by Dildora Karimova, Lecturer in Law at Westminster International University in Tashkent

Good part of the day or Merhabalar!

Intro: My name is Dildora Karimova, I am a lecturer at the Westminster International University in Tashkent and I teach two subjects, these being Public International Law and Corporate Crime. In the framework of the Central Asian Law Project my first secondment period was July-August of 2021. Our team was hosted by Marmara University in Istanbul. 

Personal Experience: For me going to Turkey was very exciting, since I had had a chance of living in Ankara for 7 years before and I was eager to go back again. As a mother of two (6 and 2,5 y.o. at the time) I could not leave my children behind and had to travel with them. I think, travelling for work or leisure is a completely different experience for women and men 😀 My first concern was how to balance work and kids. Fortunately, we managed to find a private kindergarten which still enrolled our children despite the summer break. So, my children learned some Turkish too and had a lovely experience of discovering a new country and people. 

Research experience: Being a city that 16 times bigger in area and 8 times more populated than Tashkent, Istanbul has excellent public transportation facilities which are quite easy to navigate and very convenient and all the public facilities were constantly sanitized, and mask regime was quite strict, so we felt safe regardless of whether we were at work or shopping groceries or hopping from bus to subway. From the place of our stay, we had several alternative ways to travel to the Marmara University Goztepe Campus. There were buses, metrobuses, metro and dolmush circulating frequently and without delays.

Istanbul welcomed us with its hot summer and fresh sea breezes, friendly and warm people, summer sales, delicious food and amazing views. This stay will certainly be a sweet nostalgy added to our memory thrift-box.

The topic of my research is “Perspectives of introducing corporate criminal liability in Uzbekistan in the example of the crime of bribery”. The research is concerned with studying whether there is a need in introducing corporate criminal liability into the new Criminal Code of Uzbekistan which is at the stage of development. International organizations, including UNODC, in their reports are indicating that as the next stage of complying with international obligations under the Convention against Corruption, Uzbekistan needs to introduce corporate criminal liability to the crimes related to corruption, such as bribery.

Since Turkey is a civil law country which did not introduce corporate criminal liability and is a member of the UN Convention as well and many cultural and social aspects are similar to Uzbek, I believe, the secondment destination was relevant and to the point.

Another factor that contributed to the overall positive experience was that I am fluent in Turkish and had no language barrier and language was not an obstacle at all. So, range of the specialists that I could interview was not limited only to those who spoke English.

However, due to the summer break and the famous virus there were not many colleagues available at Marmara University or in general at other universities in Turkey. I tried to contact the experts in the area, such as Prof. Bahadir Ozturk from Istanbul Kultur Universitesi. I have managed to get an interview from a source working in the Prosecutor’s office who requested to stay anonymous.

Overall, it was evidenced that despite some strong arguments in favor of introducing corporate criminal liability in Turkey, the system is not considering it in the near future.

Future Plan: The next step in my plan is to interview some experts and business community in Uzbekistan to forecast the perspectives of CCL introduction more accurately.

Acknowledgment: Using this opportunity, I would like to thank Marmara University for their warm welcome and a nice room with all the amenities and Central Asian Law Project team for organizing our trips.

Carlo Nicoli Aldini, a project assistant in the Central Asian Law Project, has just been offered a PhD position at the Agenda 2030 School at Lund University. Carlo was chosen at the end of a selection process which consisted of 182 applications for two positions. We asked Carlo to describe his research interests and PhD project:

“I was born in Bologna, Italy, where I received a law degree in 2014. I then worked for approximately three years as a legal consultant in the corporate law sector, and then quit the profession as I was looking for a different, more scholarly way to “make sense” of my legal knowledge. I thus embarked on a three-year back-in-school journey, and I first obtained an LL.M. (Master of Laws) degree from Cornell Law School in 2019, and then a Master of Science degree in the Sociology of Law from Lund University in 2021. These degrees have helped me to expand my knowledge on law and to problematize its presence and impact in society. In particular, I have developed research interests on legal pluralism and its intersection with legal culture and legal consciousness. Generally put, I am interested in understanding (1) how multiple legal systems coexist in the same social arena, how they interact, change, and influence one another; (2) how these interactions vary across cultures and political contexts; and (3) what role individuals’ agency plays in these processes.  

These interests of mine are reflected in my PhD project, which aims to comprehend how populations who have been invested by environmental tragedies have relied upon law(s) as a tool of social resilience, and how these practices vary from democratic to authoritarian political regimes. More specifically, I have designed a comparative study of Italy and Uzbekistan, respectively a democratic and an authoritarian regime, which have both been a theater of an environmental disaster in recent years. On the one hand, Italy houses the largest steel factory in Europe, ILVA, whose pollution has devastated the city of Taranto and substantially increased the rate of death by cancer of the local population. On the other hand, Uzbekistan is home to the Aral Sea, once the fourth biggest lake on Earth, which has dramatically reduced its size due to the drainage of water from its two tributaries decided during the Soviet planning of the cotton economy. The choice of Uzbekistan and Italy is also informed by the fact that both countries display traits of legal pluralism, and thus my analysis aims to understand how practices of social resilience are shaped by norms coming from multiple legal systems (both institutional and informal). The intention with my study is, therefore, to grasp how the local populations have relied upon law(s) to resist, adapt, and create new opportunities in the face of environmental tragedies, and to ultimately understand how these practices vary depending on the existing political regime.

My PhD project is funded by the Faculty of Social Science at Lund University, and it is part of the Agenda 2030 School, which aims to create multidisciplinary knowledge to foster the implementation of the UN’s Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals.”

By Khasan Sayfutdinov, Senior Lecturer in Law at Westminster International University in Tashkent.

I had an opportunity to do my secondment in Goztepe Campus of Marmara University. As a public university, Marmara University is the second oldest university of Turkey founded in 1883 after Istanbul University. On our first day in the university campus, we have been given the office room in the Faculty of Economics. The hospitality of the faculty was on a high level. The dean of school, Prof. Dr. Sadullah Çelik introduced us to the faculty members and provided all necessary documents for accessing the facility in the university territory. We have been given access to the university webmail and intranet. The members of the faculty were always ready for assistance from the first day of our secondment. Both academic and technical staff helped to get settled in the office.

About Research 

My research topic is about legitimate expectations of investors in the host country. In the last ten years, the topic “Legitimate expectations” was widely discussed by prominent scholars of international investment and trade law. One of the first scholars interested in the origin and limits of legitimate expectation was the publication by Michele Potesta (2013). His research included most cases from investment arbitration, where the author criticizes the inconsistency in the interpretation of legitimate expectations as the component of FET standards. The paper also included the analysis of the national administrative law systems and the EU framework, intending to grasp the common features of protection of expectations under those systems. The recent publication by Wonkaew (2019) challenged the theory of legitimate expectations and suggested his approach, which is called reliance theory. Wonkaew suggests that promissory obligations lead to a different understanding of legitimate expectations. The proposed analytical framework is based on three conceptions. First, the promise as a willful act to undertake an obligation leads to a restrictive, state-centric view of legitimate expectations. The second category of promise is employed as an intention to create expectations that allow the non-binding, voluntary conduct of the state as the basis for an obligation. The third type of promise is conduct that induces reliance offers a flexible framework for balancing the investor’s conduct and the investor’s expectations. During my research stay in Istanbul, I have also researched the legal stability approach in the local legal system. The degree of changes in the local foreign direct investment law and regulations in property law were also researched.

The secondment provided me with an opportunity to formulate my analytical framework and questionnaire for conducting the interview with stakeholders in Uzbekistan. I have discussed my research questions with colleagues at Marmara University. During the secondment, my research also benefitted from data collection on legal stability in the local (Turkish) law and regulations in the field of property law. Legal expectations and legal stability are closely connected, and some local authors found interesting findings in the area.

