(In)Visible Inequalities: War-Induced Migration from Russia to Neighboring Countries and Access to Resources through Mutual Support Infrastructures

In his book on transnational social spaces, Thomas Faist (2000) rightly pointed out that network theory as applied to migration says little about the content of resources inherent in migrants’ social ties. The content of the resources that make up the webs of migrants' transactions is the accumulation of economic and social capital, as well as access to information necessary for employment. According to Faist, if migration scholars strive to go further than network theory allows, they need to pay more attention to how the (un)equal access to designated resources generates obligations, reciprocity and solidarity. Since the publication of Faist’s book, migration studies have undergone an infrastructural turn. This turn consisting of a focus on cross-border assemblages that facilitate mobility, has clearly enabled a step beyond network theory. Within the infrastructural turn, however, the issue of social inequality and power dynamics seems to be somewhat overshadowed by the material and technical dimensions of transnational social spaces.

This paper aims to draw attention to how inequalities in access to resources are arranged in relation to migrant infrastructures, and how relationships of obligation, reciprocity and solidarity operate accordingly. Drawing on the existing literature on privilege and precarity within the war-induced migration of Russian citizens to neighboring countries, as well as the author’s own ethnographic research conducted in Kazakhstan, the paper will focus on the following question. What can the study of Russian migrant infrastructures reveal about configurations of privilege/precarity at different levels: a) within migrant communities; b) between migrants and those in Russia with whom they maintain ties; c) between migrants and citizens of the countries they are in; d) in the contrast between migration from Russia and expatriate mobility along the global North / global South axis?