Between War and the World: Afghans, Borders, and the 'Crisis' of Migration in Hamburg

This dissertation offers an account of ‘crisis,’ migration, and border regimes among Afghans across Kabul, Afghanistan and Hamburg, Germany based on over 26 months of fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2017. It is situated in an ethnographic and, at times (auto-) biographic, exploration of kinship, chronic refugeeness, and exile. By focusing on Afghans in Hamburg, this study highlights a community that has often been neglected by social scientific studies or subsumed under broader categories of Muslims living in Europe. The research consisted primarily of ethnographic fieldwork, including qualitative methods, such as semi-structured, informal interviews, media analysis, and participant observation throughout the research period. The chapters of this dissertation are organized in ascending orders of scale, from the personal to the communal to broader publics, while attending to the ways in which contemporary issues of global concern are imbricated in the lives of my Afghan interlocutors, as well as my own. By taking up a critique of the notion of ‘crisis’ and its implied temporality, I trace the movement of the concept through my ethnographic material to a particular imagining of the subject of suffering—as bona fide ‘refugee’ or ‘migrant’—by drawing from scholarship on critical humanitarianism and migration studies. Through this discussion, the caveats to Germany’s Welcome Culture begin to surface as Afghans and others from countries deemed ‘safe’ must brave not only the asylum procedure, but political expediency, public opinion, and everyday life. In this way, I add ethnographic texture to the claim that it matters what kind of emigrant one is. Throughout the chapters of this dissertation, I show how these are not isolated within governmental, bureaucratic realms, but operate in multiple ones—whether in everyday interactions, in cultural productions, or in media reportage. With attention to what has been referred to by social scientists of border and migration studies as the ‘Border Spectacle’ or ‘migrant illegality,’ I push these concepts and the critiques they offer of how we study migration to look to ways in which they are experienced at the level of the everyday and in spaces often considered ‘safe’ or less-violent than others