La frontière et les ombres : les clandestins afghans de Peshawar, Pakistan
A four-decades long, perpetually mutating war, has forced millions of Afghan people into exile. These now constitute the world’s second largest and most enduring refugee population. Divided for the most part between Iran and Pakistan, corresponding roughly to the varied ethnic, linguistic and religious affiliations that make up Afghan society, these refugees are increasingly confronted to rejection from the states that had hitherto welcomed them. The situation of Afghan refugees represents a point of convergence between a multiplicity of phenomena – local and global, political and social, economic and cultural – that make it a unique standpoint from which to think about our times. It marks something like the visible imprint of an unraveling of the biopolitical dispositive1, of its very paradigm even, as it is unfolding at the postcolonial Frontier. It is a moment which also appears as a sort of “crisis of the postcolonial subject”. One torn between its “tribal”, religious and juridical selves. What such crisis lays bare however is just how such an overlap of competing modes of subjectivation may open a breach, allowing for the subversion of their very controlling and exclusionary purposes. This ethnography focuses more specifically on the Pashtun, undocumented Afghan refugees living in Peshawar, Pakistan. It examines the diverse strategies they deploy in negotiating a living space, in spite of being officially unallowed in the country – how they manage their best to live (almost) normal lives. Throughout this work, as if an extension of the indetermination and ambiguity that characterises the situation of these refugees, this ethnography is confronted also with the epistemological question concerning the possibility or impossibility of an anthropology of troubled times.
Afghanistan Pakistan Peshawar Refugees Undocumented Illegal immigration Anthropology