The paper sheds light on informal economies, focusing on transnational entrepreneurs between Central Asia and Russia. Both male and female entrepreneurs from Central Asia live mobile economic lives, traveling between Central Asia and Russia and forming a kind of class. With Islam playing a prominent role in the regulation of informal economies, Islamic belonging has become a stronger marker of identity than ethnicity among Central Asian migrants in Russia, and mosque communities have grown in influence. Mosques have become places to meet and socialize, where contacts are established and maintained.

Mobility and migration increased rapidly following the end of the Cold War period and the collapse of communist regimes. These developments led to the emergence of new national, regional and international mobility regimes (e.g., the Commonwealth of Independent States, the European Union and the Eurasian Economic Union). These newly established mobility regimes-encompassing visa regulations, union regulations, refugee politics, labour market regulations, migration regulations and capital globalisation-rendered these nation-states visible in new ways and placed state-society relations at the centre of popular discussions (Schiller and Salazar 2013) . For many travellers, mobile workers, migrants, refugees and other mobile entrepreneurs moving beyond their hometown or country, these new mobility experiences and strategies generated new challenges, hardships and uncertainties. The social and kinship networks, which served as alternative (to the state's) welfare structures in their home countries, were no longer available in their host countries, leaving individuals in more precarious positions and rather vulnerable (Turaeva 2016). Another key contributing factor was the rapid proliferation of draconian immigration laws and policies within various migration regimes (Coutin 2003;De Genova 2004), a global trend that produced millions of undocumented migrant workers for informal economies.However, despite tightening immigration laws and flourishing informal economies, legal uncertainty, increased mobility and globalisation, mobile people became increasingly innovative and transnational, whereas a growing number of mobile entrepreneurs have found their niches within and beyond these processes and structures. Since mobility does not recognise rigid state legal systems and boundaries, mobile actors have found alternative ways of navigating restrictive legal landscapes and of organising their economic activities and mobile lives. Today mobile people represent the largest category of people navigating their daily survival through mobile lives beyond nation-state legal systems, crossing multiple geographic and digital boundaries and dealing with diverse power structures, institutions, brokers and gatekeepers. The contributions in this volume include original, fieldwork-based examples from Russia, Central Asia, Eastern

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