how shared cultural heritage and digital connectivity transform individual vulnerability into a strategic, collective resilience.