Authors

Discussion

The paper will discuss the postcolonial institutional practices in migration government bureaucracy in Tajikistan.  It is based on a chapter of the forthcoming book Making Migrants: International Bureaucracy of Migration Management. The book explores the politics of representation of a ‘migrant’ as a form of postcolonial oppression and as a technology of rule. It focused on migration government bureaucracy in Tajikistan, which is tasked to ‘order’ labor mobility from Tajikistan to Russia amid Russia’s tightening migration legislation and the expansion of the deportation regime. The ordering of migration largely revolved around a racialized figure of a migrant, whose institutional needs and risks were defined and spread by experts from international organizations, such as the International Organization for Migration and Russian officials. The paper will focus on a chapter of the book that explores sovereign and short-lived bureaucratic practices of Tajikistani officials to address increased instances of far-right violence in Russia. Local officials designed the program to host far right in Tajikistan to address far-right practices of animalization and the hunt for migrant workers in Russia’s cities. The program was meant to seek human treatment of migrants and the far-right. The relationship of “giving” is important to explore the field of hospitality. Hospitality becomes an immediate reflection of this mediation, demonstrating how, and in what circumstances, shared cosmopolitan humanity can be claimed, but not achieved.