Sanaa Alimia reflects on fifteen years of research on refugee displacement in urban contexts, including both what she got “right” and what she may have missed. Using Afghan refugees in Pakistan as a case study, she shows how long-term residents who helped build cities with their own hands can nonetheless be violently expelled from them.

Moving beyond camp-centric and humanitarian perspectives, Alimia's work highlights refugees as active makers of urban life – the Refugee City. Yet, in the post-9/11 era, state policies have shifted from strategic incorporation to securitized abandonment, unleashing violent mass deportation campaigns. These, she suggests, resemble ethnic cleansing: racialized projects of forced population transfer enabled by a permissive global right-wing order.

The Afghan case compels us to ask: how are migrant populations transformed into permanent security threats, and how do 'host' societies become hostile homelands?