Intersubjective understanding of violence: the lifeworld of Tajik immigrant workers in post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the phenomenon of violence in the context of labor migration from Tajikistan to Russia. It examines the legal framework for migration policy and asks how sociology can understand the experience of violence and how social phenomenology can contribute to this understanding. I apply Alfred Schutz's theory of intersubjectivity to understand migration violence. Migration violence in Russia has been interpreted as an abstract phenomenon rather than the experience of labor immigrants. It is a reductive understanding of violence that ignores the perspectives of the immigrants themselves. Such interpretation of violence is incompatible with its intersubjective understanding. The understanding of migration violence in this thesis is not only what is recognized as the violence of one subject against another, but the essence of this violence and its real picture which lie deeper in state policies and the stories of labor immigrants themselves. In studying these stories and the relationship between labor migration and violence I show how Tajik labor immigrants experience institutionalized and noninstitutionalized violence. An intersubjective understanding that I propose in this thesis is founded upon the relationship between the perspective of labor immigrants and the social context. Moreover, I show how understanding is constituted in infusion of mass media information into a social context. In this sense, the lifeworld perspective of immigrants or, as Schutz notes, their 'biographical situation' provides a basic frame of orientation that guides me to generate understanding in a complex lifeworld of labor migration.