SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Overview

Internal Supervisors

• Laleh Khalili
• Matthew J Nelson

Biography

Sanaa Alimia is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies. Her PhD analyzes the position of Afghan refugees and devalued Pakistani citizens in urban Pakistan. She shows how both Afghans and Pakistanis are let down by official structures and are forced to turn to informal politics in order to secure access to material and non-material goods. She shows that informal ways of acting shows that there are alternative ways of belonging in urban Pakistan which go beyond usual demarcations of the “citizen” and “non-citizen” and reveals Afghans as an integral part of urban Pakistan. Sanaa has presented on her work on Afghans in Pakistan and the urban Pakistani poor in Pakistani media, online media, and academic presentations. Sanaa is currently teaching Comparative and International Politics, and Government and Politics of South Asia at SOAS.

PhD Research

“Refugees” and “citizens” live in shared realities in urban Pakistan. In most aspects of everyday life the nationally segregating boundaries of the “refugee Other” and the “national citizen” do not count. Assumptions that refugees, as “guests”, have limited political agency are not valid. Similarly, assumptions that citizens, as “natives of the soil”, enjoy enforceable rights and access to public goods more than non-citizens require questioning. Only in the “security” landscape that dominates post-9/11 Pakistan does “citizenship” offer some safeguards against state violence. This thesis pays attention to (a) shared Afghan and Pakistan lives in Karachi and Peshawar and (b) instances of the limits to this “shared” space, with a specific focus on the urban poor. It looks at this shared and unshared space through the framework of “dehumanisation” and “self-humanisation”, which is informed by oral narratives and urban ethnography collected and completed during fieldwork.  This thesis also shows how Afghan and Pakistani experiences of dehumanisation and self-humanisation undermine the state (and, where relevant, international institutions), most significantly by changing urban ecologies, challenging the state’s legitimacy and exposing its incompetence.

PhD Conferences

Nov 2012. American Anthropological Association, 111th Annual Conference 2012, San Francisco. Paper presented: Disciplining the “Dangerous” Afghan Body in Pakistan: Harassment, Humiliation, and Identity Cards.
Chair: Dr. Junaid A Rana, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and Samar Mussa Al-Bulushi, Yale University.

May 2012. Stanford University, California: Centre for South Asia Studies, “South Asia by the Bay”. Paper presented: Self Sustaining Urban Peripheries and the Shared Realities between Afghan Refugees and ‘Devalued’ Pakistani Citizens.
Chair: Dr. Thomas Blom Hansen, Stanford University.

Nov 2011. Oxford University, Oxford: Department of Sociology and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), “South Asia in Transition”.
Paper presented: Afghans Refugees and the Devalued Citizen in Pakistan: Shared Realities? Networks, Negotiations and ‘Security’ in Pakistan.
Chair: Dr. Faisal Devji, Oxford University.

Nov 2011. School of Oriental and Africa Studies, Research Students Society (RSS), “Fieldwork: How to Do It and How to Survive Coming Back”
Presentation: Ethnographic Research – How to Complete Oral Histories.