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Abstract

By foregrounding romantic love as an ethnographic object, this talk explores how intimate relationships are being reconfigured in contemporary Tajikistan amid intensified labour migration. It argues that romantic love offers a productive analytical lens for examining how Tajikistanis renegotiate intergenerational authority over partner choice and contributes to making sense of the rise of polygynous marriages in the context of migration.

The extensive regional archive of love poetry and literature attests to the rich imagination of desires for love that has long existed. Yet the individual enactment of romantic love has historically been tightly constrained by social norms. Young people’s wishes to marry for love were often not endorsed by parents and wider society. A prior romantic relationship or even public suspicion of romantic feelings could damage a girl’s and her family’s reputation and negatively influence her chances of marriage.

Today, intensifying forms of mobility—including social media engagement, student mobility, and labour migration—are reshaping established patterns of intimacy and kinship. These processes give rise to prolonged periods of separation, transnational and sometimes polygamous family arrangements, as well as competing imaginaries of love and partnership. Such ideals are produced and circulated, among others, through consumer practices, television, poetry, music, public education systems, national celebrations, and religious teachings.

The talk presents ethnographic examples of how people in Tajikistan today search for, practice, and evaluate love. It is based on the first seven months of a twelve month in depth ethnographic PhD fieldwork project conducted between 2025 and 2026 in urban and rural settings, including Dushanbe and villages surrounding Bokhtar. By following romantic love as an ethnographic object, it contributes to broader debates on intimacy and mobility by examining the tensions in how social norms and individual desires are negotiated. In doing so, it nuances dominant explanations of rising polygynous arrangements in Central Asia that focus on economic precarity and religious revival, showing that romantic love and individual desires are also central to how such marriages are imagined, negotiated.

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This paper presents a typology of male domestic violence offenders in Kazakhstan using a sequence analysis approach. In 2023, more than 99,000 complaints of domestic violence were recorded by law enforcement agencies, and in 2024 this number exceeded 100,000. Despite the scale of the problem, longitudinal patterns of offending and the structure of offenders’ trajectories remain insufficiently studied.

The analysis draws on unique administrative records of domestic violence-related offenses from January 2020 to July 2024, provided by the Committee on Legal Statistics and Special Accounts of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The study focuses on male offenders and does not include information on the relationship between offenders and victims.

The research applies life-course criminology to conceptualize offending as a dynamic process unfolding over time. Sequence analysis is used to reconstruct ordered histories of administrative offenses and to identify distinct trajectory types. The study is designed to compare three groups: (1) offenders involved in domestic violence, (2) repeat offenders in domestic violence, and (3) offenders without such incidents.

Preliminary results for repeat offenders reveal stable combinations of domestic violence, child-related offenses, traffic violations, and alcohol-related incidents. Four trajectory types are identified: “specialists” in domestic violence, “specialists” in child-related offenses, “versatile” offenders, and offenders with sporadic incidents. Comparative analysis across groups will clarify how these patterns differ depending on involvement in domestic violence.

The findings demonstrate that sequence-based typologies can capture qualitative differences in offending trajectories beyond frequency measures. The study contributes to understanding offender heterogeneity and provides a basis for identifying risk groups and developing prevention strategies in the context of administrative regulation of domestic violence in Kazakhstan.

Key words: domestic violence, male offenders, law enforcement data, Kazakhstan, sequence analysis

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Abstract

This article analyzes the determinants of perceived contradictions across economic, political, and social spheres in contemporary Russia. Drawing on data from the 2024 monitoring study conducted by the Institute of Sociology of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology (FNISS RAS), the authors investigate whether objective socioeconomic status or subjective well-being exerts a stronger influence on conflict perception. Employing a Conditional Mixed Process (CMP) model that incorporates stratification variables, value orientations, and subjective indices, we demonstrate that subjective factors, specifically trust in institutions, economic anxiety, and perceived life achievements play a pivotal role, often outweighing objective material conditions. While the primary analysis focuses on national aggregates, the study explicitly acknowledges significant regional heterogeneity, noting that the dynamics of the "social contract" likely differ across distinct macro-regions such as Siberia, the Volga region (Povolzhye), and the North Caucasus due to varying ethnocultural contexts and economic structures; detailed sub-national estimations for these specific areas are outlined for forthcoming technical reporting. These findings are interpreted within the framework of social contract theory, positing that institutional trust serves as the key indicator of the agreement between citizens and the state. The study contributes to the broader scholarly literature by challenging purely materialist interpretations of social tension, offering a nuanced view of how psychological factors and regional diversity collectively shape the stability of the Russian social order amidst ongoing transformative changes.