Small-scale trade and smuggling are part of everyday life at many borders. These trading activities often compensate for economic shortage that many households are suffering from in consequence of e.g. political transformation processes. Despite of the diversity of transborder small-scale trade and smuggling and their wide dispersion, not only in Europe, their reception within social sciences is relatively low. The contributions shed therefore light on research in geography and neighboured disciplines. On the basis of empirical research findings from borders all over the world, the authors thrive to analyse mechanisms and conditions of the informal activities and to detect parallels and differences of informal economic structures from different perspectives. This book is valuable reading for researchers in geography, sociology, ethnography, and in political science.
Concerned with people called variously: eta, burakumin, buraku jumin, buraku people, outcastes, or "the lowest of the low", this book examines how their experience of caste/status-based discrimination in 19th century Japan affected their experience of race-based discrimination in the West of the US and Canada in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
This collection brings together an interdisciplinary pool of scholars to explore the relationship between children and borders with richly-documented ethnographic studies from around the world. The book provides a penetrating account of how borders affect children's lives and how children play a constitutive role in the social life of borders.
In the aftermath of the Ukraine crises, borders within the wider post-Cold War and post-Soviet context have become a key issue for international relations and public political debate. These borders are frequently viewed in terms of military preparedness and confrontation, but behind armed territorial conflicts there has been a broader shift in the regional balance of power and sovereignty. This book explores border conflicts in the EU’s eastern neighbourhood via a detailed focus on state power and sovereignty, set in the context of post-Cold war politics and international relations. By identifying changing definitions of sovereignty and political space the authors highlight competing strategies of legitimising and challenging borders that have emerged as a result of geopolitical transformations of the last three decades. This book uses comparative studies to examine country specific variation in border negotiation and conflict, and pays close attention to shifts in political debates that have taken place between the end of State Socialism, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the outbreak of the Ukraine crises. From this angle, Post-Cold War Borders sheds new light on change and variation in the political rhetoric of the EU, the Russian Federation, Ukraine and neighbouring EU member countries. Ultimately, the book aims to provide a new interpretation of changes in international order and how they relate to shifting concepts of sovereignty and territoriality in post-Cold war Europe. Shedding new light on negotiation and conflict over post-Soviet borders, this book will be of interest to students, researchers and policy makers in the fields of Russian and East European studies, international relations, geography, border studies and politics.
Placing the Border in Everyday Life complicates the connection between borders and sovereign states by identifying the individuals and organizations that engage in border work at a range of scales and places. This edited volume includes contributions from major international scholars in the field of border studies and allied disciplines who analyze where and why border work is done. By combining a new theorization of border work beyond the state with rich empirical case studies, this book makes a ground-breaking contribution to the study of borders and the state in the era of globalization.
Alena Ledeneva invites you on a voyage of discovery to explore society’s open secrets, unwritten rules and know-how practices. Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done’, these invisible yet powerful informal practices tend to escape articulation in official discourse. They include emotion-driven exchanges of gifts or favours and tributes for services, interest-driven know-how (from informal welfare to informal employment and entrepreneurship), identity-driven practices of solidarity, and power-driven forms of co-optation and control. The paradox, or not, of the invisibility of these informal practices is their ubiquity. Expertly practised by insiders but often hidden from outsiders, informal practices are, as this book shows, deeply rooted all over the world, yet underestimated in policy. Entries from the five continents presented in this volume are samples of the truly global and ever-growing collection, made possible by a remarkable collaboration of over 200 scholars across disciplines and area studies. By mapping the grey zones, blurred boundaries, types of ambivalence and contexts of complexity, this book creates the first Global Map of Informality. The accompanying database (www.in-formality.com) is searchable by region, keyword or type of practice, so do explore what works, how, where and why! Praise for Global Encyclopaedia of Informality ‘The Global Informality Project unveils new ways of understanding how the state functions and ways in which civil servants and citizens adapt themselves to different local contexts by highlighting the diversity of the relationships between state and society. The project is of great interest to policymakers who want to imagine solutions that are benefi cial for all, but sufficiently pragmatic to ensure a seamless implementation, particularly in the field of cross-border trade in developing countries.’ - Kunio Mikuriya, Secretary General of the World Customs Organisation, Brussels ‘An extremely interesting and stimulating collection of papers. Ledeneva’s challenging ideas, first applied in the context of Russia’s economy of shortage, came to full blossom and are here contextualized by practices from other countries and contemporary systems. Many original and relevant practices were recognized empirically in socialist countries, but this book shows their generality.’ - János Kornai, Allie S. Freed Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard and Professor Emeritus at Corvinus University of Budapest ‘Alena Ledeneva’s Global Encyclopedia of Informality is a unique contribution, providing a global atlas of informal practices through the contributions of over 200 scholars across the world. It is far more rewarding for the reader to discover how commonalities of informal behavior become apparent through this rich texture like a complex and hidden pattern behind local colors than to presume top down universal benchmarks of good versus bad behavior. This book is a plea against reductionist approaches of mathematics in social science in general, and corruption studies in particular and makes a great read, as well as an indispensable guide to understand the cultural richness of the world.’ - Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Professor of Democracy Studies, Hertie School of Governance, Berlin ‘Transformative scholarship in method, object, and consequence. Ledeneva and her networked expertise not only enable us to view the informal comparatively, but challenge conventionally legible accounts of membership, markets, domination and resistance with these rich accounts from five continents. This project offers nothing less than a social scientific revolution… if the broader scholarly community has the imagination to follow through. And by globalizing these informal knowledges typically hidden from view, the volumes’ contributors will extend the imaginations of those business consultants, movement mobilizers, and peace makers who can appreciate the value of translation from other world regions in their own work.’ Michael D. Kennedy, Professor of Sociology and International and Public Aff irs, Brown University and author of Globalizing Knowledge ‘Don’t mistake these weighty volumes for anything directory-like or anonymous. This wonderful collection of short essays, penned by many of the single best experts in their fields, puts the reader squarely in the kinds of conversations culled only after years of friendship, trust, and with the keen eye of the practiced observer. Perhaps most importantly, the remarkably wide range of offerings lets us “de-parochialise” corruption, and detach it from the usual hyper-local and cultural explanations. The reader, in the end, is the one invited to consider the many and striking commonalities.’ Bruce Grant, Professor at New York University and Chair of the US National Council for East European and Eurasian Research
Vinoth Ramachandra considers six areas of contemporary global discourse where powerful myths energize and mobilize a great deal of public funding, academic production and media attention: myths about terrorism, religious violence, human rights, multiculturalism, science and postcolonialism.
State borders are somewhere the state is keen to stress its presence and yet are simultaneously places where that presence is challenged. They are sites of resistance to the state, and at the same time places where the national interest is vigorously maintained. This constant ambiguity generates questions about the dynamics of borderland-state relations, and about how what happens along the border can undermine state policies. Using case studies of nation and state relations in borderlands in Europe this book seeks to understand how structures of power are created, experienced, changed and reproduced.
This book investigates how borders in former Soviet Union territories have evolved and shifted in the thirty years since the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to fifteen independent states and numerous de facto states; but this process of rebordering is not finished, and social, economic, infrastructural, cultural and political networks and spaces continue to develop. This book explores the intersection between these geopolitical shifts and the individual lived experience, drawing on cases from across border regions in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Throughout, the book introduces and frames the case studies with well-informed theoretical, conceptual and methodological overviews that situate them within border studies in general and post-Soviet border spaces in particular. Overall, the book demonstrates that like a kaleidoscope, the dynamic elements in these newly evolved border regions are similar yet strikingly different in their juxtapositions, with the appearance of new configurations often dependent on changing geopolitical constellations. This timely guide to the post-Soviet world thirty years after the Cold War will be of interest to researchers across border studies, politics, geography, social anthropology, history, Eastern European Studies, Central Asian Studies, and Caucasian Studies.
Detailing the history of a well-known phenomenon of post-socialism - cross-border petty trade and smuggling - as the history of a practice in daily life from a gendered perspective, this book considers how changes in these practices in a particular border region, between Belarus and Lithuania, have been accompanied, and to some extent provoked, by changes in the border regime. It looks at how the selective openness of the Belarus-Lithuania border worked during different periods over the last twenty years and how it influenced the involvement of different social groups in shuttle trade practices.
