Migration and Welfare Austerity: Mobilizing Kinship for Care, Welfare and Development in Kyrgyzstan

• Migration and Welfare Austerity has three important comparative aspects.
• First, the manuscript compares informality as practiced in the post-Soviet era to informality as practiced during the Soviet and pre-Soviet eras. As I said above, the practice has been transformed over time in response to radical political, economic, and social shifts. Migration and Welfare Austerity traces the evolution of this practice, and contributes to enhanced understanding of kinship during both the Soviet era and in post-Soviet times.
• The second comparative aspect of the manuscript lies in its focus on informality as currently practiced in the other Central Asian states: Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
• Third, the conclusion of Migration and Welfare Austerity will compare informality in Central Asia to informality in migration in Africa and the Middle East. These regions contrast in many ways with the experience of Central Asia: but they are all regions where transnational activity has brought a new flexibility to local patterns of social life in general, and kinship in particular, rendering them translocal in character. This has major implications for our understanding of globalization in the third decade of the twenty-first century.

Aksana Ismailbekova is Senior Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, Germany. Her research focuses on the importance of gender, kinship and religion in negotiating socioeconomic change. She is the author of the book Blood Ties and the Native Sons: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan (Indian University Press, 2017), and the co-editor of Surviving Everyday Life: The Security Capes of Threatened People in Central Asia (Bristol University Press, 2020).