Accommodation 

I have found accommodation in the Bomonti neighbourhood in the Sisle district . Sisle is one of the largest districts in Istanbul. Even though it does not have access to the sea , the entire area is very modern with developed infrastructure. Bomonti neighbourhood also hosts expats who work in Istanbul where you can get feedback about their experience in the city. Sisli is one of the major districts of Istanbul on the European side of the city. Although not by the sea, it’s located at the exit from the Bosphorus Bridge that links Asia to Europe.

Getting around 

Metrobus and Metro are the best option for getting around the city. I have used Metrobus for commuting. Every passenger should use Istanbul Card, which has linked with a Hayat Eve Sigar (HES) code for inner-city public transportation and inter-city bus travel.

Covid Measures 

Turkey lifted intercity travel ban and restrictions on urban public transport and the country returned to regular working order in public institutions and organizations from July 1, 2021. 

As a foreigner, I registered in the system and received an HES code before we started our journey to Istanbul. In the public areas, everybody followed the mask rule, and I felt safe during my stay 

Weekends 

On the weekends, I have visited the historic places in the Istanbul. The best time for walking around in the tourist areas was between 6 to 8 in the morning.

References:

1. Potestà, Michele. “Legitimate expectations in investment treaty law: understanding the roots and the limits of a controversial concept.” Icsid Review 28.1 (2013): 88-122.
2. Wongkaew, Teerawat. Protection of legitimate expectations in investment treaty arbitration. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

By Carlo Nicoli Aldini and Gian Luca Traverso

In this blog post we recount an incident that recently occurred to us, regarding our tenancy agreement in Tashkent. Before narrating the events, however, we consider it necessary to clarify the reason why this story is worth sharing, that is, we deem it to be an excellent example of the blurry lines that separate formal law and informalities. While we admit that, throughout the entire incident, we felt an uncomfortable sense of fragility regarding our rights as tenants, we feel it important to clarify that we have not decided to write this post to vent these feelings out and thus criticize Uzbek legal culture. Rather, we believe that what occurred to us was a thought-provoking experience that, once again, enabled us to reason over the sociology of law and its analytical value. Let us now turn to the story.

A couple of weeks ago, during an ordinary day at the Academy, we received a call from our landlady’s son. He wanted to let us know that he needed the apartment we are renting in Tashkent, saying that he got covid and therefore he needed the flat to isolate himself; he would have given us four days to leave. Considering that we have a regular contract, such an unexpected call was a bit awkward to us, and we informed our supervisor at the Academy. As soon as we informed him about our situation, we had the impression that he was not particularly surprised but, at the same time, immediately wanted to help us out and thus asked us to provide him with the written contract. Once at home, we found the agreement and we sent it back to our supervisor. After a quick translation from Russian, with the help of our supervisor’s assistant, we found that the contract clearly stated that none of the parties have the right to terminate it unilaterally. The day ended with a slight sense of precariousness, but also with curiosity about what was happening beyond our sight. Thinking that we could have possibly left our flat in three days, we went to bed. The next day, we found out that the landlady instructed the real estate agency to provide us with a new apartment. We got a call from the real estate agent who explained to us that, despite our efforts to enforce the contract, we had to leave the apartment. The quarrel seemed closed and, to our bewilderment, it seemed that we had to find a new home. We called our supervisor to inform him about this development, but he communicated to us that discussions over our tenancy were still open. After less than an hour, our supervisor called us again saying that the situation unravelled in our favour; immediately afterwards we received apologies both from the landlady and the real estate agent. Thankfully, then, we managed to keep our suitcases unpacked and Gian Luca’s Netflix account signed-in on the smart TV in our living room. However, while this incident did not alter the social and legal arrangements between us and our landlady eventually, we argue that this positive outcome was the result of the interplay between multiple socio-legal phenomena, which we briefly describe in the following.

To begin with, when the landlady’s son called us to claim the possession of the apartment, he relied upon his social position and condition (i.e., son of the landlady, physically ill with covid) to provide a justification to his request. This behavior seemed to us an example of a with the law practice, to use Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) terminology. As they argue in their seminal work on legal consciousness The common place of law, Ewick and Silbey claim that individuals can consider the law as a game, and accordingly play with it by relying upon personal capital. Individual resources (social, cultural, economic) can in fact help to stretch the law’s boundaries to blend them to one’s personal goals. In this case, the landlady’s son used his social capital as a means to sustain his right to terminate the contract.

On the other hand, we too engaged in this game, by means of using two essential tools. First, we immediately relied upon our social capital as well. As two foreigners in Uzbekistan, our first instinct was to seek the help of those people who had helped us adjusting to the country, i.e., the supervisor and staff at the Academy. Subsequently, however, we also resorted to the written contract as a tool to claim our rights as tenants. During our phone conversation with the real estate agent, in fact, we constantly mentioned the fact that, since we had signed a written contract, the landlady did not have the right to terminate it so abruptly. We therefore “played the law game” using a diverse set of tools, both social (our connections at the Academy) and legal (the letter of the tenancy agreement).

Considering that we were not present during the conversations among our supervisor, the landlady and her son, and the real estate agency, we do not know what kind of strategies they employed. In other words, we are not in the position of offering an ultimate answer surrounding what enabled us to remain in the apartment. Was it the formality of the law (i.e. the written tenancy contract) or, rather, the informality of our social connections?

Regardless of the answer, this incident testifies to the fact that legal and social phenomena are in a constant, and mutually changing, interaction. It is only by acknowledging and appreciating the nuances existing in our lifeworld, that we can indeed have a grasp of how normativity works.

References:

Ewick, Patricia, and Susan S. Silbey. 1998. The common place of law: stories from everyday life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

By Gian Luca Traverso and Carlo Nicoli Aldini

The last day in Samarkand was supposed to be a calm, relaxing day. We had already visited the most important sites in the city, so we did not have any particular place to go. We decided to go to Registan square at around 10 am, and we started to work outside, at the tables of a little lovely bar facing the astonishing view of Registan. After a while, we started to walk aimlessly in the alleys of the city centre behind the square, looking for a place to eat. Here the magic happened. During our aimless stroll, we stumbled into a group of elders who invited us to a wedding. That was not prepared, they did not know us, but still, they called us inside the inner courtyard, and we were immediately surrounded by a large crowd of people. Before we knew it, we realized that we were in the middle of a wedding feast.

There were a lot of children, one of them was 15-year old and spoke perfect English with an American accent as, to our surprise, he explained he lived in the US for six years. The courtyard was strictly divided between men and women, with a curtain hanging in the middle of the yard that separated them. It was difficult for us to understand the relationships between the guests: they were not all relatives; instead, they were neighbours, it seemed in fact that the entire neighbourhood was present. Even if it was difficult for us to grasp the precise network of relationships, it felt clear that, in that context, there was a strong feeling of kinship. We ate together with the men and some elders. Besides the 15-year-old kid we mentioned, there were two other English-speakers: one of them was a 16-year-old boy who studied to become an actor. After a big lunch, with a lot of plov, soup and vodka, attendees went outside to pick the bride from her house.

Accompanied by local folk music played by a fun loud band, we entered a little alley that was just a few steps away from the restaurant and stopped at the doorstep of what must have been the bride’s house. At this point, people started to engage in many rituals, which we observed curious and confused at the same time. First, several young men started to pull a rope to win it over the other contenders. They engaged in a kind of all-against-all tug-of-war, which escalated quickly as two of them started to confront each other in a fighting mode. Upon asking for explanations to the 15-year-old English speaking boy, we were told that the fight arose as both men lamented being skipped in the order that was supposed to be respected while pulling the rope. That explanation came as a surprise to us: what to us looked like a lawless fight over a rope, had instead a specific regulation over its performance. In any case, the fight was quickly sedated by the elders, who spoke to both men and found a way to conciliate the debate. Encouraged by the elders’ intercession, we could see the two men walking together along an alley close-by, finally exchanging their views on what had happened in a calm and peaceful manner. For us, it was very interesting to observe the role the elders had in resolving the fight and their authority over the youngsters. Their intervention indeed rapidly sedated the quarrel, and thus restored the order.

