Introduction
Refugee Cities

Though the wealthy drink water from a golden cup;
I prefer this clay bowl of mine.

Though Aurangzeb feels proud of his throne in Delhi;
The house of every beggar is a Delhi for him.

When a traveler leaves his home;
Who knows if he is nobleman or slave?

Once he becomes earth mixed with earth,
Then who can tell whose grandchild he is?
―Rahman Baba (1650–1715), “A Dog of the Beloved’s Street”



This book is a history of Afghan migration to urban Pakistan since the 1970s. In this period, millions of Afghans have lived in Pakistan, forming one of the world’s largest refugee populations. They have done so, for the most part, without being naturalized as citizens. Their presence is often framed as alien and the norms of the international state system assume that Afghans in Pakistan should and will return to their national homeland.[i] Despite not being citizens, however, Afghans have claimed and accessed rights and resources in the cities of which they are a part. In this process, they have developed attachments to the places in which they live, and to the people alongside whom they live. Their struggles, which are a crucial, neglected dimension of Pakistan’s urban history, are reflective of how Pakistan’s longer-term Afghan population are not an alien cohort, waiting to go home, but rather are an important part of Pakistani society. Despite being denied access to citizenship, and the precarious terms of their residency, Afghans have contributed to the forging of new local, urban identities and demands for rights that cut across national and ethnic lines. Thus these Afghans emerge as urban citizens in Pakistan, at home, not in the nation, but in the local neighborhoods and cities in which they reside. Their attachments to place reflect dimensions of belonging based on moral and humanistic frames that challenge the legal powers that seek to exclude them.
In order to get access to basic goods and rights such as water, housing, and sanitation lines, most Afghans must rely on the so-called informal sphere. Informality―the production of legal goods and services that are not formally provided, protected, and regulated by the state―is an essential lifeline for most people. Scholarship on cities in the Global South has established that marginalized populations rely on the “informal sphere” to claim rights of access to resources.[ii] It is also, we are told, not separate from the formal, nor a space outside of “modernity,” but coterminous with it.[iii] In this book, I show how the Pakistani state encourages informality as a way to manage populations it cannot and does not always want to directly engage with―both noncitizens and citizens―particularly with respect to matters of social welfare. In Pakistan, as is the case in India, Egypt, Brazil, Ghana, and other countries of the Global South where there is a rich body of work on urban informality, the urban poor live shared precarious lives in which the informal sphere is a crucial lifeline for their survival.[iv] Yet as noncitizens, Afghans face an additional set of constraints in the informal sphere. As noncitizens, even the informal sphere is extra precarious for them: they are more vulnerable to exploitation within it or they are policed with the intention of encouraging them to leave the country and return to their national homeland.
The Afghan experience in Pakistan has been profoundly shaped by geopolitics. Throughout much of the 1970s–1990s, the Pakistani state welcomed an Afghan presence as a way of exerting political influence in Afghanistan. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the context of the War on Terror (WOT) and continuing rivalry with Afghanistan, however, the Pakistani state, alongside the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), and other international partners, has advanced an agenda of Afghan refugee repatriation; Afghans are being told they are no longer welcome in the country. Under coercive pressure, many have left. In 2017, Human Rights Watch said Pakistan was engaged in on the world’s “largest unlawful mass forced return of refugees.”[v] But many Afghans have remained in the country, underlining the limit of the state’s ability to repatriate Afghans. In this gap between the state’s professed aims and ground realities, Afghans live a precarious existence. Neither legally included as citizens nor fully excluded, they occupy a zone of quasi belonging. They are socially accepted by the people they live with and alongside, yet recognition of their existence in legal and political terms is resisted by the state. Drawing on the testimonies and lives of ordinary people, this book tells the story of the ways in which the terms of their belonging are negotiated and contested, and its impact on the Pakistani cities in which Afghans have settled.

