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Abstract

This paper examines why extensive rule-of-law and anti-corruption reforms in Central Asia—despite decades of institutional redesign, legal transplantation, and governance reform—have failed to produce meaningful changes in everyday governance practices. Focusing on Uzbekistan as a paradigmatic case, the paper argues that these reform failures cannot be explained by weak institutions or poor enforcement alone. Instead, they reflect a deeper misalignment between formal legal frameworks and the informal legal orders through which legality is actually constructed and enacted in daily life. Drawing on socio-legal perspectives of legal pluralism and the concept of living law, the paper conceptualises governance in Uzbekistan as operating within hybrid legal landscapes where state law coexists with community norms, moral economies of reciprocity, Soviet administrative legacies, and pragmatic survival strategies.

Empirically, the analysis is grounded in long-term, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2023 in both urban (Tashkent) and rural (Fergana Valley) settings. Through detailed ethnographic vignettes—ranging from ceremonial life and mahalla-based solidarity to citizen–state interactions with police, inspectors, and reform institutions—the paper demonstrates how informal practices function as central mechanisms of governance rather than as marginal deviations from legality. Citizens and officials routinely navigate overlapping normative orders, selectively mobilising formal rules, personal networks, and moral claims to resolve problems under conditions of uncertainty and discretionary enforcement.

The paper shows that informality persists not merely because institutions are weak, but because informal norms often provide more predictable, legitimate, and socially intelligible solutions than formal legal channels. Corruption is thus revealed as a socially differentiated phenomenon, locally evaluated through distinctions between morally sanctioned reciprocity and predatory extraction. The paper concludes that effective anti-corruption and rule-of-law reforms must move beyond institutional design and punitive enforcement to engage seriously with the lived moral and relational infrastructures through which governance actually operates.