Meanwhile, music and dancing proceeded in front of the bride’s house, and many people encouraged us to enter. We were a bit sceptical at first, as we felt afraid of intruding in a very familial setting. Upon continuous invitations, we decided to enter the bride house where we saw the groom – clothed with a cloak and a traditional hat – and the bride standing in the corner of a little room, surrounded by many people including who we understood was the groom’s mother. Here again, we were able to see them performing a ritual. The groom’s mother was, in fact, reciting some words to the married couple, which we inferred were the duʿāʾ, as everybody was keeping their hands in the gesture Uzbek people usually have when praying Allah. We experienced this moment as the climax of the entire ceremony, and as soon as the recital was over, attendees started to leave as the wedding feast came to an end. Upon recognizing how lucky we had been to have had the unexpected opportunity to be part of such a special moment, we left too, not before having thanked everybody who had made us feel welcomed and included in this glimpse of Uzbek lifeworld.

On the train on our way back to Tashkent, we talked and thought a lot about what we had just witnessed. Sure enough, we had found a welcoming community, with deep-rooted costumes and traditions that heavily regulated the wedding ceremony. At the same time, as socio-legal researchers, we could not stop wondering about the nature of those rituals. Were they expressions of living law? What kind of relationships do these informalities have with Uzbekistan’s official laws on marriage? While we could observe a high degree of unspoken in our experience, including some gestures and behaviours that truly seemed to have some kind of normative force, it was still very difficult for us to draw a line between the blurry boundaries of law and custom, of seen and unseen. Upon sharing our experience with lawyers at the Academy of the General Prosecutor’s Office where we both do research at the moment, we were informed that, as per Uzbek state law, the wedding must be registered at a public registry. However, this mere fact does not answer our questions, because our observations are increasingly suggesting to us that, in Uzbek society, the unseen customs might still have more normative force than the state law.

“Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights;
it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”
(Mary Ritter Beard)

1. Merhaba!

Hello, everyone. My name is Nilyufar Abdulatova; being a member of a research team of Westminster International University in Tashkent (WIUT), I had a chance to spend few months in one of the most beautiful countries, Turkey, within the framework of the project (Central Asian Law: Legal Cultures and Business Environments in Central Asia: 870647). Using this blog post as an opportunity, let me share my experience about research and life in Turkey, particularly in Istanbul, where I was hosted as a research fellow by the friendly academic team of Marmara University.

To begin with, let me provide a brief overview of my research project. My research focuses on the energy sector, one of the underresearched topics in the context of Uzbekistan, particularly from a legal perspective. The need for empirically-grounded research on this topic is high considering the recent legal and political reforms in the energy sector of Uzbekistan. In this respect, my research project on “The Principle of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources as a Booster of Legal Accountability and Transparency Norms in the Energy Sector”  is very timely and addresses the research gap regarding the principles of good governance in natural resources management in Uzbekistan. My secondment at Marmara University provided me with unique opportunities to further develop and fully concentrate on my research: to collect primary data, meet experts, academics, and use facilities of partner universities.

2. Research stay on two continents or cats lovers’ paradise.

During the research stay in Istanbul,  my everyday reality is suspended for two months. Being located in Istanbul, the significant distance from lecturing and teaching responsibilities, produces a relaxed environment. This allows me to explore a new international academic environment, experience a different part of the world (I lived in the European part and worked in the Asian part of Istanbul), and meet new people. The çay (tea) breaks, nice talks and never repeated walks around the city inspired me to work on my research project with full enthusiasm and passion. There was no need to wait for inspiration because the inspiration was my satellite.

Because the inspiration is Istanbul – the city of universal beauty. You do not track time when you live and work in the cat lovers’ paradise (it is indeed the second name of this city). The same happened to me. Whenever I had a conversation with an expert at the Marmara University campus or an interview via Zoom with officials from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (Oslo, Norway), there was magic in the air of Istanbul. Of course, precautionary measures because of the Covid – 19 brought corrections to some plans related to the empirical part of the research. Still, the theoretical approach was not impacted under the sky of the Bosphorus, the meeting point of two different seas.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the project people (Dr. Rustam Urinboyev, Ms. Chekhros Kilichova and others) who made the research stay real and contributed to my research. I am pleased to convey my appreciation to Prof. Dr. Erhan Dogan and his team for providing all the necessary facilities to conduct my research in the most comfortable environment. Also, I would like to thank our WIUT research team (Mr. Alisher Pulatov, Mr. Khasan Sayfutdinov and Ms. Dildora Karimova) for their invaluable support during the research stay. They made this stay even more colourful and remarkable.

by Carlo Nicoli Aldini (Project Assistant at the Sociology of Law department of Lund University and Guest Researcher at the Academy of the General Prosecutor’s Office of Uzbekistan

I am writing my first blog post from Samarkand. It’s roughly 10 am and Gian Luca and I are having a coffee facing the astonishing beauty of the Registan. Gian Luca is a student at the Master of Sociology of Law, and he is doing his third semester curricular internship at the Academy of the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Uzbekistan, where I am seconded until December. This morning we woke up at dawn to come see the square under the soft sunrise light, which was a calm, powerful, and reinvigorating experience. It’s our third day in Samarkand and this town has conquered our hearts already.

From the perspective of two Italians doing research in Uzbekistan, this town is fabled and magic, a place we would have rarely imagined travelling to. But Samarkand and Uzbekistan alike are much more than an exotic destination for us: in these initial weeks, they have given us immense resources to think about the theories of the sociology of law that we studied on the books in Lund, Sweden. In this first post, I would like to share a reflection that Gian Luca and I had yesterday after visiting one of Samarkand’s landmark touristic destinations, the Shah-i-Zinda, a necropolis that includes a sequence of breathtakingly beautiful turquoise mausoleums.

At the entrance of the Shah-i-Zinda, one can find a banner that lists in Uzbek, Russian, and English the rules of behavior that visitors are expected to keep while wondering around the lapis lazuli-colored site. Here’s my picture of the panel:

Let us look at rule n. 8! It clearly states: Please, don’t put money on graves. Put money into donation boxes instead. However, despite the rule’s clarity, we barely found a grave without Uzbek soʻm banknotes on it. This was not a surprise to us: we discovered the same norm of behavior in many other mausoleums we had previously visited along our journey. Yet, this time we immediately noticed the stark contrast with the letter of the “official law” at the site’s gate.

Upon discussing the evident discrepancy between what the authority expects people to do, and how people really behave, Gian Luca and I agreed that there is one question that is essential to answer in order to comprehend the behavior of the visitors of Shah-i-Zinda: is leaving the money over graves an instance of disobedience (and thus a violation of state law), or is it an example of a different legality that shapes people’s behavior contextually to state law in the same, legally-plural, social arena?

This puzzle is truly a socio-legal one. Conceptually, it is indeed a representation of one of the evergreen debates of the sociology of law, namely the difference between the law-in-action and the living law (see e.g., Nelken 1984; Hertogh 2004). I am aware I cannot answer this question as I have not collected any data beside my observation: in order to provide a “thick description” (Geertz 1973) of what I had observed I would have had to, arguably, interview those visitors who left money over the graves in order to comprehend the reasoning behind their gestures. In socio-legal terms, I would have needed to investigate their legal consciousness.

For now, I am left with the awe of Samarkand’s beauty in my eyes and with the promise that my secondment in Uzbekistan will offer many more occasions to reason over these questions.

References.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation Of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Hertogh, Marc. 2004. A `European’ Conception of Legal Consciousness: Rediscovering Eugen Ehrlich. Journal of Law and Society 31 (4): 457–81.