Pakistan’s Migration Stories
Pakistan’s most famous migration story follows the 1947 independence of India and Pakistan from British colonial rule that included the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Partition created the twentieth century’s second largest displacement of people after World War II in Europe. Between one and four million people were killed during partition and another twenty million displaced. Those who moved across the newly formed nation-states’ borders transformed cities and understandings of citizenship and territoriality across the subcontinent.
Before 1947 ideas of what citizenship might look like for migrants were not a major concern of the different parties calling for independence. Historian Ayesha Jalal has famously argued a territorial partition was not anticipated by those who are understood as its primary advocates, namely Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, that is the so-called protagonists of Pakistan.[vi] When independence was officially declared, people on the ground, Muslims in Hindu-majority areas of the subcontinent and Hindus and Sikhs in Muslim-majority areas, were unsure as to where they should be: stay put or seek refuge with their co-religionists? Sadat Hassan Manto’s literary classic Toba Tek Singh remains a timeless and poignant indictment of partition.[vii] Yet historian Joya Chatterji shows how refugees who found themselves in the newly established nation-states were able to shape their destiny in important ways.[viii] While both states muddled through the shock of partition, Muslim refugees in Pakistan and Sikh and Hindu refugees in India claimed rights in their new “religious” homelands through their own actions―in processes of integration that took place in cities such as New Delhi, Lahore, and Karachi.[ix] Land grabs, squatting, defiance of official decrees, and moral claims made by refugees (usually on the evacuated property of former city dwellers) were common.[x] Citizenship was not a legal status bestowed by the state upon those who resided in its territories, but was rather claimed as a right by new sets of displaced persons along lines of religious identity―this also had implications for religious minorities in the new nation-states, who were treated as potential fifth columns.[xi] However, while refugees became formal citizens of their new states, there was a limit to their acceptance. As Vazira Zamindar shows, by 1951 India stopped the blanket acceptance of Hindu and Sikh refugees as citizens; Pakistan did the same for Muslim refugees. Both states instead moved toward a territorial definition of citizenship.[xii]
Yet since 1947, large scale migration has remained a central feature of the subcontinent. In the case of Pakistan, there have been decades of research into outward Pakistani migration, diaspora, remittances, and transnational mobility to Britain,[xiii] Europe,[xiv] and the Gulf Arab states.[xv] There is also a rich body of work on earlier, precolonial and colonial migrations from and within the subcontinent that pushes us to imagine regional and global processes and identities beyond the nation-state.[xvi] But, apart from some important exceptions,[xvii] we know much less about Pakistan’s internal migration circuits and regional migrations of noncitizens into Pakistan. This is surprising given that Pakistan hosts some of the highest numbers of refugees, displaced persons, and undocumented migrants in the world.
At its peak, by around 2005, it is estimated that seven to eight million Afghans were living in Pakistan―mainly in urban areas.[xviii] Today the figure is between two-and-a-half and three million. In addition, over one million Bangladeshis, primarily from low-income backgrounds, live in Karachi with the status of undocumented migrants.[xix] In 1971 East Pakistan seceded from Pakistan and became Bangladesh, yet Bangladeshis still moved to Pakistan in search of work or because of existing family and social ties.[xx] Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, tens of thousands of Rohingya have also fled discrimination and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and settled in Karachi.[xxi] There are also pockets of undocumented Sri Lankan, Somali, Thai, Filipino, Iranian, Iraqi, and Yemeni migrants (individuals and communities) in major cities across the country.[xxii]
In addition to these regional migrations, millions of Pakistani citizens are periodically displaced and made landless or homeless within Pakistan due to conflict, political persecution, ecological disasters, and economic and infrastructural development. From the 1960s, the introduction of new technologies and state-led agrarian development via the so-called Green Revolution have led to massive displacements, above all from rural Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. By the 1980s and 1990s, rural flight to the cities was accelerated because of structural adjustment programs implemented by international financial institutions.[xxiii] Since the 1970s, military campaigns against an ethnonationalist mobilization and insurgency in Balochistan province has led to migrations toward other cities in the country or exile from Pakistan. Since the WOT started in 2001, over five million people have been internally displaced from Pakistan’s northwestern, predominantly Pashtun, areas.[xxiv] Many have migrated toward major cities such as Peshawar, Karachi, and Islamabad. Meanwhile, the devastating nationwide floods of 2010 affected some eighteen million people, with twelve million people’s homes destroyed.[xxv]

