Join our next virtual seminar – Forum for Uzbek and Silk Road Studies Virtual Seminars. The speaker is Dr Balihar Sanghera from the University of Kent, with a presentation titled “The digital economy in Kazakhstan: neofeudalism, rentierism, and precarity”.

Abstract: The paper examines how digital platforms can create economic dispossession and precarity for gig workers and retail merchants. Owners of platforms, or ‘digital landowners’, often dominate their sectors, shaping the conditions of labour and exchanges of goods and services. Lacking alternatives, gig workers and retail merchants have little choice but to submit to the demands of platform companies. Arguably, platforms can be characterised as ‘virtual land’ that enables owners to extract rent from users by mere virtue of having property rights to online sites. Like feudal lords, they receive unearned income, contributing little to nothing to wealth creation. The paper will argue that digital platforms have neofeudal features, in which platform owners extract rent and impose exacting conditions of work and services on platform users. The study is based on 34 qualitative interviews with gig workers and retail merchants in Astana, Kazakhstan

December 3, 12:00PM London time / 17:00PM Tashkent time
Registration link: https://wiut.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e868d86a7ec9c1d101f8245ba&id=fe8c3e4cac&e=9a2261749e