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Paper short abstract

This study investigates how Afghan youth’s sustainable livelihood in Pakistan is linked to their (im)mobility across international borders. Likewise, how their repatriation to their native country affect their economic opportunities in Pakistan, and encourage their migration beyond Pakistan.

Paper long abstract

This study aims to explores how Afghan youth navigate economic self-reliance and inclusion in Pakistan and, in turn, how their sustained livelihood shape their (im)mobility beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan. Additionally, the study invistigates how the repatriation processes affect Afghan refugees’ economic sustanability. The study focuses on Afghan youth in Pakistan because, besides hosting millions of Afghans for over four decades, Pakistan is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, nor has it enacted any refugee-specific national legislation. The absence of a legal framework creates uncertainties for conflict-driven displaced Afghans in Pakistan, complicate their sustainable inclusion, and enforcing further migration across international borders. Moreover, the recent initiatives of repatriation/deportation of Afghans to their home country deepens legal crisis surrounding Afghans, their livelihoods and businesses, impacting further displacement and complicating borders’ governance. Therefore, by engaging the Fassin’s notion of “the moral economy of immigration, defined as a complex interplay of moral and economic norms/frameworks by which immigrants/refugees are thought and acted on” (2005, p.365), this study explores the interplay of refugees’ economic resilience and inclusion with borders’ sustainable governance in the context of global South/Pakistan. I propose to employ qualitative methods and will focuse on Afghan youth in the urban regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), as it hosts the largest number of Afghan refugees in Pakistan. The study adopts a gender-sensitive youth-centered approach, and critically engages the agency of young Afghan entrepreneurs, to explore how they experience the nexus of economic sustainability and borders governance in the context of Pakistan.