A New Language of Rights: Insani Haquq in the City
What do the lives of these various international, regional, and internal migrants tell us about mobility, citizenship, urbanity, and belonging in the postcolonial state today? This book explores how they are leading to new urban identities that are less about nationality, ethnicity, and “imagined communities,”[xxvi] than basic rights―quite literally, having a roof over your head, access to water, sanitation, and food. The framing of these rights is less about ethnic or religious identity or claims of belonging to a territorial homeland, as was the case for Chatterji’s refugees of partition.[xxvii] Instead, these claims are made using a language of human needs and rights, and stem from an awareness of the way in which the labor of these populations contributes to the cities in which they reside and have transformed them in size, culture, and economics.
In the formation of new urban identities, inevitably the space, culture, and economics of the city itself have a crucial role. Pakistan is the world’s sixth largest country in terms of population (it has an estimated 220 million people). It has the fastest rate of urbanization in South Asia. By 2025, 50 percent of the country’s population will live in urban centers.[xxviii] Pakistani policy makers boast of constructing “sustainable cities” (Islamabad)[xxix] or “world class” cities (Karachi),[xxx] as they seek to replicate models imported from the Gulf, shaped as they are by consumerism, finance capital, and a neoliberal vision of Islam. Thanks to the so-called Dubai effect,[xxxi] the postcolonial city no longer looks only to the former metropole for a vision of modernity. Unlike the Gulf Arab states, however, Pakistan does not have an oil-rich economy and miniscule populations that can easily be catered for by the state. In Pakistan, as is the case elsewhere in the Global South, urbanization has been “radically decoupled from industrialization, even from development per se.”[xxxii] In Pakistan, when the poor and jobless migrants end up in cities, “they find neither jobs in the formal sector nor affordable housing” and “with no other alternative, they tend to become part of the sprawling, ever-expanding network of squatters’ slums.”[xxxiii] Yet as this book shows, this growing informal sphere is not simply shaped by helplessness; instead it is home to large populations seeking to improve their lives and reclaim a humanity denied them.
In the modern political system, citizenship and nationality are central to membership in society. The radical idea of the French Revolution that all people are equal as citizens laid the foundations for a break with the social hierarchies that had hitherto ordered French society and were considered “ordained by God.”[xxxiv] (At the time of the French Revolution, however, citizenship was not extended to enslaved persons in the Americas, indigenous persons, colonial subjects, and women―even if liberal ideas of citizenship would inspire liberation movements across the globe.) But universalistic inclusion within the nation-state is also based on the subordination of those who are categorized as nonmembers,[xxxv] and denied to those who do not belong (refugees, undocumented migrants, and legal foreigners). In other words, citizenship is and always has been, ultimately, exclusionary. One answer to this was meant to have emerged through a language and practice of universal human rights. Scholars of anti-colonialism, indigenous studies, and critical whiteness, however, have shown the limits of the international human rights framework as it emerges through a Euro-American tradition in which the standards of humanity center around the white (male) subject.[xxxvi] Other scholars have shown that it is only the state that can really enforce and uphold human rights (and not all states want to do so)―not an international human rights regime―meaning, noncitizens always occupy a more vulnerable position within the confines of a nation-state that is not theirs. [xxxvii]
Moreover, while being a member of society is affected by what it means to be a rights-bearing citizen of a territorial nation-state, what happens when being a citizen does not, in practice, improve the quality of your life? In the postcolonial state, meaningful citizenship is only the preserve of a limited elite, which means most “citizens,” find themselves “only tenuously, and even then ambiguously and contextually, rights-bearing citizens in the sense imagined by the constitution.”[xxxviii] In addition, in the Global South, unlike migrants in the Western liberal democratic state that may become formal members or residents, the processes of claiming rights rarely results in formal membership.[xxxix] Yet even within the Western liberal democratic state, as scholars of race, ethnicity, and class show, the distinction between the citizen and noncitizen is not a dichotomous one, but rests on a continuous and reversible gradation often connected with ethnoracial and ethnonational hierarchies.[xl] For migrants who do become citizens, many experience social, cultural, and economic exclusion and remain situated on the “threshold between inside and outside”; they are included without being members and as a result are forced to “be the border.”[xli]
A related body of scholarship on cities in the Global South examines how cities are important sites for new identities and alternative forms of citizenship.[xlii] For some, such as Mike Davis, the breakneck speed of “Third World” urbanization, reflected in the proliferation of “slums” in the Global South’s “megacities,” leads to an apocalyptic and dystopian existence.[xliii] Others, however, understand the city, including the megacity, as spaces of resistance and agency―even if the poor face severe constraints. Ananya Roy uses the concept of “subaltern urbanism” a “terrain of habitation, livelihood, self-organization and politics,” while cautioning against the romanticization of the urban poor―or what they call the Slumdog Millionaire effect (a reference to a 2008 film by British director Danny Boyle).[xliv] AbdouMaliq Simone says, “cities remain critical domains for engendering new collectivities” that “continuously remake the potentialities of life.”[xlv] Anthropologists John Holston and Arjun Appadurai’s work on cities and citizenship tell us, “with their concentrations of the nonlocal, the strange, the mixed, and the public,”[xlvi] cities carry within them the conditions through which negotiations of membership play out. For while the modern nation state, including the postcolonial nation state, has sought to “dismantle the historic primacy of urban citizenship and replace it with the national . . . cities remain the strategic arena for the development of citizenship.” [xlvii] Here, “place remains fundamental to the problems of membership in society.” [xlviii] Meanwhile urban geographer Ayona Datta says informal neighborhoods create a “cosmopolitan neighborliness”―an openness to difference―in cities that are otherwise exclusionary to the poor.[xlix]
