Doubling Up or Moving Out? The Effect of International Labor Migration on Household Size

We use household panel data from Tajikistan to explore the change in living arrangements as a response to income shifts related to international labour migration. In addition, we analyse the interaction between the effect of idiosyncratic income increase resulting from a completed migration episode, and the effect of an aggregate shock – the global financial crisis – and show how different households adjust their household size during times of financial hardship. The empirical evidence indicates that while current migration is associated with an increase in household size, a completed migration episode two years before the interview was followed by family members moving out. At the same time, our empirical analysis demonstrates that migrant families doubled up in response to a financial crisis to the same extent as non-migrant families, which suggests that labour migration in Tajikistan does not insure against economic shocks in the long run.     

The lifestyles and changes in culture of Afghan Kyrgyz and Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan

This paper traces changes in the culture of the Kyrgyz ethnic group in the era after the break-up of the USSR. In order to describe correctly changes in their lives, a comparison was used from a wide range of areas where Kyrgyz live. As a basis, the way of life of Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan is used. Kyrgyz here represent the majority, but before the break-up they did not emphasize their ethnicity significantly. After the break up of the USSR and the formation of the national state, they began to look for new, or new-and-old, roots and to strengthen their nationalistic tendencies. Looking for new roots included the creation of historical constructs and emphasizing many specifics of lifestyles of ‘real Kyrgyz’. But Kyrgyz live in many other states as a minority – especially in China, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. These Kyrgyz, however, often designate different elements of their culture as a basis of their ethnic group compared to Kyrgyz from Kyrgyzstan. The paper first tries to identify important elements of Kyrgyz culture in the era of the break-up of the USSR based on statements of respondents from Kyrgyzstan and to find out if these elements are also important as an identification feature for Kyrgyz in other states. Field research has been conducted in China and Tajikistan, but in this work, results from Afghanistan in particular are presented. The paper also tries to give an answer as to the influence of the formation of the national state (Kyrgyzstan) on members of ethnic groups living in other states as a minority (Kyrgyz in Afghanistan) and how this changed their ethnic identity.     

The Macroeconomic Determinants of Remittance Flows from Russia to Tajikistan

Within the two decades of transition to market economy interdependence of the former Soviet Union countries is continuing. Labour migration between Russia and the former Soviet Union republics is one of the examples of this relationship. This paper defines the macroeconomic determinants of remittance flows from Russia to Tajikistan—the world’s top remittance-receiving country as a share of GDP. The paper demonstrates that the changes in the income available for the migrants and the possibility of migrants involvement in the labour market of the host country have a significant impact on their money transfers. Furthermore, remittance inflows are determined by the overall economic environment in the host and home countries as well as the global economy’s condition.     

Institutional Isomorphism in Religious Entities of Post‐Soviet Tajikistan

Grounded in institutional isomorphism theory, the paper analyzes the extent to which the process of homogenization (isomorphism) can be useful in our understanding of changes within religious entities. Examining the emergence and development of religious entities in post‐Soviet Tajikistan, I find that three isomorphic mechanisms are less dependent on the impact of religious institutional environments and interaction among religious organizations. Rather, isomorphic changes are manifested as the result of interaction with the state. Mimetic and normative processes are observed in a weak state, whereas coercive isomorphism is exerted under the influence of a strong state. A relative heterogeneity of the religious field is observed in the first two stages of the development of religious entities. Once the state expands its regulation and control, religious entities become more homogeneous in structure and administration due to coercive isomorphism. Implications for extending the concept of institutional isomorphism beyond traditional organizational fields are discussed.     

Economic Incorporation,Civil Inclusion,and Social Ties: Plans to Return Home Among Central Asian Migrant Women in Moscow,Russia

This study uses data from a survey of female labor migrants from three Central Asian countries – Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan – in Moscow, Russia, to examine factors that influence these women's plans to return to their home countries. The conceptual framework considers three types of factors of migrants' attachment to the host society – economic incorporation, civil inclusion, and social connectedness – while also accounting for migrants' ties to their homelands. The results of multivariate analyses point to the importance of sector and type of employment, income, legal status, experience of ethnically motivated harassment, and social ties to adults relatives and friends in the host society in shaping return plans. In contrast, connections in the home country do not appear to influence the likelihood of having plans to return. These findings are contextualized within the political, socioeconomic, and ethnocultural reality of the post‐Soviet world and related to the cross‐national scholarship on return migration.     

