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Paper short abstract

In Transcarpathian villages, smuggling is described as “helping each other get by”. Local moral rules guide trust, fairness, and community autonomy, revealing how residents navigate uncertainty, sustain livelihoods, and negotiate everyday life beyond the reach of the state.

Paper long abstract

In villages along the Ukrainian–Slovak border, residents often describe smuggling not primarily as profit-making, but as “helping each other get by”. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Transcarpathian Ukraine, this paper examines how cross-border smuggling is embedded in a rural moral world shaped by mutual commitment, shared hardship, and a persistent sense of local autonomy from the state.

For many residents, everyday economic life unfolds amid uncertainty, shifting regulations, and limited trust in formal institutions. In this context, smuggling serves as a practice through which households maintain local autonomy and neighbors enact obligations toward one another. Decisions about trust, which goods to move, and how profits should be shared are guided by locally recognized ideas of fairness, moderation, and responsibility, reflecting an ethical sensibility within the community’s informal rules. People speak of “doing it the right way” — a phrase that signals moral restraint and attention to community consequences rather than legality.

These distinctions matter. Certain practices are condemned as greedy, dangerous, or socially disruptive, while others are tolerated or respected. Through these everyday judgments, borderlanders define the limits of acceptable economic action and assert collective stakes in how life should be organized. By tracing these moral evaluations, the paper shows how economic practices become a key arena where commitment to community, local autonomy, and negotiations with state authority are lived and contested. It offers ethnographically grounded insight into how moral economies are constituted through shared stakes, obligations, and situated forms of commitment.