(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:
- 93% of the country’s territory is occupied by mountains and almost 6% of the territory of the republic is covered with glaciers.
- 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).
- 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).
- 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
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