IDEAS is pleased to invite you to attend our upcoming Book Talk & Book Signing event with Dr. Sanaa Alimia, author of the book ‘Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan’, and Associate Professor of Political Science at the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London.

The book talk will be moderated by IDEAS Research Fellow Dr. Maryam S. Khan and co-organised with Hast-o-Neest and Bazm-e-Alam, and will be followed by a book signing by the guest speaker. 

Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event, courtesy of Folio Books.

Date: Friday, 16th May, 2025

Time: 05:00 PM

Venue: 19-A, FCC, Syed Maratib Ali Road, F.C.C., Lahore, 54660

Registration Link: https://forms.gle/ZwpAXkLuNUfnGzyt9

Guest Speaker

Sanaa Alimia is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, London. She holds a PhD from SOAS, London and an MSc from the London School of Economics. She is the author of Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan (Penn Press 2022, Folio Books 2024). Alongside academic publications, Sanaa also writes in the media and in the policy worlds.

Sanaa has previously held positions as a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Peshawar (2013 to 2018), a Dahlem Research Fellow at the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Societies and Cultures, Free University, Berlin and the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient (2014 to 2016), and a Research Fellow at the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient (2016 to 2019).

Her current British Academy funded project examines Digital Borders, Bodies, and Mobility in South Asia.

Her research has three strands of focus: migration, conflict, and urbanity. Her methodological approach uses ethnography, storytelling, and using social histories.

Book Description

Situated between the 1970s Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and the post–2001 War on Terror, Refugee Cities tells the story of how global wars affect everyday life for Afghans who have been living as refugees in Pakistan. This book provides a necessary glimpse of what ordinary life looks like for a long-term refugee population, beyond the headlines of war, terror, or helpless suffering. It also increases our understanding of how cities—rather than the nation—are important sites of identity-making for people of migrant origins.

In Refugee Cities, Sanaa Alimia reconstructs local microhistories to chronicle the lives of ordinary people living in low-income neighborhoods in Peshawar and Karachi and the ways in which they have transformed the cities of which they are a part. In Pakistan, formal citizenship is almost impossible for Afghans to access; despite this, Afghans have made new neighborhoods, expanded city boundaries, built cities through their labor in construction projects, and created new urban identities—and often they have done so alongside Pakistanis. Their struggles are a crucial, neglected dimension of Pakistan’s urban history. Yet given that the Afghan experience in Pakistan is profoundly shaped by geopolitics, the book also documents how, in the War-on-Terror era, many Afghans have been forced to leave Pakistan. This book, then, is also a documentation of the multiple displacements migrants are subject to and the increased normalization of deportation as a part of “refugee management.”