Internal migration and the population registration system in post-socialist Kyrgyzstan: Revealing a new spatiality of discrimination

 

Enacted throughout the former USSR to fulfil the demands of a planned economy, the propiska – a form of residence permit and population registration system – was designed to restrict any form of mass migration from rural areas to cities.  Despite sustained attempts to reform its economy, and shed other aspects of its socialist past, Kyrgyzstan retains key elements of this legal relic.  In my paper, I argue that this fusion of continuity with so-called “transition” in Kyrgyzstan reveals a new form of discrimination that is inherently spatial.  Using the analytical framework of legal geography, I illustrate that this form of discrimination is only visible, however, when one goes beyond examining official sources of law and instead focuses on the quotidian practices of internal migrants and how they experience and produce law. 

Population registration systems are often targeted by academics, international organisations and human rights’ groups alike for continuing to restrict freedom of movement within post-socialist states (Schaible, 2001; Amnesty, 2008; OSCE, 2009).  While I baulk at refuting this observation, I aim to offer a more nuanced perspective by demonstrating the contemporary role that property rights play within Kyrgyzstan’s registration system and, in particular, the distinction that the law imposes between ownership and renting property. A combination of Kyrgyzstan's transitional property regime with inherited state apparatus from the former USSR that restricted migration creates an interface where the continuing meets the transforming.  A new spatiality of discrimination towards internal migrants emerges at this interface that raises fundamental and contemporary challenges in respect of human rights as well as for migration and post-socialist studies in general.