In many cities in Pakistan, Afghans have transformed space into place, imbuing it with emotional, social, and material investments. Using informal channels, such as social solidarity networks (friendships, marital relationships, relationships with neighbors), as well as middlemen and other power brokers, they claim rights and resources in the city. In this process, of struggle and redistribution, they experience an emotional attachment to the towns and cities of which they are a part. They become urban citizens, a status that is informally recognized by the communities composed of citizens and noncitizens of which they are a part.
Afghan nationals are a part of global, transnational networks; mobility has emerged as a strategy to survive in the context of conflict.[l] A minority of these migrants have become formal Pakistani citizens through irregular channels. Political scientist Kamal Sadiq calls this the process of becoming “paper citizens,”[li] whereby, through bribery and forgery, refugees and undocumented migrants acquire official papers (identity documents, registration certificates, school enrollment forms, and the like).[lii] But not everyone can do this―it is quite a skilled and expensive process or requires connections with officials or middlemen. Moreover, as I show in Chapter 5, new computerized surveillance technologies are making such strategies more difficult. Since the start of the WOT, Afghans in Pakistan have been governed by a framework of “repatriation” to Afghanistan―the assumption is that all Afghan nationals, irrespective of how long they have lived in Pakistan, will and should return to their “natural” territorial homeland.[liii] However, many subjects of this book do not view the rural areas from which they or their parents came as home or their only home; rather, they want to remain in the towns and cities of which they are now a part.
Liberal ideas of the equality of all individuals in the eyes of the sovereign state are quite well understood and even idealized among ordinary people, including low-income groups. Meanwhile Afghans―even those with emotional ties to the Afghan nation―recognize the value of formal citizenship in Pakistan: of being equal to other citizens in the eyes of the law. But most of Pakistan’s longer-term Afghan populations know that formal citizenship is not accessible. Despite this, they still carve out their attachments, responsibilities, and sense of community in the localities and cities in which they live. For these Afghans, most of whom settle in urban areas, the city’s anonymizing form provides a sense of security. The nation is not so easy to attach itself to; it is exclusionary, jingoistic, and hostile. But the city is complex, layered, and made as much by the people who live within it, if not more so, than those who govern it at the municipal and national level. In the city, people from different class, ethnic, national, and religious backgrounds live side by side, not equally but in diversity. The city does, in important respects, accommodate different ethnicities, nationalities, sexualities, and classes within a single space―albeit subject to hierarchical, uneven divisions.
And yet, urban citizenship, as discussed in this book, and the claims-making processes upon which it is based are not to be conflated with the conscious, targeted, and collective action in urban spaces of advanced capitalist and liberal democratic societies and has been discussed by the likes of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey.[liv] Instead they are akin to what Asef Bayat calls “social non-movements” that draw on “atomized” acts, which are repeated simultaneously, but without coordination, which nonetheless create long-lasting changes (physical, social, cultural, ecological, economic, demographic).[lv] These acts are a route to improving immediate circumstances, but they do not have the specific objective of enforcing political change. They are part of an “unplanned revolution.”[lvi] Though not intentional acts of resistance, they represent the “silent, protracted, but pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied, the powerful, or the public in order to survive and improve their lives.”[lvii]
For Bayat it is these spaces that we must understand as sites in which the potential for political change is strong, if and when the correct conditions emerge. My own research confirms the conditions for political change that would improve the conditions of Afghans in Pakistan are not present. Yet at the same time, for the people of this book, they have an agency, awareness, and lucid understanding of the structural conditions that govern their precarious lives. My research subjects know when they break the law, by squatting, siphoning electricity, and getting informal water supplies, these actions are taken out of necessity. Their moral claims to access basic goods and resources rest on constructions of the “insaniyat” (humanity) and “insani haquq” (human rights) of the poor―citizens and noncitizens alike. These understandings of insaniyat are somewhat reflective of Yasmin Saikia’s split nature of the human subject in South Asia, who is able to possess multiple identities. For Saikia, writing on the 1971 war in Bangladesh, the ability and need to have multiple identities is, in part, a reflection of the failure of a unitary national identity to successfully emerge in the region.[lviii] For the subjects of this book, their claims and calls of rights are not based on a regional construction of humanity, but one that is shaped by everyday lived struggles for rights, resources, and dignity that are often denied to them. It is their shared material conditions and lived experiences of depravation that drive their actions, which lead to their attachments to the city.


