This book situates the transformation in the world of work and employment relations in Central Asia within broader and uneven processes of labour precarisation in the global political economy during the past decades. Contributions show how a region that has largely remained marginal to the discipline of political economy can inform the theorisation of labour precarity and its gender-differentiated dynamics in rural, urban, and migrant contexts in and beyond the post-socialist world. The chapter authors illustrate this through different case studies from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, using data gathered from several rounds of fieldwork up to 2025.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Rethinking Labour, Gender, and Precarity in Central Asia is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Franco Galdini is Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Department of Political Science and International Studies (POLSIS), University of Birmingham.

Eugenia Pesci is PhD candidate and researcher in the LIFEMAKE project at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki. She previously worked as a Marie Curie Early-Stage Researcher in the Horizon 2020-funded project MARKETS and as a research fellow, University of Bologna.