Nelken, David. 1984. Law in Action or Living Law? Back to the Beginning in Sociology of Law. Legal Studies 4 (2): 157–74.

by Erhan Doğan (Professor at the Faculty of Political Science of Marmara University, Turkey).

Within the framework of the Central Asian Law Project that Marmara University has been a partner, I decided to go and make a solo research which fits into the project’s research objectives. The idea was simple, due to the language related barriers I decide to conduct interviews with Turkish businessman who invested in Uzbekistan. I was planning to ask them questions about their business and how they overcome the gap between the laws (de juro situations) and de facto situations.

I have arrived in Uzbekistan on 15th April in about five hours and on a comfortable flight with Turkish Airlines. When I arrived at the Tashkent Airport, I was asked to sign a paper by officials at the entry which stated that I understood and accepted that I will be in a self-imposed quarantine for 14 days. The host university that I was seconded to – Westminster International University in Tashkent (WIUT), was kind enough to send a person to meet me at the airport. Before my arrival they informed me about every detail of my settlement in Tashkent

The person who met me at the airport brought me to the University’s guest house that they had arranged for my stay. In the morning our local coordinator Alisher called me and kindly asked me if I needed anything.  

From the day arrived, I started contacting the people who I was supposed to interview. It seems that in Uzbekistan people did not take coronavirus as serious as we did in Turkey. People asked me to meet from the first day. I explained them I was under the quarantine rules. The university was quite serious on quarantine rules. They informed me that I should stay under quarantine till to the end of required 14th day. After that date I should have a coronavirus test which should show that I was coronavirus negative.  Only after I could prove that I was Coronavirus negative, they allowed me to join them at the university.

While I was waiting these 14 days to pass, I made some walks in the less crowded streets of the city while avoiding close contact with people. I always had my mask on. Most of the people in the streets either did not put on their masks or if they had it, it was either covering their mouth or nose only or none (simply sticked to their jaw). I concluded from what I observed and what I read that Uzbekistan went through “herd immunity” way and before I arrived, they almost developed a sort of collective immunity. This was understandable from the low infection numbers.  But later on, the other variants of the coronavirus hit Uzbekistan and I personally got sick too.

After the quarantine period was over. I took the test and it was negative. I went to the university. Our local Project leader Alisher introduced me to his colleagues. They were all welcoming and nice people. I started to learn what Uzbek hospitality was form the very first day at the university. Alisher also arranged a meeting with the University’s rector. I met the rector too and he was quite a welcoming person and supported the Project.

After I started to go to the campus, I started to do my interviews but then I had been informed by the University research unit that due to the nature of the topic and as it was including interviews, I needed to get an approval form the ethics committee of the university. I submitted an application to the ethics committee including a summary of my research and interview questions. Ethics committee investigated my case and provided me a letter that my research was in line with the ethical rules. With this letter in my bag, I felt more confident and started my interviews. During the interviews people were almost always without a mask. Even if I wore a mask, they were asking me to be relaxed and take my mask off. I was gently responding them that the mask was mainly for them, their answers were much more relaxed and they were insisting me to take my mask off.

My stay In Uzbekistan coincided with time of holiday season after the fasting month of Ramadan. I got used to the fasting month and the holiday in Turkey. During the holiday time (they call it “Fıtır Hayit”) I organized a visit to Samarkand and Bukhara. Two of the must-see cities of Uzbekistan. Visiting Samarkand and Bukhara is highly recommended. These visits showed me the wealth of Uzbekistan, how rich the history of the country was and the important role that this country has in the human civilization. Amir Timur, Avicenna, Ulugbek, Bakhauddin Naqshbandi, Imam Bukhari, Imam Matirudi were all from this land and these people are quite important for the history of human kind and history of Muslim societies. I am deeply impressed with the country’s history.

After my holiday visits to these two historical cities, I returned back to Tashkent and kept doing my interviews. During the early periods of these interviews, I was strict on coronavirus related warnings of authorities but after some time I relaxed my strict standards and at one point I got the coronavirus myself. It was a bad experience. I had the travel health insurance as per the project rules, with that insurance in my bag I had visited one of the good hospitals. They examined me and asked me to take some tests. I did the tests and I was corona positive. First three days were difficult due to the pains at my joints and feeling of fire on the skin of my arms and body. For the first 7-8 days I was relatively fine. For this period Doctor just gave me some vitamins. But at the 8th day I felt a difference. There was a different feeling at my upper back. Next day I went to the doctor. Doctor listened my lungs and asked me to have a CT image of my lungs. There he saw that 20% of my lungs were affected by the coronavirus. Doctor decided to start “remdesivir” treatment. The remdesivir treatment was already a difficult procedure in itself. I went to hospital each day and they gave me the medicine under the doctor’s supervision. After the third treatment dose, as soon as they gave me the medicine, my body responded with a temperature change.

During that period, I was a bit scared. I was thinking what I read from the media. I was concerned about my coming days. Will I have a breathing problem? What happens if I needed to be put into reanimation room? These were the thoughts that were occupying my mind. At the end of the remdesivir treatment, I had some additional tests and showed their results to the doctor. Doctor told me that I was cured but I was still carrying the virus.

It was a disappointing moment. I needed to be under quarantine for another 14 days. The doctor recommended me to inhale sodium bi carbonate. He said that that would kill the virus in my breathing system and the next test would turn to negative after a while. I did follow the doctor’s recommendations and my test turned to negative five days later. That was one of the happiest moments that I had. I even wrote to our Project coordinator that I was the first veteran of the Project who had the coronavirus and recovered from it.

In a nutshell, I can say that I am happy that I did this secondment to Uzbekistan despite the coronavirus part. Westminster University in Tashkent was quite a good host to me. I am impressed with their high teaching standards. Meanwhile I also arranged signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between my university (Marmara University in Istanbul) and Westminster University in Tashkent. I joined two conferences during my stay. One was about the sharing of teaching experiences during the corona time, organized by WIUT. It was an Internal workshop in which different WIUT members shared their own ideas and experiences to make teaching better during corona times I shared my personal experiences from Turkey as they asked me to contribute. My talk was welcomed by the audience. It was quite a good exercise for me. Later I joined an online conference organized by another Project partner from Uzbekistan, the Academy of the General Prosecutor’s Office of Uzbekistan. They asked me to make a speech about the methodology in social sciences. It was a too big topic. I made some preparation and delivered my speech on the methodology in social sciences. That talk was also a good exercise for me and it was welcomed by the audience as well.

Other than these two events, I tried to talk with every person that I engage including the hairdressers that I got service from, the shop that I made shopping, etc. Talking to people with the aim of learning from them on a special topic is one of the most important methods to enhance our knowledge about a society that we newly enter. I learned a lot. Every encounter and every talk created additional curiosity in me. There are much more to learn about this society.

Uzbek people are quite lovely. They are quite welcoming. During my stay I tried to talk to them in Turkish and they answered me in Uzbek and at the end we understood each other. So, in my opinion there is some Turkish within Uzbek language. Uzbeks who recognized that I am from Turkey brought the Turkish within the language forward and that was how we communicated. Feelings and emotions are transmitted more with gestures. But I have to admit that during my communications in Turkish-Uzbek axis many details were lost. It requires me to bring the Uzbek within Turkish forward, too. I guess I started to understand the Uzbek language better now.

I tried to build up bridges between Marmara University and WIUT so that in the future we can keep cooperating and learning from each other. This was my main intention which is in line with Project objectives. I am excited and already started to work on articles that I plan to compile and publish soon. I have done several formal interviews and many small talks with people who make business. They also count as interviews as I learned a lot on these small talks with people who make business in Uzbekistan. I remember my conversation with a barber shop. He told me many anecdotes about his experiences in Uzbekistan and they were highly relevant for my research, too. As these small talks are more informal, informants feel themselves much more relaxed and talk freely.