Reflections on Methodology
This book draws on fieldwork conducted over an eight-year period (2010–2018) consisting of ethnography, over five hundred semi-structured interviews, and archival analysis―details which are listed in the bibliography of this book.[lix] (Only interviews that were cited directly/used to inform case studies in the text have been listed.) The book is an effort to tell the story of ordinary peoples’ lives situated between two global wars, the Soviet-Afghan war and the WOT. (It does not comment on the impact of the 2021 Taliban recapture of political power in Afghanistan.) As Afghans have been increasingly pushed out of Pakistan, this book is, in part, an act of witnessing and preservation. But it is also about uncovering how a new Afghan-Pakistani urban identity has developed over a period of forty years that is not so easy to undo.
I focus on Karachi and Peshawar since both cities are home to large numbers of Afghans and because they are marked by scores of “mixed” neighborhoods in which citizens, refugees, and undocumented migrants reside. Both cities, then, are relevant sites for a study on urbanity and local, national, and regional mobility. The two cities are different in size, demographics, history, economy, and politics. Karachi is a global port and megacity, home to some twenty-three million people. Situated on the coast and linked to the Indian Ocean world, Karachi is a vast, sprawling, metropolitan commercial center. Peshawar, on the other hand, is much smaller than Karachi, landlocked, home to some five million people, and a dry port that links the Central and South Asian regions. Both cities have, since Pakistan’s creation, been important local, national, and regional migration hubs for Afghan nationals and Pakistani Pashtuns. Karachi, however, has been somewhat neglected in the Afghan story in Pakistan, with most attention centering on Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa―including the areas formerly part of FATA. This book tries to move the Afghan story in Pakistan beyond the territorial “frontier.”
Owing, however, to the mobile and networked lives of the people I worked with, I also conducted less intensive research in other cities in Pakistan (Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Mardan, Nowshera, Charsadda, Jamrud, Swabi, Attock, Peshawar, Karachi); Germany (Berlin, Mainz, Frankfurt, Munich); France (Paris, Lyon); the UK (London); and Turkey (Istanbul, Ankara). I also reconnected with interviewees via messages and online calls to Afghanistan, Iran, Australia, Greece, and Italy.
In Karachi and Peshawar, my main field sites were informal housing areas or refugee camps located at spatial, infrastructural, economic, and political urban margins. In order to conduct my fieldwork, in some cases, I situated myself in a particular locality on a regular basis (Chapters 2 and 4), traveling daily to and from an area. At other times my fieldwork was dependent on movement across the city. The reasons for movement were multilayered. While dominant understandings of how to conduct ethnography require being based in one site through processes of immersion, that is “of simply being there,” this often does not apply when it comes to studies of the poor, migrants or migration, and in contexts of political violence.
First, most of the people I interviewed were from low-income backgrounds (and in some cases have no income). They engaged in scavenging, daily wage labor, small enterprises, or handicraft work. Many walked and traveled long distances to access work, food, water, health care, and education. Some had their family split across different locations in the city (and, indeed, across Pakistan and in other countries) in order to secure a livelihood. In order to be able to interview them and understand their lives, I conducted some of my interviews with them in the areas where they lived and at other times I interviewed them at their places of work.
Second, I quickly came to see firsthand that many of my research subjects―Afghan refugees and undocumented migrants, Pakistani Pashtuns from the then FATA in Peshawar, and in Karachi, all Pashtuns, the Baloch, and the poor―were racialized. Their mobility in the city was accompanied by systematic harassment by law enforcement officers. As such, my sites of research had to include roads, checkpoints, and enumeration centers and techniques carried out by the state and UN-affiliated institutions.
Third, my own subject position and gendered social norms meant I felt, as a Pakistani woman, it would have been problematic for me to live in a participant’s house.
Fourth, I was acutely aware that housing a guest would have been burdensome for the host family in question.
Finally, the decision to remain mobile was also shaped by local political conflicts: the routine nature of bombings, political strikes (hartal), state surveillance in the context of the WOT, and the vulnerability of those who I worked with. A flexible, multisited approach to fieldwork was made inevitable by the difficulties of accessing field-sites. For example, in Peshawar and Karachi, when transport networks closed down because of a bomb blast or a political strike, some neighborhoods I had studied became difficult to access. Further, as a dual national, British and Pakistani, I was concerned that my status as a British national could put interviewees and interlocutors at risk, or that my Pakistani status would not protect others or me enough. The nature of the military-dominated state and WOT meant rumor and fear were (and are) a part of everyday life. The feeling of being under surveillance was never absent, though knowing which branch or faction of the state is doing what was impossible to decipher. On two occasions I was directly confronted by intelligence officers; at other times I was told by family and colleagues that intelligence officers had asked details about who I was and what my work was about. This was, of course, an indication that the surveillance regime is working. What is at the heart of the panopticon is not necessarily being observed, but making the subject aware that she/he/they are being watched, which in turn affects the subject and shapes behaviors.
The climate of fear informed how I recorded my data, anonymizing names and even the locations in which I conducted my research. All of the names of individuals and specific localities have been substituted with pseudonyms in this manuscript.
During my research I was also concerned with how my subject position shaped how I produced knowledge, especially in the contexts of violence, migration, and poverty. I found myself reflecting on the methodological, political, and ethical considerations of documenting, analyzing (and pontificating over) instances and routine forms of direct and structural violence―from the bulldozing of houses, to malnutrition, deportation, to military operations, or criminal and political violence.[lx]
As someone who identifies or is identified as a woman, Pakistani (Kashmiri-Punjabi), East African-Yemeni-Indian, Muslim, born and raised in the UK and sometimes Pakistan, I found some aspects of the worlds I was studying familiar. I lived in and visited urban Pakistan throughout my life―as a child, teenager, and adult. My mother’s own low-income background, her recollections of living on handouts, going without food in Lahore and being malnourished as a result, and my grandmother’s continued hand-to-mouth struggle are a part of my lifeworld. In interviews in informal housing areas in Karachi and Andrun shehr (the inner city) in Peshawar, the homes were familiar: the smells, the lack of a roof/ broken roof, the wood fire or gas canister on the floor of the kitchen. Yet beyond this sense of familiarity with and, I dare say, nostalgia for my mother’s poverty or the home we played in as children, I was disturbed by the commonplace encounters[lxi] I had with extreme poverty that were entirely alien and often shocking: severely malnourished infants, extreme illness, acute depression, death from poverty, and severe forms of persecution by the state were routine parts of my conversations and interactions. All of which could hardly be further from my relatively privileged existence stemming from citizenship from an affluent country and the ever-present option to leave unpleasant situations. At the same time, my fieldwork experiences are not simply encounters laced with unfamiliarity. Rather they are typical of so much of diaspora’s experience and of those whose upward social mobility has taken place within a generation: familiar, yet alien; learned, at times, lived, but only ever in punctuated bursts.
What is the responsibility of the researcher in this situation? The challenge, perhaps, is not to analyze these events as an encounter or as an aberration (which it was for me). Rather the consideration must be to allow the perspective of the individuals and groups in question to be considered and explained: to unpack how individuals and groups cope and contextualize their lives (and sometimes do not) in the face of massive and lethal structural shortcomings, and reclaim a humanity that is denied to them. One of the tasks of the anthropologist and social scientist is to humanize those otherwise marginalized and demonized, giving them a voice and bringing their life experiences to others. Yet crucially another task is to not just analyze how violence and suffering are enacted, experienced, narrated, and coped with, but to also analyze the historicity and the structural conditions, local, regional, and global that underpin their lives.[lxii] It is with this effort that this book has been written.

