Paper long abstract:

The topic of my (individual) conference paper: "The role of Afghanistani diaspora associations in the reproduction of ethnic identities and the creation of a new sense of home in Hamburg-Germany"

My paper provides new empirical evidence steming from my five months of ethnographic fieldwork on the Afghanistani diaspora community in Hamburg-Germany. During the fieldwork carried between August and December 2017, I learnt that Afghanistani diaspora associations attempt to re-route themselves in the new environment — Germany. By doing so, they choose not to act under the umbrella of a united Afghanistani community but to mobilize separately along the ethnolinguistic lines.

My research findings suggest that quite opposite to popular believe, the identity "being Afghanistani" only exists for outsiders and foreign researchers, while within the community, ethnicity and language speak louder than nationality. Very particularly, the ever growing division between Pashtun and non-Pashtuns refers to the longstanding historical disputes over the distribution of power as well as recent political hegemony of Pashtuns in Kabul. During my ethnographic fieldwork, I learnt that each diaspora organization acts as a factory of identity-making imposing harsh in-and-out group sanctions fixating membership in ethnolinguistic clubs.

Doing more than 100 ethnographic interviews with members of different ethnolinguistic associations, mosques, and cultural experts, I came to know that these associations channel their aid to their co-ethnolinguistic communities in Afghanistan. Realizing the failure of Kabul government in providing educational and governance services in Hazara and Tajik areas they invest immensely in building schools and transporting knowledge to Afghanistan. These associations also provide a platform where Afghan issues can be discussed and analyzed. Simply put, they make people in Hamburg to think and act towards changing situations in Afghanistan and help create a vague sense of home.

Regarding the wider relevance of my finding, I believe that this case study unravels the complexities of diaspora communities in Europe or North Atlanthic world and attempts to challenge the outsiders' perspective about them. Furthermore, considering that the diasporas functions beyond their home governments' immediate pressures and interventions, they can excercise their freedom of expression more effeciently and their contribution to transforming the status quo in their home countries can be of great value.