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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.