Emplaced legality: How private homeownership structures post-socialist citizenship

• In Event: Migration Policies

Abstract

How have post-socialist states’ efforts to privatize housing and encourage homeownership shaped their administration of civic status? Scholars have detailed how household registration institutions like China’s hukou or Russia’s registratsiya maintain social and economic inequality between local citizens and migrants, whether internal or international. At the same time, these countries have engaged in the mass privatization of housing, turning private homeownership into a vehicle for the acquisition, transfer, and guarantee of local registration. Building on these insights, this paper argues that post-socialist states condition access to public goods through emplaced legality, that is, by binding each person’s legal status to evidence that they live where they claim to, with varying efforts to assess the validity of their residential address and the fact of their physical presence at that address. To show how emplaced legality operates in practice, I draw on 92 semi-structured interviews with Kyrgyzstani migrants to Russia, the fourth largest migrant host country in the world practice. I find that Russian homeowners use their property-based control over addresses and living spaces to broker and condition migrant tenants’ claims to emplaced legality. This control positions ordinary homeowners as powerful intermediaries of national boundary-making and legal exclusion. This paper demonstrates how post-socialist reforms have transformed the legacies of public housing and household registration, projecting state power into private housing. By focusing on the understudied post-socialist space, this paper contributes to a growing sociological interest in the legal and cultural linkages between homeownership and citizenship.

Author

• Jeffrey Bilik, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor