Review of Sanaa Alimia, Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022, 248. ISBN: 9781512822861
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: Sana Alimia'sRefugee Cities is essential for all interested in questions of belonging, citizenship, and migration in urban Pakistan.Refugee Cities shows how Afghan refugees constituted urban life in Pakistan and, in turn, how this experience has come to shape their own identity.Through this process, Afghans emerged as urban citizens of Pakistan, even without legal citizenship.Refugee Cities brings an empirically rich investigation of issues central to urban spaces in the Global South-including property relations, informality, and precarity-into conversation with broad political questions concerning identity and citizenship.Alimia deftly moves between the scale of the urban neighborhood and the complex geopolitics of a contentiously bordered world within which Afghans live and move while never collapsing the texture of the multi-ethnic city with its cross-cutting solidarities.A significant intervention of Refugee Cities is demonstrating how Afghans are not outsiders to Pakistan's social and political landscape but integral to its making.Refugees do not exist in isolation but within a complex and internally differentiated urban world.The political implications of this insight should not be underemphasized: Afghan refugees are far from a drain on their host countries.They make the places they live in.Yet, Alimia's story is far from a triumphant tale of resilience.Alimia's nuanced rendering of the paradoxes of citizenship foregrounds the limitations of legal conceptions of belonging, namely through official, statesanctioned channels.At the same time, Refugee Cities provides an ethnographic account of precisely how legal recognition, or the lack thereof, bears upon refugee lives.Most profoundly, the absence of legal citizenship limits refugees from returning to cities like Karachi or Peshawar, which they consider home.Refugee Cities foregrounds the role of paper documents in informing the multifaceted ways that Afghan refugees create a sense of belonging.This account is especially intriguing because, in some cases, belonging is limited by and works through documents.Alimia describes how Afghan refugees' sense of belonging differs, at times, based on their differential status.One interlocutor, Safdar, describes himself as Pakistani because of his documentary status: "We come from Afghanistan : : : but we have all of the documents to say we are Pakistani.We are Pakistani" (84).Here, Refugee Cities prompts further questioning into the role that documents and legal status, even if precariously and provisionally acquired, play in generating claims of belonging and shaping identity.What are the precise social and affective processes by which the acquisition of "paper citizenship" transforms how refugees claim belonging?As Alimia describes, the regimes of paper citizenship are entering a new era of technological capacity.There have been significant transformations and, indeed,
Source: Critical Pakistan studies.
DOI: 10.1017/cps.2025.1
Author: Zehra Hashmi
Institution: University of Pennsylvania
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,450
OpenAlex ID: W4407634025