Refugee Cities

Abstract

Ordinary encounters can be social scientific entry points to dive deep into broader structural conditions and historic transformations that underpin everyday ways of living together. This book is an engaging read for those interested in how multiple structural conditions intersect and how they are positioned vis-à-vis historical periods of colonialism, postcolonial nation building, and global warfare. Whilst being ethnographically situated with Afghans who fled to Pakistan, this book invites the reader to draw acute parallels with the dismantling of hospitality towards refugees in the post-2015 crisis in European refugee reception, the hostile governing of uprooted people who experience oppressions at the intersections of ethnicity and class, and the effects of the nationalist territorialization of spaces across the globe. It does so without losing specificity and situatedness: microhistories of Afghans in Pakistan are reconstructed through over 500 semi-structured interviews and material from archives that add factual context to what makes possible the poverty, harassment, imprisonment, torture and deportation of Afghans who have fled to urban Pakistan from the Soviet-Afghan war in 1970 onwards and try to make a living. [...]