Is Russia more informal than other countries? Evidence from the Global Informality Project

Please join us on Tuesday, December 4th for a talk with Alena Ledeneva from University College London on “Is Russia more informal than other countries? Evidence from the Global Informality Project”.

Russia is a perfect laboratory for researching informal practices, unwritten rules and open secrets. How does Russia compare to other countries? Are some countries more informal than others? On the basis of context-rich comparative material from the Global Encycopaedia of Informality, Ledeneva will speak on informal governance in the past, present and future: kompromat, informal co-optation/control, cyberinformality and many others.

Global Encyclopaedia of Informality is free to download:

Vol 1: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/global-encyclopedia-of-informality-i

Vol 2: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/global-encyclopaedia-of-informality-ii

Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, United Kingdom.

She is an internationally renowned expert on informality and governance in Russia. Her books Russia’s Economy of Favours (1998), How Russia Really Works (2006), and Can Russia Modernize? (2013) have become must-read sources in Russian studies and social sciences. Her latest co-edited volumes include Innovations in Corruption Studies (2017) and The Global Encyclopedia of Informality (2018).

She received her PhD in Social and Political Theory from Cambridge University (1996). She is a founding director of the Global Informality Project (www.in-formality.com) and a founder of the UCL Press FRINGE series.