Publications

Scholarship on Afghan transnational mobility has focused on the historic global dispersion of Afghans and on transnational lives dominated by circular migration across borders and continents that enabled their survival. While the end of the war in Afghanistan following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 has once again increased the dependence of many Afghans on transnational networks, it has not enabled but rather disrupted Afghans’ mobility, for two reasons: First, the gradual immobilisation of Afghans has reached a peak due to the long-term increase in the politicisation of their presence in Pakistan and Iran, the continuous legal limbo and diminishing protection they face, and the securitisation of national borders by neighbouring states. Second, the insulation of Afghanistan and its people have been amplified by an unprecedented fragmentation of ‘the Afghan diaspora’. Political and social remittances from various diasporic groups have fallen to an all-time low, resulting in a de facto negligible influence on the situation inside the country after 2021. Both findings indicate that transnational networks, being exposed to nation-state policies, are fragile and can collapse rapidly. Consequently, Afghanistan has turned into a humanitarian prison of immobility. The inhabitants of Afghanistan have become homines sacri (Agamben in Homo Sacer, Stanford University Press, 1998) of the global world order.

Read the book chapter here.