A Cross-Country Study on Labour Migration from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to Russia

Labour migration in Central Asia has become a crucial issue. One can hardly find a family there that does not have a member working in Russia. To what extent do transnational Central Asian migrant networks in Russia contribute to sociopolitical changes in their home countries? This is the question that this Ph.D project aims to answer.

While post-Soviet state elites try to advance sovereignty and national self-consciousness in the process of state- and nation-building, a gamut of actions among migrant networks can be observed that extend beyond the territorial framework of nation states. As migrants’ actions circumvent territorial borders, there is a need to go beyond state-related ‘container’ conceptions of migration processes. The project is therefore based on a transnational approach that looks at cross-border communication through the prism of the global movement of capital, goods, information and cultural symbols. Since the research concerns countries in a transition period, the transnationalist approach to migration will be integrated into the area of development sociology. It is for this reason that the Ph.D project will be implemented at the International Graduate School in Sociology at the University of Bielefeld in co-operation with CORE.

The project requires field research, surveys on migrants and individual interviews. Preliminary field research has already been carried out within the framework of a Marie Curie Predoctorate Fellowship Programme in Moscow. Further field trips to Russian cities are planned for 2006.