As the bigger project team, we even got an acceptance to an online conference that will be conducted by the Central Eurasian Studies Society at the Ohio State University this October. Me and other Project members will make some presentations about our conducted research. I will return to Turkey and start from where I left at Marmara University by 15^th September. I will miss my days in Tashkent.

While I was seconded in Tashkent, four WIUT researchers were seconded at Marmara University. With the help of our research assistants, I tried to organize their stay and make it as comfortable as possible. You will read their impressions from their own posts in these pages. What I heard from them so far is happily quite positive. This project structure is so well designed and it is helping us to establish some sustainable links for the future.

(The Service Course, 2021)

BY TOLIBJON MUSTAFOEV

This blogpost may be of interest to researchers who want to contemplate the nature and realities of conducting research fieldwork in a developing country with lower-middle income economy as Tajikistan (World Bank, 2019). It will also provide insights on the role of informal practices and norms in everyday life and in business dealings of the local people in Tajikistan. The blogpost is based on author’s findings from the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tajikistan, specifically in Dushanbe – the capital city, during June-July of 2021, in the frame of the Central Asian Law Project funded by the European Commission. The fieldwork consisted of semi-structured and informal interviews with more than 20 local people and business representatives who reflected on their daily lived experiences of the role of law and informality. The blogpost is divided into three parts which relies on my personal observations, interviews and the secondary data respectively: (1) general information about the country; (2) how informal practices are justified in the Tajik social context; (3) and the discussions of the legal informality in Tajikistan. 

What do we know about Tajikistan?  

It is a landlock, small country in Central Asia which became independent on 1 September 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  This country has a territory three times bigger than Denmark with a capital city in Dushanbe and nearly 10,000,000 residents. It borders with Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, China and Kyrgyzstan. Tajikistan is known as a homeland for Tajiks, who make up the majority of the population in the country where more than 98% of people are Muslims.

Interesting facts about Tajikistan:

1. 93% of the country’s territory is occupied by mountains and almost 6% of the territory of the republic is covered with glaciers.
2. Every year around 550-600 thousand of Tajiks leave the country in search of employment opportunities abroad, mainly in Russia and Kazakhstan (independent media, 2019; UNECE, 2011).
3. Tajikistan’s economy is mostly dependent on humanitarian aid, agriculture, services and remittances coming from Tajik workers in Russia that is estimated as making more than 26% of the total GDP of the country (The World Bank, 2020).
4. Dushanbe had the world’s tallest flagpole (165m) with the national three-color which was taller than the National Flag Square in Azerbaijan (162m), Panmunjeom Flagpole in Kijŏng-dong in North Korea (160) and the Ashgabad Flagpole in Turkmenistan (133m) until 2014 when Saudi Arabia constructed the flagpole (175m) in Jeddah.

(Flagpole in Dushanbe, Tajikistan)

Tajikistan is a full-presidential country with a head of the state Emomali Rakhmon who has been in power since 16 November 1994 as a result of his victories as a representative of the National-Democratic party in all last five presidential elections in Tajikistan (1994, 1999, 2006, 2013 and 2020). Mr. Rakhmon has extended his presidential powers by the nationwide constitutional referendums in 1999 and 2003 and who has been a lifelong holder of the title ‘Peshvoyi Millat’ since 2015 which means ‘Leader of the Nation’. Indeed, during my visit to beautiful capital city Dushanbe and Khujand it was impossible to ignore big portraits of the leader of the nation on almost every single state, educational or social buildings, parks and squares. My observations show that portraits on buildings have both cultural and social importance and are known as symbols of pride for the leader and the future of the country. In my perception, the biggest and the best aura fitting portrait was on the Soviet-style building that illustrates smiling state leader in the poppy field which I saw during my visit to the national park named after Kamoli Khujand in Khujand city.

(President in the poppy field, Khujand, Tajikistan)

In general, presidentialism in a state dominates the ideology of having the system of checks and balances by establishing two straight parallel lines known as presidency and legislature, but in practice Tajikistan applies full presidential control over the state policies, laws and development agenda. Tajikistan’s governance system is based on a Soviet-style heavy-handed bureaucracy which requires quite a much paperwork to be done before doing any business or getting any social benefits from the state organizations both for locals and foreigners. For instance, many informants during my fieldwork who represent the businesspeople of Tajikistan decided not to enlarge their businesses but rather stay in the middle-economy class of business entities because of the high level of bureaucracy and difficulties in complying with the laws and regulations governing the business activities. Due to complicated legal requirements and procedures, many businesses prioritize to operate in the realm of shadow economy where they have more flexibility. Correspondingly, default of the proper separation of powers in the public sector and stagnation of substantial decision-making authority in a narrow circle of political elites are currently challenging the business climate of Tajikistan .

How and why are informal practices justified in Tajikistan?

During the fieldwork in Tajikistan, I explored the interplay between law, informal practices and corruption, a common pattern which can be observed under the conditions of weak rule of law and corrupt legal systems. According to many informants I encountered during my fieldwork, informal practices and playing with the law in everyday life situations are pivotal to economic and social survival in the Tajik context and in many cases, they replace the legal norms and the state polity. Dysfunctional legal institutions and, poor governance and systematic corruption in both public and private sectors compel people to rely on informal practices which generate many interesting questions to be discussed in this blogpost.

My informants were diverse and represented small and big business holders, airport staff, social workers, café/restaurant and hotel employees, investors and public officials. As a legal ethnographer I was interested in understanding the different types of informal practices in business activities and moral frames used to justify people’s reliance on informality.  What I observed was that local people did not even view informality through legality lens because they considered informal practices and transactions as cultural and morally legitimate phenomena. Impossibility of making proper distinction between formal and informal practices led many to justify their illegal practices as commonly accepted norms which are convenient and effective in managing businesses and maintaining economic stability and social interactions of local people in Tajikistan. The instances of such illegal transactions included avoiding taxes, currency exchange in black market and paying unrecorded fees to individual inspectors from different state organizations are decriminalized by the social viewpoint.

To give an empirical flesh to my narrative, I present some intriguing stories from several informants who provided their own justification points and explanations for informal practices which they experienced in the past. Firstly, there is a case of a shopkeeper who claims to deceive the local police on daily bases as a response to their unplanned and unnecessary systematic inspections.  I am naming this informant as Akbar and he is 56 years old and has 15 years of work experience in Russia as a shopkeeper and has dual citizenship (Tajik and Russian), but currently resides in Dushanbe because of his mother’s health issues. He claims that apart from inspections from the tax office and the other relevant state bodies, he also experiences unclear and illogical product quality-control checks from local police inspectors, or as they are called in Russian uchastkoviy, even though these people have no legal authority or any document-based background for their actions.  As Akbar claims, he understands that uchastkoviy aims not to just inspect the quality but also get some products for free by abusing his power. As a result, Akbar reciprocates to uchastkoviy’s illegal actions by providing falsified documentation for the products he sells in the shop, because he buys most of the products for cash from the local bazaars and there is no legal documentation confirming neither quality nor quantity of his purchases. Akbar states that most of the uchastkoviy(s) get easily tricked due to their ignorance or incompetence. However, Akbar also mentions about the stavka, ‘rate’, that is fixed at 100 somoni, local currency which equals to approximately 10 USDs, and to be paid to experienced and persistent uchastkoviys.  Hence, this shopkeeper justifies his own illegal actions as a creative response to the illegal checks by the local police. Indeed, people obey law if they see a legitimate authority in it (Tyler,2006); but, apart from not believing in the protection by law, Akbar’s case shows how disorder (bardak) and corruption make it almost impossible to people to act fully legally, a pattern commonly observed in Central Asian societies (Urinboyev, 2019). 

