Afghan (re)migration from Pakistan to Turkey: transnational norms and the 'pull' of Pax-Ottomanica?

• Author: Alimia, Sanaa

Introduction

Since the onset of conflicts in Afghanistan in the 1970s, for Afghans of a particular class, namely the rural and urban poor, Iran, Pakistan, and increasingly the Middle Eastern Gulf States have been the primary locales of Afghan migration and a focus of a research, policy making, and artistic and cultural imaginings. However, limited attention has been paid toward increased Afghan and wider Central and South Asian migration towards Turkey. Similarly, in recent years significant academic and public attention has been given to Turkey as a recipient state of migrants, but this has been limited to refugees fleeing war in bordering Iraq and Syria. In part this focus (or lack of) is because Turkey has not traditionally been understood as a 'migrant' destination per se and in fact has been understood as a migrant sending state (in particular to European states such as Germany). However, this process appears to be changing, as increasing numbers of 'new' migrants from the Global South, in particular from Asia and Africa, move to Turkey. This paper explores the processes by which increased numbers of poor Afghans in Pakistan, usually young males who are already refugees or irregular migrants in Pakistan, migrate (for a third or more time) toward Turkey.

This paper discusses, first, how Afghan migration patterns are increasingly shaped by what is referred to as the 'transnational moment' in migration studies, where transnational norms have come to shape the lives of many in a globalized world. This is particularly salient for Afghans, whose migration patterns have been framed by conditions of continued wars within Afghanistan since the 1970s. Second, this paper questions the traditional viewpoint employed by migration scholarship that analyze the motivations of migrants through "rational" dimensions (seeking economic opportunity or escaping political persecution) or notions of "helplessness." Rather, this paper uncovers a more complex picture, whereby migration patterns are also shaped by constructions and experiences of masculinity, selfhood, and emotions. Third, this paper explores how the rise of Turkey's regional power--in economic, political, and cultural terms--across the regions off Middle East, Central and South Asia, and the wider Muslim world, drives, intertwines, and benefits from these transnational norms and personalized motivations to make Turkey a migration destination through the Afghan example. In particular, this paper highlights how increased (and often irregular) migration from Global South countries potentially provides Turkey with a cheap labor pool to consolidate its own neoliberal project and is a subject that should be further explored.

Methodology

This paper is based on ethnographic research and case studies using oral history interviews that have been conducted in Pakistan since 2010 with Afghans, primarily from urban poor backgrounds in Peshawar and Karachi in Pakistan. The paper is also based on interviews conducted in Istanbul during 2012 and 2014 and telephone interviews with Afghans first interviewed in Pakistan, as they were en route to a third, fourth, and sometime fifth or more, country of resettlement, which included Turkey. Interviews were predominantly conducted with male respondents--although some Afghan women were interviewed in Pakistan. However, no women were interviewed in Turkey, which is a shortcoming that must be accounted for if a fuller picture of migration and its impacts are to be understood. Interviews usually semi-structured in format and were recorded either using a Dictaphone or by taking notes during the interviews. Ethnographic observations were recorded though note-taking processes.

Afghans in Pakistan: Geopolitical Migrants

Millions of Afghans have been living in Pakistan since the onset of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and because of the continued conflicts in Afghanistan thereafter. Since 2001, approximately 3.77 million Afghans have repatriated to Afghanistan, (1) however, approximately 3-to-4 million Afghans remain in Pakistan, of which 1.6 million are registered as refugees with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the rest are irregular migrants. (2)

Historically, cross-border migration between Afghanistan and Pakistan has not been unusual. However, as a number of post-colonial scholars have demonstrated, (3) encounters with the colonial and post-colonial states in Afghanistan, British India, and post-Partition Pakistan acted to consolidate and normalize constructions and practices of the "absolute" territorial sovereign nation-state. Other scholars of migration, such as Liisa Malkki, (4) also highlight how this has impacted current hegemonic norms of "sedentarized" living, i.e., of being "rooted" in one place. Assumptions of "rootedness" Malkki highlights, however, are not an inherent fact but are rather a modern phenomenon that developed alongside constructions of the modern territorial nation-state.

