Migration and Welfare Austerity

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, residents of Alma, a village in Kyrgyzstan, were faced with many challenges. Economic crisis and the elimination of welfare support forced an entire generation to become labour migrants in Russia. Those ‘left behind’ were sustained by migrants’ remittances and charitable activities, but at a cost. As villagers built upon existing kinship structures to create new practices of mutual aid on the lines of Islamic teaching, they suffered from the ‘dark side of kinship.’ This book shares experiences of people in Alma and its Moscow-based diaspora and how they created a ‘moral economy of migration’ that became territorialised as kindship was de-territorialised.