Secondly, there is a case from Dushanbe regarding labor law in practice and how people ‘payback’ or ‘thank’ the employer for hiring them or at least giving a chance to be considered as an employee. Informant, whom I name as Ruslan, shared his process of getting employed as a head waiter in a hotel restaurant located in Dushanbe and introduced me to the cultural aspects of being thankful to his bosses for providing employment opportunities. Ruslan is a middle-aged man who has been working in the service sector for the last ten years in Tajikistan. After successful application review and interview he was invited for a week unpaid trial and upon its accomplishment he was officially hired. Regardless of the official employment status, he still was supposed to work the first month for free, because as he said it is a widespread cultural practice to not get paid for the first month out of thankfulness and respect to the hiring person or company.   This example shows that informal norms influence social behavior more forcefully than the state law in Tajik society, thereby showing the discrepancy between the law “in books” and “in action”.  Ruslan’s emic approach for conceptualizing the necessity and practicality of informal norms at workplace might be a sign “of cultural acceptability of corruption” (de Sardan, 1996; Blundo, 2008). However, as Bohn believes there are rational-choice corruptors who always have a societal-level-phenomena justification for their informal practices while dealing with public sector; the same rationalization of corrupt behavior might be applied in the case of individual-level, as of Ruslan’s (Bohn, 2013). Although, critics argue that none of social means or culture justifies corruptible ends (Busch and Palmas, 2017).

Illusional deception in bazaars: understanding systemic illegal practices in Tajikistan

For me there was a necessity to enter the field and make participant observation to understand the nature and the ways of bypassing the law by small and medium businesses. I frequently visited local bazaars to talk to respondents and observe the informal practices in their everyday transactions. During my visit to the biggest bazaar in Tajikistan which is located in Dushanbe and named ‘Korvon’, I conducted interviews with local shopkeepers. All of them had very small shops, approximately 3-4 sq.m., but they were mentioning hundreds of thousands of USDs as an annual cash flow from each shop. When I was wondering how they made this much profit from a very small shop in a lower-middle income economy country, they responded that the size of the shop was a illusional deception with only reason, that is to ‘’throw the dust in authorities’ eyes’’ because the bigger and more presentable the business is, more individuals from tax office and police want to have ‘dolya’ (share) from them. All informants from that market were keeping their goods in the basement storages to wholesale and retail them during the ‘night bazaars’ which stands for trading at night or very early morning. Therefore, the reasonings for the informal business transactions and such a social behavior were not any high tax rates or detrimental legal norms, but the threat of the systemic corruption and a possible abuse of power by local authorities. Even though, all informants mentioned that they still had to pay monthly ‘dolya’ to corrupt officials to be under their patronage for long-term financial and legal security.

Scholars believe that tax compliance in a social context might contradict the law enforcement standards because of the normative social behavior and individual economic incentives (Posner,1997,2000; Scoot, 2000). Bypassing legal taxation system might be possible if illegal benefit from violating the law exceeds the expected sanctions in a society as in Tajikistan where informal rules coexist alongside with state laws (Posner, 2000). However, if informal practices and illegal business practices prevail over law, then there might be a room for irreversible outcome for systemic corruption as it was observed and discussed in the ‘Korvon’ case.

Concluding remarks

My fieldwork to Tajikistan was very interesting and I truly experienced the hospitality of local people. There are some legal problems and social challenges concerning informality and corruption in Tajikistan, but all people I met were very optimistic about the future of their country. Further, I would like to thank all informants and people who decided to stay anonymous but helped me a lot with approaching respondents and explained me how social norms are constructed in Tajik society. This blogpost shares just the first insights of the fieldwork outcome and academic papers are planned to be published within the Central Asian Law Project based on fieldwork findings. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Academy of the General Prosecutors Office in Uzbekistan and the Sociology of Law Department of Lund University for hosting and supporting my research.

Reference list

Blundo, G. (2008). Hidden acts, open talks. how anthropology can “observe” and describe corruption. Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective. 27-52.

Bohn, S. (2013). Justifying corrupt exchanges: Rational-choice corruptors. Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft. 7. 159-182. 10.1007/s12286-013-0166-5.

Busch, Otto & Palmås, Karl. (2017). Social Means Do Not Justify Corruptible Ends: A Realist Perspective of Social Innovation and Design. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation. 2. 275-287. 10.1016/j.sheji.2017.07.002.

Olivier de Sardan, J.P. (1996). L’economie morale de la corrupsion en Afrique. Politique Africaine. 63: 98-106

Posner, E. (2000). Law and Social Norms: The Case of Tax Compliance. Virginia Law Review, 86(8), 1781-1819. doi:10.2307/1073829

Scott, R. (2000). The Limits of Behavioral Theories of Law and Social Norms. Virginia Law Review, 86(8), 1603-1647. doi:10.2307/1073826

Tyler, T. R. (2006). Why people obey the law. Princeton University Pres.

United Nations. (2011). International_Migration_Statistics_Practical_Guide. [ebook] Available at: <https://unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/stats/publications/RUS_International_Migration_Statistics_Practical_Guide.pdf>.

Urinboyev, R. (2019). Everyday Corruption and Social Norms in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan. (pp. 1-31). The Program on Governance and Local Development at the University of Gothenburg.

World Bank. (2019). World Bank Country and Lending Groups. Datahelpdesk.worldbank.org

World Bank. (2020). Personal remittances in GDP. Available at: <Personal remittances, received (% of GDP) | Data (worldbank.org)>.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DSC_9149_Valvet_Lund.jpg)

Berdymyrat  Ovezmyradov shares some information on life in Sweden for visiting researchers at Lund University. The blog post reflects only his personal subjective experience based on the secondment in 2020 – 2021. As such, this post cannot substitute official and up-to-date sources for foreign scholars planning a trip to Sweden, especially in times of changing regulations due to COVID-19. The practical information is shared in the hope that at least some part of it could be helpful for future scholars visiting Lund within the “Central Asian Law: Legal Cultures and Business Environments in Central Asia” project.

Before and right after arrival

Some of my colleagues in Lund previously made excellent posts about Lund and the university. In this blog post, I would like to focus on a narrow topic of selected practical aspects of living in Lund.

I was lucky in that I had already been within the EU with a visa allowing me to travel to Sweden after I received an invitation from Lund University to join the project. Therefore, the only major procedure I had to undergo for obtaining a Swedish residence permit after the online application was to visit the Immigration Service (Migrationsverket) in Malmö, which took just over an hour to reach from Lund. Understandably, the process would be more complicated and take much longer if an application from Central Asia was made outside the EU (possibly involving the Embassy of Sweden in Moscow).

Immigration procedures and travel restrictions in the EU countries could change several times and suddenly since the pandemic outbreak in 2020. Therefore, it is critical to start checking the regulations long before the planned departure and then keep checking for updates until the arrival date. By the way, purchasing long-term travel insurance could be much cheaper abroad than obtaining it later in Sweden (particularly if you are unable to get the local ID number).

More on the travel to and within Sweden later in a dedicated section further in this post.

Upon arrival, the next step should be visiting the Tax Office in Lund as soon as possible to apply for getting the personal Swedish ID number (personnummer). This magic number gives access to nearly all sorts of benefits that foreigners can enjoy for free (or subsidized) in Sweden: bank account, healthcare, language courses, loyalty cards at local stores, appointments at certain offices, and so forth. I should warn that late arrivals and other delays in applying for the ID number could make it impossible due to some minimum requirements towards stay in the country to obtain the number.

One of the most critical points I would like to emphasize here is applying to the correct type of visa or travel document – it had to be Residence Permits for Researchers.  This choice could sound obvious, but I could easily confuse it among the many types available in the online application system via the Swedish Migration Agency website if it weren’t for timely guidance by another researcher from Central Asia who arrived before me. And here comes the advice I would like to give all future researchers visiting host institutions abroad within our project: never hesitate to ask for consultations and other help from administrators, assistants, and other researchers in the project who already went through the related experience. Not only is this much easier and faster than trying to figure out everything by yourself, but it can also save you from making costly mistakes that would be very hard or impossible to fix later.

