Informality and Politics in the Global South: Three Perspectives

Informality is often studied by scholars of urban studies but has received comparatively little attention by political scientists. This is surprising given the fact that large portions of the world’s population live, work, or transfer funds informally. The conventional wisdom is that the informal economy—the portion of the economy operating outside the regulatory reach of the state—is not very political because informal sector workers are relatively atomized and find collective action to be costly. The three books reviewed here, however, demonstrate that the informal sector is not only characterized by important forms of political organization but also affects politics within government institutions—and can even contribute to regime downfall. Calla Hummel’s Why Informal Workers Organize and Shelby Grossman’s Politics of Order in Informal Markets examine organization among informal sector workers, with Hummel probing the circumstances under which organization occurs and Grossman when such organizations are effective. In Black Markets and Militants, Medani takes the opposite perspective, examining how informal financial flows and networks affect state regulatory capacity. These three books marshal significant amounts of original data, pointing to how future research on these important dynamics can be conducted.