Book Outline
Chapter 1 provides a historical background to the contemporary Afghan story in Pakistan. Drawing from archives and interviews, the chapter examines how Pakistan’s Afghan question cannot be separated from the ways in which the British colonialism depicted and governed Afghanistan and British India’s territories bordering Afghanistan through simplified prisms of Pashtun ethnolinguistic and tribal tropes―tropes that would eerily reappear in both the Soviet Afghan war and WOT. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 reconstruct microhistories of low-income urban neighborhoods on the outskirts of Karachi and Peshawar. The chapters focus on how neighborhoods―home to Afghans and Pakistanis―work together to secure basic resources and rights using informal channels. These acts, the book argues, reflect the calls of residents for rights in the city that they feel they are due to them. It is also through these actions that an urban identity that cuts across lines of ethnicity and nationality emerges. Chapter 5 examines how shifting geopolitics mean the Pakistani state tries to push back against the Afghan presence across the country by making repatriation central to its policy of managing Afghans. The book concludes by reflecting on what the harrowing reversal of the Afghan position in Pakistan teaches us about citizenship, refugee status, and geopolitics in an era of increased securitization.

[i] Liisa H. Malkki, “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 24 (1995), 495–523.

[ii] Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010; Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983; Mike Davis, Planet of the Slums, London: Verso, 2006; Janice E. Perlman, The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976; Ananya Roy, “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35 (2009), 223–238; AbdouMaliq Simone, City Life from Jakarta to Dakar, New York: Routledge, 2010.

[iii] Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

[iv] Bayat, Life as Politics.