The principal investigator shared contact details with me that proved to be useful already before arrival to Lund. Overall, everyone I met during my secondment at Lund University and other host institutions was extremely kind and helpful. I made sure to benefit from their skills and knowledge, asking for assistance and double-check at every step. This helped avoid considerable troubles due to misunderstanding and confusion that even an experienced traveller like me had several times during the secondment.

Finances

As customary practice in Central Asian countries, most of the expenses in this post will be shown with the conversion from the local currency to US Dollars (USD). Payments in Sweden are made in Swedish krona (SEK). The exchange rate has been relatively stable and, in the first months of 2021, hovered around 1 USD = 8.5 SEK.

Sweden is becoming a cashless society, but surprisingly I encountered a couple of restaurants in Lund where only cash was accepted. So I used to carry about 100 SEK just in case. There are still more places where it is impossible to pay, such as accommodations. Having a debit card suitable for electronic payments online is absolutely a must. Not only will such cards save exchange fees, but they can also help track daily expenses.

Just before leaving Sweden, I decided to withdraw some cash in USD and EURO. After a rather lengthy search, I found an ATM near the entrance to Malmö Hyllie station where I could withdraw the euro. At least from my debit cards, it was possible to withdraw up to one hundred euros in 20-euro banknotes at a time, so I had to spend quite a while letting others in a queue behind to use the ATM after few withdrawals before starting again. As for USD, ATM was not an option, and I found that fees charged by kiosks and other places to exchange (typically found around major train stations) very high. It could be more affordable if I had a personal bank account in Sweden.

I decided to open free accounts in two popular financial services: Revolut and TransferWise. Opening the accounts with a long-term visa in the EU allowed benefiting from full-fledged functionality, including possibilities of using debit cards and bank transfers. Each of those competing services provided unique benefits: TransferWise proved to be more convenient in currency exchange and cash withdrawals, while Revolut offered extra services such as travel insurance and even buying stocks. Each service can be accessed almost exclusively as a mobile app, so having a smartphone for app installation is desirable. I would not claim that fintech can fully replace a traditional bank. Nevertheless, the relatively new technology could provide certain banking services in much more accessible and economic way while staying in a foreign country for smaller amounts to spend. Among the appreciated capabilities in both Revolut and TransferWise was nearly real-time control over my payments, which included numerous options for safety and analytics of spending by categories. And tracking expenses does matter in a Scandinavian country, as the next section would explain. Notably, the support provided by the project during the secondment would be enough to cover even substantially higher living costs than the expenses indicated furthermore mostly for the personal example of a frugal lifestyle. The experience showed that saving for travels and other purposes was quite realistic.

Living costs

Many foreigners perceive Scandinavia as being among the most expensive places on earth to live. After travelling to many countries, I would personally agree with this viewpoint when it comes to accommodation, less so with other kinds of expenses. I had been a budget traveller since my first study abroad many years ago. So the costs presented below are primarily for the most economical options in each main category of living costs in Sweden. I also maintain moderate rates of consumption in shopping and eating habits. The indicated figures are thus cannot be accepted as very representative for an average adult.

Numbeo is a popular website for comparing living costs across cities, which is not perfect but reasonably representative of what I observed in at least two cities. Table 1 shows selected expenses in Lund, Tashkent, and Almaty.  In the middle of 2021, consumer prices in Lund were about 150 % higher than in Almaty and 160 % higher than in Tashkent. Meanwhile, Expatisan.com, another website to compare living costs, suggests the cost of living in Sweden is approximately 161% more expensive than in Kazakhstan, and 200% as expensive as in Uzbekistan. Presumably, the prices in Table 1 are probably for an average product/housing at a conveniently located normal store/area.

Table 1. Cost of living comparison according to Numbeo.com (as of June 2021)

Note: For easier interpretation, the presented expenses are converted from Swedish krona to USD Dollars (at an approximate exchange rate as of 2021, rounded to closest integer when appropriate).

In my personal experience, the expenses in Lund could be 20-40% lower than indicated in Table 1 if you aimed like me at bargain-hunting searching for lower-cost options and being ready to live or shop in less convenient locations, buy in bulk, and choose budget products lines. Table 2 shows the summary of my monthly budget in Lund. It should be noted that I was often choosing the most economical ways to spend money. I often had lunch and dinner at inexpensive restaurants and rarely travelled outside my region – Skåne county (I mostly walked within Lund without frequently using public transport). The results could differ considerably for people with different cooking, traveling, and other preferences and skills. The details about my accommodation and other choices are discussed in the following sections.

Table 2. Low-cost scenario budget (in USD) for each month of winter and spring 2021 in Lund (excluding insurance, long-distance travel, leisure, events, and other less frequent expenses and lump-sum costs.

Accommodation

Finding a suitable place to live would likely become the next concern after a residence permit. Hotels and hostels in Sweden appeared, on average, more expensive than in the majority of other European countries. And after finding accommodation, rent would likely be the single most significant expense. Sweden seemed to have a housing shortage, and searching for accommodation is particularly challenging in a city with a large student population.

My preparatory stay in Sweden was only for few weeks before traveling back to another European country to complete a preceding academic work. Renting an apartment for around one month is not easy in any country, so I had to use a combination of other housing options in Sweden. In the beginning, I booked few days of stay at budget hotels and hostels in Malmö. At the range of 30 to 60 USD per night, these were much more affordable than in Lund, and I also wanted to explore the vibrant city, which is about ten minutes by train from Lund station.

The pandemic outbreak was already happening in Europe, so remote work was soon allowed and even encouraged. I used this opportunity to move to a hotel in the beautiful Swedish countryside outside of Lund.  My daily accommodation cost for the next two weeks was then reduced to around 25 USD, which represented considerable savings even after accounting for transport expenses. I could still reach the campus in less than one hour using bus and train with my transport pass. In exchange, I enjoyed something that was not immediately available within a city – living in the natural landscape near one of Sweden’s numerous splendid lakes surrounded by forest. 

The remaining two weeks of the preparatory visit were spent closer to the outskirts of Lund in an apartment found via Airbnb at around 25 USD, a very reasonable rate for accommodation within a city in the country. The issue with the corresponding app was the more effort and time it took to find and negotiate the place to stay with a host compared to Booking.com and similar hotel booking services.

If I were lucky during my first visit, I could theoretically find short-term housing through Lund Apartments for Rent. This private Facebook group where I was added by one of my foreign colleagues remained quite active during the entire period of my secondment. As always in such social networking places, it can be a viable place to search if a reasonable caution is exercised to avoid potential scams (usually involving advance payments to foreign accounts).

When I returned to Sweden soon after my first preparatory visit, another option luckily became available, which was much more affordable: LU Accommodation services by Lund University itself. I guess most of the visiting researchers would prefer this long-term housing option from the beginning. So my main advice here is to try reserving the university accommodation long before arrival, desirably two months or earlier because it is in high demand. The earlier you apply to LU Accommodation, the more choices you would be offered to select from different options for your target budget and size. The later you apply, the more you risk of getting no offer in the end. Assistants in the project would provide crucial support to become eligible for university housing as a researcher (ask as early as possible). Other researchers could also suggest alternatives, including even the possibility of temporarily staying or sharing an apartment when available. I benefitted from one of the temporal options generously provided by another visiting research at some point.

After an adventurous first month of the secondment, I was offered a studio by LU Accommodation. Of course, I accepted it and remained at the university housing until the end of the secondment in Lund. I loved my relatively small but very comfortable apartment with basic furniture, kitchen appliances (including new utensils, fridge, oven, and microwave), private bathroom, and internet all included. Importantly, housing in Sweden includes typically a laundry room with washing machines and driers at the basement level that all residents can freely book and use. This was a great relief since I found laundry services were almost nonexistent in the area. The monthly rent at around 5500 SEK could seem high for many countries but is quite reasonable for a university town in Sweden. The tenants had to give a minimum notice of two full months to cancel a contract for the rental period.