塔吉克斯坦留学生在延庆感受冬奥氛围

2022年北京冬奥会已进入倒计时阶段,为展现广大首都女性“参与冬奥、奉献冬奥、服务冬奥”的美好愿望,弘扬和平、友谊、团结的奥运精神,《2021她的北京》专题片以“她与冬奥”为主题,邀请塔吉克斯坦留学生美荷和北京冬奥会高山滑雪裁判郭军华,共同感受此时的北京冬奥节奏,共同表达中外姐妹手牵手、一起向未来的美好愿望。     

Contextualizing Migrants' Strategies of Seeking Medical Care in Russia*

Russia is an important destination for labour migrants from the former Soviet Union republics especially Central Asian low‐income countries: Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The life of migrants from Central Asia is characterized in Russia by scarce resources and social exclusion. Limited access to healthcare is aggravated by the negative attitudes and discrimination that migrants face when visiting state hospitals and clinics. In our study, we aim to describe the medical infrastructure available to migrants in Moscow. We investigate how migrants use formal and informal strategies to overcome the barriers to their receiving medical care in the urban environment. The study is based on the analysis of qualitative interviews with 60 labour migrants from Central Asian countries and 23 caregivers working in Moscow‐based medical facilities such as state hospitals, outpatient clinics, ambulance stations, and private medical centres including the so‐called Kyrgyz clinics.     

Teaching economics across cultures: challenges and lessons learned in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan

Nine years of experience teaching economics in the Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan provides knowledge on the nuances and challenges of teaching economics across cultures. Particular categories and difficulties are presented with some examples of how to address them. Conclusions and findings are used to form general guiding principles for teaching economics in the increasingly diverse US classroom. The principles offered in the paper are valuable to English speakers providing economic teaching and training in post-Soviet nations and, more broadly, to anyone teaching economics across cultures. Finally, suggestions based these principles are offered to encourage all professors of economics to carefully consider language, illustrations, diversity of views regarding economics and the multi-cultural nature of university classrooms to better relate to students and be more effective teachers.     

Eastern Europe and Community of Independent States

This article reviews the literature on migration, HIV/AIDS, and sexually transmitted diseases in Eastern Europe and the Community of Independent States (CIS): Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the former Yugoslavian countries; and Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. There is little in-depth research on the prevalence of HIV/AIDS. After the collapse of the USSR, the opening up of borders presented greater options for the spread of HIV. During 1991-1996, HIV-infected persons increased from 0.3/100,000 to 7.8/100,000. Syphilis and gonorrhea also spread in the 1990s. The increased prevalence is attributed to changes in sexual behavior due to increased travel and migration, disruption among families, and changes in sexual mores; and changes in the structure, availability, and effectiveness of health services. Many migrants in the CIS are young people. Mobile populations in the CIS include labor migrants, refugees, persons displaced by armed conflicts, repatriates, forced migrants, resettlement of formerly deported persons, and ecological migrants. It is general knowledge that migrants are poorly informed about HIV/AIDS. Condoms are not readily available in the CIS. Eastern Europe has high rates of HIV among migrant sex workers.     

How people with disabilities experience programs to prevent intimate partner violence across four countries

Women with disabilities are more vulnerable to violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV), yet the majority of emerging IPV prevention programs fail to explicitly consider the needs of participants with disabilities. Women and men living with disabilities engaged with IPV prevention programs in four countries were interviewed to explore how disability shaped their experiences of gender, violence, IPV, and whether the programs met their disability related needs. In-depth interviews were conducted with 16 women and 15 men living with disabilities in Ghana, Rwanda, Tajikistan and South Africa. The data were analysed thematically and compared across the settings. Participants described experiencing disability-related stigma, discrimination, exclusion, and for women, increased vulnerability to IPV. Barriers to full participation in programs included limited accessibility, and lack of disability-specific materials, recruitment or outreach. Enablers of inclusion included recruitment and monitoring strategies aimed at people with disabilities, partnering with a local disabled people’s organization, training staff in disability inclusion, and raising awareness of disability rights. The data encouragingly suggests that inclusion of women and men with disabilities in IPV prevention programs designed for the general population has beneficial outcomes. Inclusion can prevent violence, promote their wellbeing, support economic empowerment, and challenge disability-related stigma and discrimination.     

Steering the Poverty‐Environment Nexus in Central Asia: A metagovernance analysis of the Poverty‐Environment Initiative (PEI)

The close and reciprocal ties between poverty and environmental degradation present significant potential for simultaneous improvement of the livelihood of the poorest along with increased opportunities and enhanced resilience of the environment and natural resources. By supporting governments and other stakeholders in designing and implementing development plans that tackle environmental and poverty concerns in a joint manner, the globally operating UNDP‐UNEP Poverty‐Environment Initiative (PEI) addresses a major governance challenge for sustainable development (SD) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in particular. Focusing on Central Asia, and specifically Tajikistan, a country outside the spotlight of studies concerned with SD governance mechanisms, and through the analysis of PEI programme documents and stakeholders’ interviews, this article probes into the governance and governance co‐ordination (metagovernance) settings for SD. The article closes by presenting a set of recommendations to improve governance co‐ordination, while achieving more inclusive decision‐making and ultimately increasing the impact of PEI on the society and the environment. Specifically, it argues for improved information policy and enhanced integration of endogenous knowledge. Furthermore, national and local development planning and private initiatives should be better linked, and the different levels of governance for poverty‐environment mainstreaming should be more coherent. The solutions discussed are of relevance for wider Central Asia and the global community engaged in moving the SDGs into the mainstream of governance and policy frameworks.     

Inside the Revolution: Power,Sex, and Technique in Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis”

ABSTRACT

This essay situates Freud’s “‘Wild’ Analysis” in its local and global histories, even while reading it for what it can tell us about psychoanalysis now. Even as it is taken on its own terms, this essay serves also as a means to consider psychoanalysis as host to crucial tensions, its ideas and their relation to technique, its traffic in power, and sexuality and the primal crime. Using a clinical vignette, the essay argues the heterogeneity and multiplicity inherent to psychoanalysis are a gift to later generations, even if they made trouble for Freud. In celebration and critique, it examines, in effect, where Freud was and where psychoanalysis is now.     

Averting the Gaze: Gender and Power on the Perfumed Picket Line

This paper argues that the interplay of masculinity as a social construction, masculinism as an ideology, and patriarchy as a political system is grounded in the ontological condition of anxiety as a response to undecidability. Gender differences initiate the desire to resolve the ambiguities and incompletenesses experienced through the lack of the Other. In phallogo-centrism this means the masculinist claim to dominate and legislate epistemologically — to determine meaning for others and resolve, deny, or banish ambiguity. This resolution is, of course artificial and embodies within it fear and anxiety because of its own contingency. This condition then emerges in particular situations and events where the resolution of ambiguity is problematic. The paper takes the managerial problems experienced during the strike by Cathay Pacific Airways flight attendants as one such example. Tensions between emotional display and rational argumentation in the strike turned the status quo on its head. Management mounted an emotional defence of its position in language which evoked rationality but which was not itself a rational argument, revealing its origins in anxiety and the true fragility of its position. Flight attendants turned the seductive skills which company training had developed into an effective weapon to mobilize public opinion. Management were faced, not by the look or averted gaze of the normally supine stewardesses, but the committed, articulate, organized and consolidated stare of rebellious employees who had re-eroticized the workplace as a power play.     

When government used publicity against itself: Toledo's Commission of Publicity and Efficiency, 1916–1975

In early 20th century America, the Progressive Movement sought to fight corruption and graft in city governments through publicity. The usual approach was to establish a nonprofit bureau of research or efficiency that would investigate city government and publicize the results. However, in Toledo (OH), that bureau was a government agency and was also publisher of the official city gazette. Was the public sector affiliation of the Toledo Commission of Publicity and Efficiency a fatal flaw? This inquiry concludes that the Toledo bureau was as effective as its nonprofit counterparts. Contrary to the dogma of Progressive Era reformers, a public agency dedicated to reform could successfully use publicity against its own government to accomplish reform.     

