Imagined Communities? Relations of Social Identities and Social Organisation among Afghan Diaspora Groups in Germany and the UK

ABSTRACT

This paper engages with the complexity of diaspora by focusing on the links between self-identification, external categorisation and emerging ties among Afghans in Britain and Germany. Based on a qualitative case study and drawing on relational sociology, it demonstrates that family ties, class backgrounds, ethnicity and political affiliations inform peoples’ attitudes towards each other and foster dynamics of inclusion, exclusion and group formation. Beyond particularistic identity categories there is evidence of an imagined community, which manifests itself in an implicitly shared concern about Afghanistan and a self-identification as ‘being Afghan’. Yet this imagined community is rarely reflected in diasporic networks of Afghan co-nationals. A relational approach helps to explain how social identity categories come to be selectively enacted. The findings presented in this paper underline the importance of studying the making and unmaking of diaspora as part of wider social, political and historical processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Diaspora
• migration
• migration studies
• migration theory
• social identities
• Afghan migrants
• relational sociology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Carolin Fischer is a post-doctoral researcher at the Laboratoire d'études transnationales et des processus sociaux, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Her work forms part of the National Centre of Competence in Research ‘The Migration-Mobility Nexus’ (http://nccr-onthemove.ch/home/). In 2015, Carolin completed a D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in Development Studies at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis is about the lives and civic engagements of Afghans in Germany and the UK. During her time at Oxford, Carolin worked as a research and teaching assistant at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), the International Migration Institute (IMI) and the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC).

Notes

1. Afghanistan’s population resembles a mosaic of different ethnic groups. Over centuries they have settled in the area which became the State of Afghanistan in the mid-eighteenth century. Pashtuns form the largest section of the population at over 40 per cent. With an estimated 27 per cent of the population, Tajiks form the second-largest group. Uzbeks and Turkmen are the main Turkic ethnic groups in north Afghanistan. Their size is estimated at 9 and 3 per cent respectively. Hazaras make up about 9 per cent of the Afghan population. Further small ethnic groups include the Aimak (4 per cent), Baloch (2 per cent) and others (Vogelsang 2008).

2. To protect the identity of my informants I use pseudonyms throughout this paper.

3. The Pashtuns of Afghanistan and the Afghan-Pakistani border region are organised in a myriad of tribes and subtribes. These are held together by a code of honour, the Pashtunwali. Terminologically ‘tribe’ and ‘clan’ tend to be used interchangeably (Schetter 2004).

4. When discussing ‘young informants’ I refer to persons of Afghan origin who are at different stages of their 20s. Although all of them were born in Afghanistan, they have been living in Germany or the UK for most of their lives.