[v] Human Rights Watch, “Pakistan Coercion, UN Complicity: The Mass Forced Return of Afghan Refugees,” Islamabad, 2017, accessed 4 April 2021, https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/02/13/pakistan-coercion-un-complicity/mass-forced-return-afghan-refugees.

[vi] Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

[vii] At the end of Manto’s short story, a Sikh patient from an insane asylum in the new nation-state of Pakistan is to be transferred to India. Unable to make sense of where he should be, he emits a single loud shriek and collapses in the no-man's-land between the new nation-states, encapsulating what was, for Manto, the absurdity of partition. See: Saadat Hassan Manto, Toba Tek Singh, Lahore: Maktabah-e Jadid, 1955.

[viii] Joya Chatterji, “South Asian Histories of Citizenship, 1946–1970,” Historical Journal, 55: 4 (2012), 1051.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

[xiii] Roger Ballard, “The Political Economy of Migration: Pakistan, Britain, and the Middle East,” in Migrants, Workers and the Social Order, ed. Jeremy Eades, London: Tavistock, 1987, 17–41; Papiya Ghosh, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent, New Delhi: Routledge India, 2014; Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History, London: Pluto Press, 2002.

[xiv] Ali Nobil Ahmad, Masculinity, Sexuality and Illegal Migration: Human Smuggling from Pakistan to Europe, London: Routledge, 2011.

[xv] Jonathan S. Addleton, Undermining the Centre: The Gulf Migration and Pakistan, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1992; Hassan N. Gardezi, “Asian Workers in the Gulf States of the Middle East,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 21: 2 (1991), 179–194; Junaid Akram Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

[xvi] Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, “The Pashtun Counter-Narrative,” Middle East Critique, 25: 4 (2016), 385–400; Samia Khatun, Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia, London: Hurst, 2018; Robert Nichols, A History of Pashtun Migration, 1775–2006, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

[xvii] Nausheen H. Anwar, “Negotiating New Conjunctures of Citizenship: Experiences of ‘Illegality’ in Burmese-Rohingya and Bangladeshi Migrant Enclaves in Karachi,” Citizenship Studies, 17: 3–4 (2013), 414–428; Alessandro Monsutti, War and Migration: Social Networks and Economic Strategies of the Hazaras of Afghanistan, London: Routledge, 2005.

[xviii] Collective for Social Science Research, “Afghans in Peshawar: Migration, Settlement and Social Networks,” Karachi: Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, 2005, 54.

[xix] BEFARE, “Baseline Study on Illegal Migration, Human Smuggling and Trafficking in
Pakistan,” Karachi: BEFARE, 2009.

[xx] Arif Hasan and Mansoor Raza, Migration and Small Towns in Pakistan, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011, 30.

[xxi] Anwar, “Negotiating New Conjunctures of Citizenship.”

[xxii] Society for Human Rights and Prisoners’ Rights (SHARP), SHARP ALAC Files 2010–2011, SHARP Archive; Interview: Shahida Parveen, Lawyer, SHARP, Karachi, 9 November 2010 and 14 November 2010; Sikandar Mehmood, Manager Karachi Suboffice, SHARP, Karachi, 6 October 2010, 15 October 2010, 21 October 2010, and 4 November 2010; Independent Human Rights Lawyer, Peshawar, repeat interviews: March 2011, September 2013 to November 2013 [name withheld]; Independent Human Rights Lawyer, Peshawar, repeat interviews: October 2013 to January 2014, May 2015 [name withheld].

[xxiii] Hasan and Raza, Migration and Small Towns.

[xxiv] Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre Organisation (IDMC), “Pakistan IDP Figures Analysis 2009–2018,” 17 August 2019.

[xxv] Disasters Emergency Committee, “Pakistan Floods: Facts and Figures,” accessed 17 February 2019, https://www.dec.org.uk/articles/pakistan-floods-facts-and-figures.

[xxvi] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1989.

[xxvii] Ibid.

[xxviii] Michael Kugelman, ed., Pakistan’s Runaway Urbanization: What Can Be Done? Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2014, 2.

[xxix] Government of Pakistan, Ministry of Climate Change, “National Report of Pakistan for UN Habitat III,” 2015, accessed 10 June 2019, http://habitat3.org/wp-content/uploads/Pakistan-Final-in-English.pdf.

[xxx] Government of Pakistan, City District Government Karachi (CDGK), “Karachi Strategic Development Plan 2020,” Karachi, 2006.

[xxxi] Neyran Turan, “The Dubai Effect Archipelago,” Middle Eastern Studies, 4: 43 (2007), 557–577.

