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Photo of Rustam
På svenska

Rustamjon Urinboyev

Associate professor

På svenska
Photo of Rustam
Contact details
  • Email: rustamjon [dot] urinboyev [at] soclaw [dot] lu [dot] se
  • Phone: +46 46 222 37 99
Organisation
  • Sociology of Law Department
  • Service point: 31
Webpage

Research Areas

  • Corruption and Informality
  • Socio-Legal Approaches to Migration
  • Legal Pluralism and Legal Culture
  • Religion and Ethnicity in Post-Soviet Prisons
  • Islamic Public Administration
  • Law and Society in Central Asia
  • Central Asian Studies
  • Sociology of Authoritarian Law
  • Political Economy and Legal Reform in Eurasia

Rustamjon Urinboyev is an interdisciplinary socio-legal scholar whose research focuses on authoritarian and hybrid political regimes, with particular expertise in Central Asia, Russia, and Turkiye. His work explores the relationship between law, governance, informality, corruption, migration, and everyday social practices. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Russia, Central Asia, Turkey, and transnational migration settings, he has developed a distinctive research programme centred on what he conceptualises as the Sociology of Authoritarian Law.

He is the author of Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes: Navigating the Legal Landscape in Russia (University of California Press, 2020), widely recognised as an important contribution to socio-legal and migration scholarship. TheAmerican Journal of Sociology praised the book as “an important complement to our knowledge of undocumented labor migrants”. At the same time, reviewers highlighted its ethnographic richness, theoretical ambition, and insightful analysis of informality, migrant agency, and legal adaptation in non-Western migration regimes. 

Beyond migration studies, his scholarship spans corruption studies, Islamic legal culture, public administration, penal sociology, and state–society relations. His work consistently examines how legality is negotiated, contested, and reproduced in authoritarian and hybrid political regimes.

Current Research

Rustamjon currently leads several major Horizon Europe projects as Principal Investigator. These projects institutionalise a large-scale interdisciplinary research agenda focused on authoritarian legality, governance, corruption, migration, and legal pluralism.
Current projects include:

SOCIAL – Sociology of Authoritarian Law

MOCCA – Multilevel Orders of Corruption in Central Asia

POLCA – Alternative Institutions and Norms in Non-Western Societies

MARS – Non-Western Migration Regimes in a Global Perspective

MINARET – A Sociology of Post-Imperial Islamic Legal Cultures

He is also the founder and head of NORCA – Nordic Central Asian Studies, an interdisciplinary research environment at Lund University dedicated to socio-legal and governance studies of Central Asia. NORCA integrates multiple EU-funded projects and serves as a platform for international collaboration, doctoral training, and comparative research on law, governance, and society in non-Western contexts.

Research Impact

Rustamjon Urinboyev’s research has contributed significantly to socio-legal scholarship on authoritarian governance, migration, corruption, and legal pluralism. His work advances theoretical debates on how law functions in authoritarian and hybrid political regimes and challenges Western-centric assumptions about legality, governance, and the rule of law.

His research has informed policy discussions and institutional reform initiatives involving international organisations and development agencies, including the International Organization for Migration (IOM), OSCE-related governance initiatives, GIZ-supported programmes, USAID-supported projects, and World Bank-funded reform processes in Central Asia.

As Principal Investigator of multiple Horizon Europe projects with cumulative funding exceeding €15 million, he has established extensive international research networks connecting universities, ministries, anti-corruption agencies, migration authorities, and civil society organisations across Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, South America, Africa, and Asia.

Through NORCA and Erasmus+ mobility initiatives, he has also contributed to strengthening Nordic–Central Asian academic cooperation, doctoral training, and institutional capacity building.

Selected Publications in English

  • Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes: Navigating the Legal Landscape in Russia (University of California Press, 2020)
  • Law, Society and Corruption: Lessons from the Central Asian Context (Routledge, 2024, with Måns Svensson)
  • The Political Economy of Non-Western Migration Regimes: Central Asian Migrant Workers in Russia and Turkey (Palgrave, 2022, with Sherzod Eraliev)
  • The Political Economy of Central Asian Law: A Law and Society Analysis (Palgrave, 2024, editor)
  • Labour, Mobility and Informal Practices in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2021, co-editor)

Publications

Displaying of publications. Sorted by year, then title.

Background

Rustamjon Urinboyev is an Associate Professor (Docent) at the Department of Sociology of Law, Lund University, Sweden, and Docent in Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. He completed his PhD in Sociology of Law at Lund University in 2013. Following postdoctoral appointments funded by the Swedish Research Council and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, including research stays at the University of Cambridge, the University of Helsinki, and the University of Copenhagen, he established an internationally recognised research profile in sociology of Central Asian law, migration studies, corruption studies, governance, and legal pluralism.

Last updated: 1 Jun 2026