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.

Informed by in-depth case studies focusing on a wide spectrum of micro and macro post-socialist realities, this book demonstrates the multi-faceted nature of informality and suggests that it is a widely diffused phenomenon, used at all levels of a society and by both winners and losers of post-socialist transition.

From smugglers to entrepreneurs, blue-collar workers and taxi drivers, this book deals with the multitude of characters engaged in informal economic practices in the former socialist regions. Going beyond a conception of informality as opposed to the formal sector, its authors demonstrate the fluid nature of informal transactions straddling the crossroads between illegal, illicit, socially acceptable and symbolically meaningful practices. Their argument is informed by a wide range of case studies, from Central Europe to the Baltics and Central Asia, each of which is constructed around a single informant. Each chapter narrates the story of a composite person or household that was carefully selected or constructed by an author with long-standing ethnographic research experience in the given field site. Wide in geographical, empirical and theoretical scope, the book uses ethnographic narrative accounts of everyday life to make links between ‘ordinary’ meanings of informality. Challenging reductively economistic perspectives on cross-border trading, undeclared work and other informal activities, the authors illustrate the wide variety of interpretive meanings that people ascribe to such practices. Alongside ‘getting by’ and ‘getting ahead’ in recently marketised societies, these meanings relate to sociality, kinship-ties and solidarity, along with more surprising ‘political’ and moral reasonings.

This book critically engages with how formal and informal mechanisms of governance are used across the world. Specifically, it analyzes how the governance mechanisms of formal institutions are questioned, challenged and renegotiated through informal institutions. Whilst there is an emerging body of scholarship focusing on informal practices, this is scattered across a number of disciplines. This edited collection, by contrast, fosters a dialogue on these issues, moving away from monodisciplinary and normative methodologies that view informal institutions and practices simply as temporary economic phenomena. In doing so, the authors provide a wider understanding of how governance is composed of both the formal and the informal, which complement each other but are also constantly in competition. This novel approach will appeal to social scientists, economists, policy-makers, practitioners, and anyone else willing to widen their understanding of how governance works.

Though informed by case studies conducted in Ukraine, this book transcends its country-specific scope. It explains why informality in governance is not necessarily transitory or temporary but a constant in most political systems. The book discusses self-protective mechanisms, responses to incomplete or unfocused policy making, and strategies employed by individuals, classes, and communities to respond to unusual demands. The book argues that when state or company expectations exceed normative behavior, informal behavior continues to thrive. New tactics help cope with the reality of governance. Informality also challenges the values imposed by power through attitudes and behaviors that take place "beyond" or "in spite of" the state.

Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures critically elaborates on often forgotten, but some of the most essential, aspects of contemporary urban life, namely infrastructures, and links them to a discussion of post-socialist transformation. As the skeletons of cities, infrastructures capture the ways in which urban environments are assembled and urban lives unfold. Focusing on post-socialist cities, marked by neoliberalisation, polarisation and hybridity, this book offers new and enriching perspectives on urban infrastructures by centering on the often marginalised aspects of urban research—transport, green spaces, and water and heating provision. Featuring cases from West and East alike, the book covers examples from Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Germany, Russia, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Tajikistan, and India. It provides original insights into the infrastructural back end of post-socialist cities for scholars, planners and activists interested in urban geography, cultural and social anthropology, and urban studies.