Builders of the Homeland: Migrant Labour and the Making of the Tajik State

In the face of growing scholarly scepticism regarding the one-size-fits-all utility of the territorialized nation-state model for theorising statehood, recent decades have seen a proliferation of critiques and re-imaginings of past and present state structures and formation processes. This project pushes this larger scholarship at a more contextually specific level by offering a novel theorisation of state formation amid mass labour emigration.

Invoking mixed-methods analysis of an 'extreme case' of labour emigration from Tajikistan - where up to 50 percent of national GDP is estimated to come from labour remittances - this thesis offers an empirically grounded reinterpretation of the state formation process that centres mass productive movement as a key explanatory mechanism. This focus grows out of a puzzle presented by a tension between empirical observation and mainstream theoretical explanation: while our 'national state' is traditionally conceptualised on territorial lines, many states appear to be surviving - even thriving, despite the fact that huge numbers of their working-age population lives and works outside their territorial bounds. The question thus stands: how does the phenomenon of mass emigration shape the emergence and maintenance of the national-state?

Through collection and analysis of interviews with migrants, migrant family members, state officials, private sector actors, and representatives of international organisations, cultural texts, archival documents, and high-level participant observation at International Office of Migration-Tajikistan offices, I introduce an empirically grounded theory of the 'emigration state' as constituted from the 'bottom up' and 'outside in'. Individual affective, ideological and material experiences and productivities of 'citizens abroad' - as deterritorialized units of the sovereign state - are themselves constitutive of the state back home, forcing us to move beyond territorialized conceptions of statehood.