[xxxii] Davis, Planet of the Slums.

[xxxiii] Tasneem Siddiqui, “Pakistan’s Urbanization Challenges: Housing for the Low-Income,” in Pakistan’s Runaway Urbanization: What Can Be Done? ed. Michael Kugelman, Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2014, 66–77.

[xxxiv] Immanuel Wallerstein, “Citizens All? Citizens Some! The Making of the Citizen,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45: 4 (2003), 650.

[xxxv] Sébastien Chauvin and Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas, “Beyond Informal Citizenship: The New Moral Economy of Migrant Illegality,” International Political Sociology, 63 (2012), 241.

[xxxvi] Sonia Tascón and Jim Ife, “Human Rights and Critical Whiteness: Whose Humanity?,” International Journal of Human Rights 12: 3 (2008), 307–327; Antony Anghie, “The Evolution of International Law: Colonial and Postcolonial Realities,” Third World Quarterly, 27: 5 (2006), 739–753.

[xxxvii] Shahram Khosravi, “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Schocken Books, 2004.

[xxxviii] Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed, 38.

[xxxix] Sébastien Chauvin and Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas, "Becoming Less Illegal: Deservingness Frames and Undocumented Migrant Incorporation,” Sociology Compass, 8: 4 (2014), 422–432; Saskia Sassen, “The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 46 (2002), 12.

[xl] Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas, “Beyond Informal Citizenship,” 242. See also Rogers Brubaker, “Membership Without Citizenship: The Economic and Social Rights of Noncitizens,” in Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America, ed. Rogers Brubaker, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989; Peter Nyers, “Forms of Irregular Citizenship,” in The Contested Politics of Citizenship: Borderzones and Irregularity, ed. Vicki Squire, London: Routledge, 2011; Loïc Wacquant, “Race as Civic Felony,” International Social Science Journal, 57: 183 (2005), 127–142; Nicholas De Genova, “The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant ‘Illegality,’” Latino Studies, 2 (2004), 160–185.

[xli] Khosravi, “Illegal” Traveller, 98.

[xlii] Bayat, Life as Politics; Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed; Davis, Planet of the Slums; James Holston, “Insurgent Citizenship in an Era of Global Urban Peripheries,” City and Society, 21: 2 (2009), 245–267; Roy, “Slumdog Cities”; Simone, City Life from Jakarta to Dakar.

[xliii] Davis, Planet of the Slums.

[xliv] Roy, “Slumdog Cities,” 224.

[xlv] AbdouMaliq Simone, “The Politics of the Possible: Making Urban Life in Phnom Penh,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 29 (2008), 186.

[xlvi] James Holston and Arjun Appadurai, “Cities and Citizenship,” Public Culture, 8: 2 (1996), 191.

[xlvii] Ibid., 188.

[xlviii] Ibid., 188–189.

[xlix] Ayona Datta, "‘Mongrel City,’ Cosmopolitan Neighbourliness in a Delhi Squatter Settlement,” Antipode, 44: 3 (2012), 745–763.

[l] Alessandro Monsutti, “Migration as a Rite of Passage: Young Afghans Building Masculinity and Adulthood in Iran,” Iranian Studies, 40: 2 (2007), 167–185.

[li] Kamal Sadiq, Paper Citizens: How Illegal Immigrants Acquire Citizenship in Developing Countries, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

[lii] Ibid.

[liii] Malkki, “Refugees and Exile.”

[liv] David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review, 53 (September–October 2008), 23–40; Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, translated by Robert Bononno, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003, first published 1970 in French by Gallimard (Paris).

[lv] Bayat, Life as Politics.

[lvi] Arif Hasan, The Unplanned Revolution: Observations on the Processes of Socio-Economic Change in Pakistan, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2009.

[lvii] Bayat, Life as Politics, 56.

[lviii] Yasmin Saikia, “Insaniyat for Peace: Survivors' Narrative of the 1971 War of Bangladesh,” Journal of Genocide Research, 13: 4 (2016), 475–501.

[lix] The ages given for interviewees may be different in the text of the book when compared to the interviews listed in the bibliography. This is because the ages listed in the bibliography reflect the age of the person at the time of the first interview I completed with them.

[lx] Samar Kanafani and Zina Sawaf, “Being, Doing and Knowing in the Field: Reflections on Ethnographic Practice in the Arab Region,” Contemporary Levant, 2: 1 (2017), 3–11.

[lxi] Lamia Moghnieh, “‘The Violence We Live In’: Reading and Experiencing Violence in the Field,” Contemporary Levant, 2: 1 (2017), 24–36.

[lxii] Julie Peteet, Landscape of Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camps, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.