Informal Trade, Gender and the Border Experience

From Political Borders to Social Boundaries

Olga Sasunkevich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317116820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Detailing the history of a well-known phenomenon of post-socialism - cross-border petty trade and smuggling - as the history of a practice in daily life from a gendered perspective, this book considers how changes in these practices in a particular border region, between Belarus and Lithuania, have been accompanied, and to some extent provoked, by changes in the border regime. It looks at how the selective openness of the Belarus-Lithuania border worked during different periods over the last twenty years and how it influenced the involvement of different social groups in shuttle trade practices. Foremost, this book considers how political borders implement and/or intensify social boundaries and suggests that the selective openness of political borders, a prerequisite for the existence of female shuttle trade activities, is primarily built upon people's social characteristics. However, it claims that what can be seen as the grounds for growing inequality at a global level, at a local one may have an important resourceful meaning for various social groups including those usually perceived as disadvantaged, such as widowed female retirees or unemployed single women with children.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Transliteration and Language Usage
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Shuttle Trade in Ašmjany: Contextualizing Oral History Research
• 2 Shuttle Trade and Borders in Ašmjany Before the Disintegration of the USSR
• 3 The Emergence of National Borders, the Flourishing of Trade: Shuttle Trade in Ašmjany in the Early 1990s
• 4 Maturation of the Border, Professionalization of Shuttle Trade (1994–2007)
• 5 Persistence of the Border, Disappearance of Trade? Shuttle Trade in Ašmjany After Schengen (2007–2011)
• 6 Shuttle Trade and Gender Relations: A Female World in a Provincial Border Town
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Social Characteristics of the Respondents
• Bibliography
• Index