Post-socialist Informalities ― Power, Agency and the Construction of Extra-legalities from Bosnia to China

This book is a comprehensive collection of key scholarship on informality from the whole post-socialist region. From Bosnia to Central Asia, passing through Russia and Azerbaijan, the contributions to this volume illustrate the multi-faceted and complex nature of informality, while demonstrating the growing scholarly and policy debates that have developed around the understanding of informality.

In contrast to approaches which tend to classify informality as ‘bad’ or ‘transitional’ – meaning that modernity will make it disappear – this edited volume concentrates on dynamics and mechanisms to understand and explain informality, while also debating its relationship with the market and society.

The authors seek to explain informality beyond a mere monetaristic/economistic approach, rediscovering its interconnection with social phenomena to propose a more holistic interpretation of the meaning of informality and its influence in various spheres of life.

They do this by exploring the evolving role of informal practices in the post-socialist region, and by focusing on informality as a social organisation determinant but also looking at the way it reshapes emergent social resistance against symbolic and real political order(s).

This book was originally published as two special issues, of Caucasus Survey and the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe.

Abel Polese works on governance and informality with focus on Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central and Southeast Asia. He is affiliated to Dublin City University’s Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction and Tallinn University of Technology’s Tallinn Law School and Tallinn University’s RASI.

Lela Rekhviashvili works on informal economic practices, political economy of development, and mobility studies. She is based at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Germany.

Borbala Kovacs is based in the Department of Political Science at Central European University, Hungary.

Jeremy Morris is an ethnographer of post-socialism, and the author and editor of numerous books. He is based at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.