Records on Nationalist and Opposition Movements in Late Imperial Russia: The Police Fonds of the State Archives of the Russian Federation

This article examines collectivization as a crucial aspect of the Soviet state’s ambitious effort to “Sovietize” its postwar western borderlands. Given the enormity of this task, the state leaned heavily on local agitators to convince residents to join the farms, and to manage the farms and their workforce. This put heavy responsibility on local activists to get results, but it also gave them power. This article provides a microhistory of these dynamics in the Transcarpathian village of Bila Tserkva. Faced with a failing collective farm and increased state scrutiny in 1949, village activists blamed the local Jehovah’s Witness community for allegedly subverting a successful collectivization effort. In reality, religion provided convenient scapegoats for villagers and the state to disguise a broader indifference and animosity to Sovietization. This case study demonstrates that state control of its borderlands was limited and dependent upon locals for information and the projection of power.     

Political Narratives and the Production of Legitimacy: The Case of Corruption in Post-Mao China

China watchers have predicted that corruption would lead to a crisis for the ruling regime. Instead, the Chinese Communist Party has somehow managed to retain and even strengthen its political legitimacy. This article analyzes corruption not as a crime or a political problem but as a topic of political narratives, thereby revealing the political processes which led to this result. This study, based on interviews and archival data, examines narratives on the topic of corruption produced in the post-Mao era by the ruling regime and political dissidents in their struggle to influence the populace's views on political legitimacy. In the 1980s, disgruntled intellectuals drew upon the traditionalist collective narrative of corruption to teach citizens to blame the leadership and the structure of the government for social problems, essentially rewriting the narratives used to assess and judge the regime. In doing so, they successfully threatened the political authority of the Party-state. However, in the 1990s, China's leaders and the official media revised the story of corruption so that the Party-state battled corruption on behalf of its citizens in order to bring them economic opportunities, rising living standards, and social stability. In these new narratives, the role of the state was no longer that of ideological or moral leadership, but of economic management. Through these narratives of economic management, the regime managed to control the corruption crisis and recapture its political legitimacy, but was also forced to deal with the consequences of this new vision of state-society relations.     

Crisis communication in higher education: The use of “negotiation” as a strategy to manage crisis

This case study examined the crisis response strategies of Louisiana State University after its women's head basketball coach resigned amid charges of inappropriate conduct with former basketball players. This case study draws on relationship management and negotiation as the theoretical lens to examine the efforts of the University in managing relationships and restoring its image. Data for this study was collected through opened-ended questionnaires from students, faculty, and staff at the University. The findings from this study indicate that the good reputation of the University was responsible for the positive evaluation of the crisis management. In addition, results from this study suggest that “negotiation” can play an important role in managing a crisis when the conflicting parties are not willing to participate in a dialogue.     

Theology of liberation and some problems of religious change in Brazil

It has been said that in Brazil the Catholic Church, by the adoption of the Theology of Liberation, chose the poor, but the poor chose the ever growing churches and sects of Pentecostal derivation. This paradox haunts the sociology of religion, in Brazil and elsewhere. This paper suggests to its solution a hypothesis inspired by Weber's ‘Religious Directions of the World and their Directions’ (the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’).The social, political and economic efficacy of a given religious movement is essentially linked to its theodicy. In other words, the passage of religion to politics, if understood as the exit from religion as allegedly motivated by religion itself, involves a contradiction as it implies the elimination of its basic religious motivation. The inner-worldly success of a religious tendency depends, therefore, on the persistence of a properly religious ‘rejection of the world’. In fact the whole of the Theology of Liberation movement falls under a certain cognitive penumbra, a kind of theological and philosophical syncretism, which constitutes both its main strength and its main weakness.     

COVID-19 Pandemic and Non-standard Employees in Japan

This article aims to grasp the influence of the pandemic on standard and non-standard employees in Japan and clarify its disparity between them. In 2020, there was an imbalance between the slight increase in standard employees and the massive loss of non-standard employees in the labour market. Non-standard employees' working hours were greatly reduced, often without allowances for absence, and hence their monthly income considerably diminished. As a result, their well-being also declined. Thus, the pandemic has affected employment, and its impact has been felt most strongly by non-standard employees. This does not mean that there is no discriminatory treatment of non-standard employees in firms. However, a closer look at the real picture reveals a variety of factors. In addition to the discriminatory treatment that is related to the Japanese employment system, a combination of managerial factors such as the shortage of standard employees, practical factors such as differences in wage systems, and the lack of sufficient information about the expansion of the coverage of the Employment Adjustment Subsidy, have placed non-standard employees at a huge disadvantage.