This article examines how Uzbek migrants become incorporated into Russian society under conditions of legal precarity, discretionary enforcement and pervasive informality. Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2026 among Uzbek migrants in Russia and their families and communities in Uzbekistan, it develops the concept of shadow legal integration to explain how social and economic incorporation can deepen without a corresponding movement towards legal security. The article argues that repeated encounters with migration authorities, police, employers, intermediaries and migrant networks generate practical legal knowledge that migrants test, revise and circulate over time. This process of legal adaptation enables migrants to navigate the interaction between formal rules and informal practices while rem aining vulnerable to detention, deportation and administrative uncertainty. Ethnographic analysis of deportation, migration bureaucracy, legal brokerage, document economies and changing migration governance after 2022 further demonstrates that such competence is not a fixed repertoire but requires continual recalibration as legal and enforcement environments change. Shadow legal integration thus identifies how learning to navigate the intersection of formal and informal practices can itself become a mode of incorporation. The article contributes to migration and socio-legal scholarship by showing that migrant integration and legal security need not develop in parallel.

This paper tells the story of Felipe Pescador, a neighbourhood born of an occupation of railway lands by railway employees in Mexico City’s industrial corridor. Across disciplines, a rich literature on Latin America has critically examined housing struggles among marginalised and working-class people. But attention to individual, self-built settlements has remained a less common approach to the issue. Focused study provides an opportunity to critically examine how changes in the city’s political economy gradually shifted strategies to obtain shelter. As the heft of organised labour waned and the institutionalisation of housing demands increased, residents ultimately legitimated a pragmatic political practice – sometimes at odds with the policies of the official party, the PRI – and put property rights at the centre of their struggle. Historicising ties between property, law and politics thus complicates visions of informal housing struggles as necessarily progressive initiatives, as well as accounts of informal settlements as places of grassroots entrepreneurship.

This article brings Cotterrell’s legal concept of community based on trust-based interactions in social life to expand the critical horizons of economic sociology of law (ESL) in its analytical, normative and empirical aspects for law and development in Africa. Dominant law and economics approaches sometimes see informal economic activity as an aberration and/or an obstacle in development. This article proposes an alternative way of looking at informality in development in Africa through the lens of ESL. As part of wider social life, economic life is about social interactions in production, exchange, distribution and consumption while legal life is about social relations in and under the law. Furthermore, ‘legal and economic life shape and are shaped by each other, as well as by the wider social, and more-than-human, world’. This calls for a framework that reconceptualises law in ways that are inclusive of the many state, social, economic and other normative orders such as informal economic activity in African societies that are continually interacting as part of wider social life.

Labor history has for a long time struggled with so-called “informal” labor, which is situated outside of regularised labor relations, but is widespread in many regions of the globe. The essay reviews five recent books from different fields on transport and labor in Africa, which explore the question of informality, everyday labor, labor organisation, and the infrastructure and technology of mobility. It develops an approach to informal labor that emphasizes historicity and a dialectical model between the stability of the transport infrastructure and the precarity of the workers that uphold it.

This paper presents an analysis of nonprofit organizations—the organizational infrastructure of civil society—in East Central Europe, from one important respect: by placing them in the context of the comparative historical sociology of the region’s widespread informality. This involves two steps: (1) summarizing an argument about the role of informality in East Central European capitalism today in order to (2) outline its implications for the study of post-state-socialist nonprofits. Most of the empirical examples come from Hungary. These examples serve illustrative purposes and are intended as devices to provoke new analysis. They are meant to open, rather than close, discussion.

This article addresses critical gaps in the literature on crisis-driven policy change in international organisations. While existing studies focus on elite decision-making and institutional resilience, the role of frontline crisis managers remains under-explored in International Relations. Using the European migration and refugee crisis as a case study and drawing on insights from organisation studies and the sociology of the professions, the article introduces a novel theoretical framework that foregrounds improvisation by first responders and the ex-post stabilisation of their spontaneous policy solutions at headquarters. In addition to reconstructing and illustrating the mechanisms that link frontline action to changed policies, the article identifies theoretical conditions shaping the likelihood and direction of informal policy change from the ground up. By highlighting bottom-up dynamics in crises, it not only advances theoretical debates on crisis politics, but also proposes a new research agenda for analysing the transformative role of field-level practices in global politics.

Will rising temperatures from climate change affect labour markets? This paper examines the impact of temperature on hours worked, using panel data from Peru covering the period from 2007 to 2015. We combine information on hours worked from household surveys with weather reanalysis data. Our findings show that high temperatures reduce hours worked, with the effect concentrated in informal jobs rather than in weather-exposed industries. These results suggest that labour market segmentation may shape how climate change affects labour outcomes in developing countries.

This article examines the impact of informal intergovernmental relations on the Kenyan government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that although informality in governance has been perceived negatively by many governance scholars, it nevertheless has the capacity to enhance the effectiveness and legitimacy of government. By virtue of informality’s adaptability and recognition of the centrality of context, it can enhance efficacy particularly in unpredictable circumstances as occurred in the pandemic. Notwithstanding this reality, until recently, literature on informality, mainly informed by Eurocentric colonial perspectives on governance, has focussed on its negative elements, criticizing it for diverse governance ailments. Through the prism of the negotiated order theory, this article challenges this dominant narrative using an analysis of informal intergovernmental relations during the COVID-19 pandemic in Kenya. It argues that though informality was at times applied negatively, overall, it ensured vibrant intergovernmental relations, thus positively impacting health service delivery and enhancing the government’s legitimacy in the management of the pandemic.