EPISODIO DEPRESIVO MAYOR

This thesis set out to explore how the overlapping and interconnected processes of law and space unfold in the post-socialist city of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The study sought to understand how legal space is produced in the post-socialist city as a means of merging the epistemologically separate disciplines of legal studies and geography. The ‘inter-disciplinary project’ of legal geography (Delaney, 2010), together with concepts in urban theory, legal anthropology, and post-socialist studies, served as a useful analytical frame for examining legal-spatial processes unfolding in the city of Bishkek. Legal geography has usefully raised understandings of law as dependent on spatial rhetoric (Delaney, 2003) through the construction of boundaries that separate and create ‘otherings’ (Blandly and Sibley, 2010). This boundary production can marginalise certain social groups while benefitting others. Moreover, legal geography demonstrates how law serves as an ostensible value-free and universalising ‘tool’ to appropriate space (Blomley, 2008). Thus, studies on law and space illustrate how spatial definitions – such as the state, property and internal migration, examined in this thesis – are also inherently legal definitions or, in other words, how law and space mutually depend on each other.

I wish to outline four key contributions this study makes to legal geography and more specifically on the relation between law and the city. First, this thesis analyses the relation between law and space through an examination of the case study city, Bishkek. This responds to a call in legal geography to examine legal and spatial processes in a context outside of urban spaces of the global North, recognising its hitherto limited geographic range. Expanding on the spaces of legal geography prompts the incorporation of

less theoretically developed topics of discussion into the field of legal geography such as ‘illegality’, explored in this thesis by following the legalisation of a ‘squatter’ settlement on the outskirts of Bishkek (see also Fernandes and Varley, 1998; Datta, 2012). Moreover, expanding legal geography’s area of study develops theoretical knowledge on existing topics discussed in legal geography such as mobility (Blomley, 2011) and urban property (Blomley, 2004) as developed in this study by examining the regulation of internal migration and rental property in Bishkek. Expanding on the geographical extent of legal geography’s empirical expertise also, in turn, incorporates new concepts into studies on law and space developed through other disciplinary perspectives. Urban theory, legal anthropology, and post-socialist studies collectively formed a more robust framework for analysing processes of law and space and Bishkek through concepts such as comparative urbanism, legal pluralism, and ‘domestication’ of policies. Second, this thesis argues that legal geography needs to pay attention to time and temporality in order to strengthen existing claims that emphasise the processes and performativity of legal space (Delaney, 2010; Blomley, 2013; Braverman et al., 2014). This is not to separate time from space, but rather to acknowledge the inseparability of the two (Massey, 1992). This argument joins a more established debate in geography (Massey, 2005; Schwanen and Kwan, 2012; Rogaly and Thieme, 2012) and an emerging topic in legal geography that attends to the mobile, liminal and fluid character of legal spaces that operate irrespective of official changes in the law (Benda-Beckmann and Benda-Beckmann, 2014; Valverde, 2014). Bringing in time to studies on law and space emphasises the importance of historical trajectories that produce mobile, overlapping and contradictory legal spaces (Santos, 2002). This is especially important for examining legal space in transitional contexts, not just from ‘socialism’ to ‘post-socialism’ or ‘illegal’ to ‘legal’, as demonstrated in this thesis, but also, for example, from ‘conflict’ to ‘peace’, ‘colonialism’ to ‘post-colonialism,’ as well as examining how these transitions link with perhaps more ephemeral transitions, notably the neoliberalisation of urban space and how legal frameworks are appropriated to structure this process together with how they are contested (Barkan, 2011). Moreover, an emphasis on the non- linear movement of time disrupts such labels that presume a movement from one period to another by revealing how the ‘actually existing’ nature of such categories represents mutated, assembled and hybrid forms (c.f. Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Hirt et al., 2013). This ‘twisting’ of binary labels (Humphrey, 2002; Delaney, 2010) emphasises the interstitial nature of legal space falling between hegemonic binary orderings. Thus, while the ‘squatter’ settlement in Bishkek was classified as ‘illegal’, unpacking this category by examining the settlements relationship with the state destabilised its ‘illegal’ label to reveal a more complicated identity.

Moreover, the labelling of the registration system (propiska) in Bishkek as ‘Soviet’, especially by organisations and individuals advocating its abolition, stand in contrast to everyday practices that seemingly work towards a capitalist agenda (c.f. Golubchikov et al., 2013). These everyday practices, operating under the guise of a Soviet ‘remnant’, instead relate to new meanings of property established through neoliberal policies that create contemporary (il)legal-spaces of inequality in the post-socialist city. It is this combination of representations and everyday practice (Lefebvre, 1991) that creates the hybrid spatialites of transition.

Third, by focussing on time and temporality, static and fixed understandings of law and space are unpacked to reveal the different actors that come and go in productions of legal space. Developing a finer-grained understanding of law making destabilises traditional assumptions that equate legality to the state by drawing on the agency of non-state actors and how they appropriate practices of law making together with how the state engages with aspects of illegality (Ghertner, 2008; Datta, 2012). This goes beyond examining notions of legal pluralism as representing ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ to instead highlight how ‘state’ law making practices are internally plural, contradictory and open to interpretation (Santos, 2002). Moreover, examining the processual aspects of (state) law draws attention to the non- human agents that play a role in legal production. This was explored in Bishkek by examining the soft clay qualities of the land in relation to the ‘illegal’ settlement and its role in prolonging the legalisation process. This examination of law’s materialities joins other studies that, for example, investigate olive trees mediating and reinforcing the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians (Braverman, 2009) and how paper clips and folders in the Conseil d’Etat in Paris become embedded in processes of legal reasoning (Latour, 2010). Examining the materiality of law draws attention to the networks that emerge in law making practices, especially between non-human and human agents and how agency becomes distributed (Bennett, 2015) among different actants that enter and leave such processes at different points and times.

Fourth and finally, the study combines a doctrinal approach to analysing law and ethnographic modes of inquiry in order to develop a ‘mixed method’ methodology (Nightingale, 2003). A combination of examining technicalities of the law with ethnographic approaches (Riles, 2005) offers a broader, although still partial, research narrative for explaining and understanding productions of urban space. This mixed method approach relies on the researcher being both simultaneously ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the law as doctrinal analyses are placed alongside socio-legal, and legal- geographic, ethnographic approaches (Valverde, 2009, 153). Thus, legal space is examined not just through social relations of power, most

prominent in legal geography and socio-legal studies, but also by understanding how knowledges and power are produced and reproduced through these legal technicalities (Riles, 2005; Valverde, 2009). Understanding legal technicalities and mixing this analysis with an ethnographic approach develops a more in depth knowledge of how the law, and different interpretations and enactments of the law, can produce marginal spaces in the city. Moreover, a technical understanding of present and past legislation can also potentially offer a more substantial and localised solution to resolving such problems of marginalisation. Examining the ongoing exclusion of tenants from the registration process (propiska) in Bishkek revealed that this was based on understandings of legislation that are now out of date, yet played a much more important role during the housing privatisation era of the early 1990s.