Elizabeth Humphrey1; 1 London School of Economics, UK
Discussion
Much international relations scholarship considers ‘transnational’ labour emigration as fundamentally at odds with the coherent and territorial bounded state. In contrast, this paper considers the case of mass Tajik labour emigration as constitutive of a collective migration imaginary that powerfully binds together the (re)production of statehood with the increasingly globalised commodification of temporary migrant labour – with implications for the nature of this statehood across territorial spatialities. The paper first places the case in historical context, exploring how twentieth century practices of labour migration and Soviet resettlement played a key role in connecting emergent Tajik ethno-nationhood with the formation of the modern Taijk state. I go on to argue that this past rendered imaginable a modern spatially-extended mobility imaginary upon which the modern Tajik state relies – one that is grounded in extra-territorial labour productivity and migration, and that is materially reinforced by physical flows of migrants and money. By demonstrating how material and ideational practices of labour across territorial borders are rendered part-and-parcel of a shared Tajik imaginary, I question the common assumption that so-called ‘transnational’ imaginaries and practices necessarily undermine the coherence of the nation-state and show ways that the state may in fact feed off of deterritorialized citizen practices.
