Refugee Cities : How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan / Sanaa Alimia.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Alimia, Sanaa, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Afghans--Pakistan.

Afghans.

Refugees--Afghanistan.

Refugees.

Refugees--Pakistan.

Urbanization--Pakistan.

Urbanization.

Afghans--Pakistan--Karachi--Social conditions.

Afghans--Pakistan--Peshawar--Social conditions.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (249 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022]

Summary:

Situated between the 1970s Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan and the post-2001 War on Terror, Refugee Cities tells the story of how global wars affect everyday life for Afghans who have been living as refugees in Pakistan. This book provides a necessary glimpse of what ordinary life looks like for a long-term refugee population, beyond the headlines of war, terror, or helpless suffering. It also increases our understanding of how cities--rather than the nation--are important sites of identity-making for people of migrant origins.In Refugee Cities, Sanaa Alimia reconstructs local microhistories to chronicle the lives of ordinary people living in low-income neighborhoods in Peshawar and Karachi and the ways in which they have transformed the cities of which they are a part. In Pakistan, formal citizenship is almost impossible for Afghans to access; despite this, Afghans have made new neighborhoods, expanded city boundaries, built cities through their labor in construction projects, and created new urban identities--and often they have done so alongside Pakistanis. Their struggles are a crucial, neglected dimension of Pakistan's urban history. Yet given that the Afghan experience in Pakistan is profoundly shaped by geopolitics, the book also documents how, in the War-on-Terror era, many Afghans have been forced to leave Pakistan. This book, then, is also a documentation of the multiple displacements migrants are subject to and the increased normalization of deportation as a part of "refugee management."

Contents:

Introduction: Refugee cities

Ghosts of empire: the Afghan question in Pakistan

The right to water in an informal refugee camp

Bulldozers and violence in a Pakistani settlement

Peshawar's Afghan transformation

Surveillance, documents, and repatriation.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781512822793

1512822795

OCLC:

1310343484