This project is an ethnographic study of the circulation of documents, feelings and legal claims amongst migrant workers from southern Kyrgyzstan who live and work in Moscow.  Kyrgyzstan is today one of the countries in the world most dependent upon remittances from migrant workers and many households now rely upon money sent by absent sons and daughters to sustain family budgets.  Yet whilst the “macro” dynamics of migration has been well-studied, much less attention has been paid to its social and cultural dynamics: to the meanings of the new transnational relationships that are formed when family members are abroad for large parts of the year; to the administrative and economic arrangements that frequently tend to illegalise migrant labour; and to the consequences of this economic precariousness for livelihoods, imaginaries and relationships between kin.  This project, which draws on ethnographic fieldwork in 2009-10 Kyrgyzstan and Moscow, examines the political economy and lived experience of becoming and remaining documented and legally visible to the state.  What are the implications of residing or working illegally or semi-legally for everyday experiences of time, place, authority and social solidarity?  How does the threat of deportation affect expressions of trust and expectations about the future?  What makes some documents ‘clean’ and others ‘fake’?  How is migration policy recasting debate around the bounds of citizenship in contemporary Russia? And what are the implications of this for the meanings and imagination of political community after socialism?

This research contributes empirically to understanding the dynamics of labour migration in a part of the world that has to date been largely absent from comparative theoretical debates.  But it also points to avenues for reflecting comparatively in mutations in the nature of ‘stateness’, citizenship and the articulation of sovereign power in contexts of economic globalisation and the proliferation of technologies aimed at mapping migration.  The case of Kyrgyz labour migrants to Russia is instructive here, since in contrast to many global instances of migrations from poorer to wealthier nations, the migrants concerned are surviving as ‘illegal immigrants’ in what, less than two decades ago, was the capital of the state of which they were citizens.  As such, migration is often articulated less as a practice of ‘freedom’ than of ‘abjection’ – an active process of exclusion from social life, and even, for those who once had Soviet citizenship, of unbecoming citizens.  This offers space for reflection on some of the broader contemporary paradoxes of global migrations – the proliferation of techniques of confinement that shadows greater mobility of humans and capital; the simultaneity of inclusion and exclusion, and the need to theorise them together; and the processes through which incorporation into a global wage economy can entrench as well as challenge existing gender regimes and structures of inequality. 

To find out more about this project, please contact Madeleine Reeves

You can read (and hear) more about the research in the publications and podcast below:

Reeves, M. (2010). ‘On the documentary production of the ‘undocumented’ migrant in urban Russia’. Eastbordnet Working Paper No. 86.

Reeves, M. (2010) « Migrations, masculinité et transformations de l’espace social dans la vallée de Sokh » in Marlene Laruelle (ed.), Dynamiques migratoires et changements sociétaux en Asie Centrale.  Paris L’Harmatton : 131-147.

Rivz, M. [Reeves, M.] (2009) Po tu storonu ekonomicheskogo determinizma: mikrodinamki migratsii iż sel’skogo Kyrgyzstana’ [Beyond economic determinism: microdynamics of migration from rural Kyrgyzstan].  Neprikosnovennyi zapas, No. 4 (66), 2009: 262-280 (in Russian)

Moskvachylyk: Debating Authenticity and Transformation in a Moscow Migrant Community.  CREES Noon Lecture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  Podcast of Lecture, November 17, 2010