Image source: LU Accommodation, Lund University website.

Illustration of university housing in Lund

Shopping

Many products I used to buy in Sweden were more affordable than I expected before arrival when shopping in stores such as Lidl and Wyllis conveniently located close enough to the city center to reach by walking. Household items and confectionery were also affordable when buying in stores such as Jula, ÖOB, and Rusta – all located within Nova, my favorite shopping area at the outskirt of Lund. Several smaller stores were available around the center of Lund to buy Asian food. For more Asian and other products, Allfrukt in Malmö was worth visiting from Lund to buy in bulk (this big store also has a canteen inside). Ikea within a more extensive shopping area could be visited near Helsingborg, but it would take an entire day to reach and come back.

As for shopping online, a popular local alternative for eBay seemed to be Blocket (www.blocket.se). To compare prices, Pricerunner (pricerunner.se) appeared to be a popular service. The English language is not always available in those local websites, but the problem can be more or less solved using Google Chrome browser with automated webpage translations. To illustrate bargains that users might be lucky to find online, I bought a usable 32-inch TV with minor defects for 12 USD on Blocket. Lund Student – Sell and Buy together with Sell/Buy Stuff in Lund were two private Facebook groups where one could occasionally find attractive offers.

Blocket – famous Swedish online market

Pricerunner – website to compare prices and find places to buy in Sweden

There is Swedish Amazon website, but I instead ordered couple of times from the German online shop of Amazon where I found a greater variety of electronics, which cost less than buying locally even after paying the delivery fee. It should be noted here that deliveries of packages and post in Sweden are often made to supermarkets close to the indicated delivery address (it is also possible to send post there). In my case, I received SMS notifications to collect Amazon packages from the local Coop store (passport had to be shown to staff).

Local transport

Skånetrafiken app allows searching for journeys within Skåne quickly and easily. Two figures below show 24-hour ticket prices for the area around Lund and the entire region. Transport pass for more extended periods was available worth considering for exploring Skåne during weekends or holiday. Such passes could be electronically borrowed via Skånetrafiken to friends, which was sometimes convenient. I frequently used 24-hour tickets for trips to Malmö and Nova shopping center in Lund for two days.

Medium zone journey offers in Skånetrafiken

Regional journey offers in Skånetrafiken

Travel

For both arrivals and departures, the most common routes to access Lund that my colleagues and I considered were as follows. Usually, the travel involved Copenhagen (CPH) airport and train directly to/from Lund with a breathtaking view while crossing Öresund bridge between Denmark and Sweden. Skånetrafiken app can be used to buy tickets for journeys to and from Denmark after arrival. There are smaller airports around Malmö and Helsingborg, but these offer limited flights, which were not suitable for me. An airport near Gothenburg is further away from Lund but offers a decent range of flights in cases when travel to Copenhagen becomes problematic (for instance, due to the pandemic-related restrictions). This is also close to one of the biggest cities in Sweden with lots of things to see provided a traveller has enough time and not too much luggage.

With some savings and relaxed travel restrictions, why not use rich opportunities for travel within Sweden and the EU? The figure below shows long-distance train fares from Malmö to Stockholm shown by SJ train ticket app, which started from 23 USD – ridiculously low price for a high-speed train trip (not only in Sweden but any developed country)! Of course, getting such bargains requires booking in advance (in the SJ illustration, ten days before travel). While in Stockholm, the local airports offer great choice of routes to the EU countries at very affordable prices. I used the opportunity to visit the Baltic states after seeing my friend in Stockholm during holidays when safety conditions temporarily improved. When returning to Sweden, I used the FLIXBUS app to book a 60-euro bus journey from Vilnius to Copenhagen with longer transfer in Berlin and involving ferry service between Germany and Denmark, which provided brief sightseeing possibilities in different countries. The same FLIXBUS could be used for travel between Malmö and Stockholm, which added flexibility outside the train option.

High-speed train offers by SJ – Biljetter och trafikinfo

Communication

Lund University offers Eduroam, a wireless internet connection freely accessible at academic institutions in many countries with a valid account. And I benefitted from Eduroam access in several places outside Sweden too. Setting up Eduroam and university email account upon arrival to campus did not seem very easy. Still, I was fortunate to have a colleague who showed me how to set up without referring to instructions available on the university website quickly. My university accommodation included a LAN internet connection, and having a travel router to create a Wi-Fi network at home was helpful.

With unlimited internet access provided within campus and university housing, one can save on mobile connection fees, which were not cheap. In my subjective experience, it was relatively easy to get cell phone number and mobile internet using Comviq, a popular Swedish brand with its sim cards sold in many places. Store staff where I bought my card provided guidance for setting up, which was not easy for me to figure out as instructions and mobile app by Comviq were all in Swedish. Fortunately, the Comviq app itself was not very hard to use for viewing balance and adding funds. Mobile fees seemed more expensive than in other developed countries I visited recently, so I tried to use mobile data only outside my home or university network. My usual Comviq plan, FASTPRIS MINI cost about 11 USD including 3Gb and more than enough minutes of calling within Sweden. It was usually purchased at least twice a month.

Some options for mobile connection offered by Comviq app

Food

I am not a vegetarian (yet), but I try to minimize meat consumption for various reasons. Sweden impressed with its wide range of choices I rarely have seen elsewhere. In particular, I liked plant-based mince and other veggie products at local groceries. As for dining out, I was lucky to find delicious falafel almost everywhere. It was healthy and the most affordable at 3-5 USD per falafel roll or bread. And Lund is known for its falafel restaurants.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Falafel dish

Hobbies

Besides hiking in natural zones around Lund and regional travels, I enjoyed swimming in a beautiful lake in the countryside during summer and early autumn. For networking with locals and sports, foreigners could join one of the numerous clubs called korpen in Sweden. It is possible to find local football and other clubs by searching online (for example, using keywords such as “korpen Lund”). Chrome browser can help translate the club web pages and contact for membership.

Concluding remarks

I enjoyed and greatly benefitted as a researcher from my secondment at Lund University. This was made possible due to the comprehensive support provided by the project and the Sociology of Law Department. Conditions for my travel and stay were generally very comfortable – not least because of relatively efficient systems of local bureaucracy and flexible regulations (it was particularly evident during the pandemic). Furthermore, life in Sweden turned out to be less expensive than I expected (not taking into account housing).

At the end of this blog post, I would like to reiterate that I only expressed my personal opinions and subjective experiences, which can never be considered universally applicable. The text reflects my preferences, and I did not intend to promote any particular choice or product, or service. Under no circumstance can the information provided here replace regularly updated and “more serious” sources such as governmental websites, which potential visitors should check first. I wished to write this post because I felt it was my turn to give selected tips and ideas in the hope that they could be useful for future guests.  These were previously shared by colleagues in Lund and proved to be valuable for me.

Again, I would like to repeat the most important advice given at the beginning of this post: the project assistants and other researchers are probably the most excellent sources of practical information and further help to complete the secondment successfully. New researchers should never hesitate to ask for assistance, so they hopefully would become experienced with practical matters soon enough to help future researchers in turn.

I was lucky to personally meet colleagues from different parts of Central Asia already during my first days in Lund. Never in my life had I experienced such an exciting feeling of belonging to the region and having so many things in common. It was like being a part of a big Central Asian family. It was also nice to meet local researchers and professors at Lund University personally and colleagues from other institutions online. I am immensely grateful for the comprehensive support I received from the project and the colleagues that helped me feel at home and grow as an interdisciplinary researcher during my secondment in Sweden.