In the current global order, national spaces are believed to represent distinct realms of "fixed" belonging in singular spaces. These spaces are upheld by vast technologies of policing and control--from passports, visas, work permits, to securitized borders. The motto of "a state for everyone and everyone in a state" (5) assumes everyone has the security of belonging to one state. To underscore this principle, the UDHR states that "everyone has the right to a nationality." (6) However, in the current neoliberal age, possibilities to navigate these notions of fixity do exist and are explicitly encouraged by the economic market and the numerous multinational corporations complex. But this explicit encouragement exists only for certain upper and upwardly mobile middle classes. Further, a number of scholars have shown, it also is limited to certain "races." (7) The greater forms of social, cultural, and economic capital that one possesses, the greater the chances of being able to navigate through these borders with ease.

For migrants of a lower class, refugees or irregular migrants, and those with less variants of "capital," however, the possibilities of navigation are restricted and stigmatized. In fact these "undesirable" migrants are imagined "pathological" (8) threats against the "purity" of the modern nation-state and its citizens. They are bodies that are constructed as physical and legal threats that cannot be contained and managed by the bureaucratic technologies of the modern state and, in fact, challenge it. International humanitarian norms, laws, and institutions have gone some way in creating a space of moral politics in which expectations of safeguarding basic rights for all humans irrespective of citizenship. Yet, even then the "refugee" and certainly the "irregular migrant" remain as unresolved and always, representing undesired (9) anomalies that must be contained. The spatial segregation of detention centers and refugee camps, with barbed wires and placements on urban outskirts or rural hinterlands, point to symbolic and technological processes that ensure that refugees and irregular migrants are kept separate from "society proper." Moreover, the international migration regime is premised around the logic of finding "solutions" that will lead these individuals and families toward a "normal" sedentary life. (10)

In Pakistan, Afghan refugees have been managed by the Government of Pakistan (GOP) since 1978 and in cooperation with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) since 1980. Irregular migrants have no institutional systems of support, although the International Organization of Migration (IOM) has recently increased its activities in Pakistan. During the 2000s and 2010s, the GOP, the UNHCR, and other implementing partner states and organizations have prioritized the repatriation of Afghan refugees from Pakistan to Afghanistan. This is influenced by a number of factors. At the macro level, it is underpinned by the wider aforementioned structural norms of migration, whereby all refugees are constructed as threats to the nation-state. Further, Afghan repatriation has been strongly encouraged post-2001 by the international migration regime and the USA-led, recently ended, counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan (of which Turkey is a part via NATO). It is part of a wider public relations campaign to win Afghan "hearts and minds" via the reconstruction of the Afghan state. In this context, refugees are imagined as a vital source of human capital that can help "rebuild" Afghanistan--as well as legitimating the "moral" character of the USA, as a foreign occupier in Afghanistan.

At the level of Pakistani politics, pressure for Afghan repatriation is informed by geopolitical concerns of the military dominated Pakistani state and its relationship with imperial allies, such as the USA. During the Afghan-Soviet War, for example, Afghans, refugees and mujahideen members, were welcomed in Pakistan by the state and Pakistan's international allies, most notably the USA, as useful human, intelligence, and propaganda resources that could help defeat the Soviet Union in the context of the Cold War. Once the Soviet Union was defeated, interest in Afghan migrants waned, yet it has only been after the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington DC, in which General Musharraf (11) quickly allied with the USA, that Pakistan's hostility towards Afghan migrants has significantly increased. The Pakistani military-political leadership is keen on making clear the distinction between the "Bad Muslim" (12) Afghan state and the "Good Muslim" Pakistani state, which included their people. In addition, Afghan repatriation has also been encouraged as a tactic of political mobilization for local politics, whereby migrants are scapegoated by key political parties, such as Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek e Insaaf (PTI) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province that is home to a high number of Afghans, in...