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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2022
At the intersection of multipolar, multi-scalar sites of mutual exchange and tension, Afghanistan and Iraq conjure imaginaries of shadowy and risky geographies wired up to dispersed terrorist cells around the globe. These spaces constitute the sites where the “civilizing process” of the “War on Terror” takes place, “laboratories of globalization” where global hegemonic neoliberal projects of free market democratization and development get stranded. At the same time, they are spaces where global interconnections are accelerated, and where multiple mobilities, often contingent upon expectations about the successes and failures of reconstruction, are interwoven, producing networks that extend well beyond national borders.
1 Fluri, Jennifer, “‘Foreign Passports Only’: Geographies of (Post)Conflict Work in Kabul, Afghanistan,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99, no. 5 (2009): 986–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Salvatore, Armando, “Civility: Between Disciplined Interaction and Local/Translocal Connectedness,” Third World Quarterly 32, no. 5 (2011): 807–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Billaud, Julie, Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coburn, Noah, Losing Afghanistan: An Obituary for the Intervention (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Monsutti, Alessandro, Homo itinerans: La planète des Afghans (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dorronsoro, Gilles, Le gouvernement transnational de l'Afghanistan. Une si prévisible défaite (Paris: Karthala, 2021)Google Scholar.
2 I borrow the term from Billaud, Kabul Carnival. See also Fluri, “‘Foreign Passports Only’”; Jennifer Fluri, “Armored Peacocks and Proxy Bodies: Gender Politics in Aid/Development Spaces of Afghanistan,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 18 no. 4 (2011): 519–36; and Pietro Calogero, Planning Kabul: The Politics of Urbanization in Afghanistan (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011).
3 Subsumed by the distinction between “migrant,” “exile,” and “expatriate” in public discourse to qualify mobile persons.
4 In fact, until early August, European governments continued to seal their borders to Afghan migrants and to deport Afghans.
5 Perhaps the most obscure and absurd category was that of “women and children.”
6 For instance, an NGO worker could emigrate with his or her spouse and underage children, but not with his or her parents, adult children, or other members of their household. The category of “dependents” who were allowed to emigrate with a given individual was more informed by predefined categories of what should constitute a household in Western settings than by actual considerations of threat and vulnerability, or a contextual knowledge of household structures and “dependency” in Afghanistan.
7 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
8 Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabnay, eds., Vulnerabilty in Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
9 Arlette Farge, “Penser et définir l’évènement en histoire,” Terrain 38 (2002): 67–78.
10 In recent interactions with scholars working in and on different political space-times (notably Central Asia and West Africa), I was struck by similarities in patterns of inequality, forms of mobility, and processes including the “NGO-ization” of activism (the latter, described by Zahra Ali for Iraqi Kurdistan, resonates with ways in which mechanisms of international development intended to “empower” and “strengthen” societies phagocytize local civil societies). See Zahra Ali, Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
11 I use the word “return,” but it is important to note that most were born in Iran, or had left Afghanistan at a very young age.
12 One of the social institutions that is described by migrants as having undergone important changes through migration in Iran is indeed that of marriage. Transformations include delaying the age of marriage for brides, being less kin-oriented in marriage practices, and holding fewer expectations that the newlywed couple will settle in the groom's household. They also include changes in ritualistic aspects of ceremonies. Perhaps the most prominent distinction in practices of “return” migrants from Iran is the value attributed to mahr (referring to a donation by the groom to the bride settled as part of the nuptial contract and considered the inalienable property of the bride) in contrast to tuyana (immediate compensation to the family of the bride for taking a daughter from their household). In some communities with a large presence of return migrants from Iran, residents report giving more value to mahr, and incorporating stipulations as part of the marriage contract on the model of practices in Iran. Conversely, return migrants adopt practices common in the communities they settle in in Afghanistan, requesting, for instance, higher amounts of tuyana.
13 Lucile Martin, Iran As Model and Countermodel: Migration, (Re)definition of Identity and Transfer of Social Norms in Urban Afghanistan (PhD diss., Ghent University, Belgium, 2021).
14 See for instance Monsutti, Alessandro, Guerres et Migrations. Réseaux Sociaux et Stratégies économiques des Hazaras d'Afghanistan. (Neufchâtel, Switzerland: Éditions de l'Institut d'Ethnologie, 2004)Google Scholar; and Hanifi, Shah Mahmoud, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Malejacq, Romain and Mukhopadhyay, Dipali, “The ‘Tribal Politics’ of Field Research: A Reflection on Power and Partiality in 21st Century Warzones,” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 4 (2016): 1011–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.