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Paper Short Abstract:

Through the eyes of antisystemic movements, informality can become an analytical tool to go beyond dualistic conceptualizations of legality. Investigating initiatives that openly challenge the state order, allows to articulate everyday resistance within larger scale hegemonic processes.

Paper Abstract:

Recent debates within informality studies have been attempting to go beyond dualistic conceptualizations opposing state to non-state actors to delineate the limits of what can be legally considered acceptable. Despite these efforts, policy-oriented perspectives continue to reduce informal practices to a grey area of illicit activities needing to be eliminated, controlled or – at best – channeled into compatible and foreseeable rules and policies. Institutions can openly foster informal practices to allow citizens' participation in the socio-political life of their country. Processes referred to as transition to formality are seen by policy specialists and intergovernmental organizations as valuable contributions towards future government strategies and sustainable innovations. Informality can avoid official rejection when compatible with rulers’ interests and power dynamics, when capable of providing politically correct business opportunities: its existence is allowed as long as it’s possible to subsume it within neoliberal logics.

Literature accounting for informal practices as forms of resistance apply Scott’s notion of infrapolitics to describe reactions to authoritarian regimes, corruption, institutional ineffectiveness or behaviors motivated by individual moralities and standardized societal norms. Informality studies applied to political protests provided states with understandings that could be used to contain, prevent and even neutralize oppositions. The aim of this paper is to investigate initiatives that collectively and openly challenge the state order, their potential to promote change and build political subjectivities. Through the eyes of radical left, antisystemic movements, informality can become an analytical tool able to reconceptualize and articulate everyday forms of resistance within larger scale hegemonic processes.