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Abstract

Over the past years, the number of studies on informality has sharply increased. In early 2026 google scholars provides 200k results, against 100k recorded in 2023. This flourishing of literature has also led to some terminological confusion among scholars, resulting in what I classified as:

a) romanticisations (considering informality belonging only in certain countries or contexts),

b) generalizations (treating informality as a residual category of whatever is not immediately understood or just the “non formal”, often even failing to define the formal)

c) banalisations (when someone claims: I never studied informality but I’ve seen a lot of it in my life/during my fieldwork so I have the authority to talk about it

Based on my recent piece: Informality as the dumping ground of social sciences (theory), this presentation will engage with the growing literature on Eurasian informality to suggest:

Informality is not the opposite of formality. It’s the formal that is the opposite, the domestication, of the informal. Indeed, Every human interaction is born informal, unregulated. And then, if necessary may become formalised.

Informality is a language. You learn the one of the environment where you were born. It looks natural to you but informality without self-reflection is difficult to explain

And eventually explore some guiding principles that may help engaging with current informality debates:

a) Demoralisation; b) use it as a proxy for quality of governance; c) contextualise it (in some cases it may be helpful, in others harmful) d) ask “why informality did stay instead of all attempts to wipe it out?”