Refugee Cities

"Refugee Cities is a micro-history and narrative of lived experiences of Afghan refugees and Pakistani citizens alike. The book covers the struggles of these people in place-making in urban Pakistan and will be of great interest to anyone who wishes to know more about informal settlements and the urban and national politics of the Pakistani state in dealing with the poor and the non-citizens."—Dawn

"Alimia has provided a book that is long overdue, on a topic that has been chronically understudied. Refugee Cities provides detailed ethnographic accounts of Afghans living in the coastal mega city of Karachi and the border city of Peshawar to construct how their lives have been shaped – and more importantly are shaping – urban Pakistan today...The monograph is sublime in how it works from the ground up to create a picture of the functioning of the Pakistani state, and any stakeholder who works in or around the status of Afghans in Pakistan would greatly benefit from it."—Anthropology Book Forum

"This book is an engaging read for those interested in how multiple structural conditions intersect and how they are positioned vis-à-vis historical periods of colonialism, postcolonial nation building, and global warfare. Whilst being ethnographically situated with Afghans who fled to Pakistan, this book invites the reader to draw acute parallels with the dismantling of hospitality towards refugees in the post-2015 crisis in European refugee reception, the hostile governing of uprooted people who experience oppressions at the intersections of ethnicity and class, and the effects of the nationalist territorialization of spaces across the globe."—Politics, Religion & Ideology

"[A] valuable contribution to the scholarship on urban citizenship, migration, and the politics of belonging. In it, Alimia provides a nuanced and sympathetic account of Afghan lives in urban Pakistan...Refugee Cities is a valuable political intervention in a time when the global policy environment relating to migration is increasingly hostile"—Bloomsbury Pakistan