Have you ever imagined waking up one day to the announcement that you are an alien? It sounds like something from a science fiction movie, but what if it happened in real life? As you stumble out of bed and frantically check yourself in the mirror, you realize that you look just the same as you did the night before. But then you peek outside and see that everyone else is still human ... or are they? Slowly, it dawns on you that your identity is now in question. Are you an Afghan, a refugee, documented, undocumented ... or something else entirely? The possibilities are endless, and the uncertainty is both exhilarating and terrifying.
This is how nation-states function, particularly after the end of the Cold War, which ironically shoved us into a never-ending “war on terror.” Pakistan plunged headlong into it, to be part of the pack and ended up bruised and bleeding in the ranks of the hunted. Now faced with a myriad of crises—militancy, which has metastasized into terrorism, economic meltdown, and political instability, Pakistan turned on Afghan refugees.
More than 300,000 Afghan refugees have been forcibly sent ‘back’ to Afghanistan, a country most of them have not seen in their life, more are being hounded--literally. Crossing into Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the ‘aliens’ of Pakistan find themselves in an ‘alien’ land, a place their elders fled to save their lives, and has now become a death-world. A new and unique form, in the words of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in which vast populations are subjugated to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living-dead.
Imagine. An individual is rounded up by the police in Karachi, Lahore, or Peshawar, loaded on a bus, and dumped at Torkham or Chaman crossings before being pushed into Afghanistan—a country unseen, unimagined as a home. In an unfamiliar landscape whose every inch was stomped and bombed by the white saviors in order to de-Talibanize it, they see the Taliban searching for the remnants of the saviors. That is the experience of being an alien.
Daily humiliations perpetrated by the police have landed Afghan immigrants in-between of life and death, in a state of zoe who like werewolves do not count among any of the two species. They are inside the law and outside the law at the same time. They are “illegal” because they are not recognized as citizens, but it is within the legal right of the State to declare them “alien”. This insider/outsider status makes Afghan refugees, already declared ‘aliens’, into a homo sacer—a person, according to archaic Roman law, whose killing does not constitute homicide.
Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics explains contemporary State-sponsored deaths of humans—citizens, refugees, immigrants, etc. Necropolitical states have acquired the ability to create a group of people who exist on the brink of survival, where their sole focus is to avoid death. Such individuals are considered to have a dispensable life, with no value in the market or even in human terms. There is no sense of responsibility or justice towards this group of people, who are caught in a cycle where life is simply a means to death. This demonstrates an inversion of the usual relationship between life and death, where life is viewed as nothing more than a medium for death.
Under everyday necropolitics, a mass of populations live under extreme precarious conditions and as such, can be exploited and eliminated “naturally”. Mbembe argues that States deploy nanoracism in everyday social relations in order to stigmatize, to injure and to humiliate those considered to be ‘others’, not one of ‘us’. One of the ways for the States to construct the ‘other’ is to stay away from conventions that protect the dignity of humans and to enact laws that deprive ‘them’ of becoming ‘us’. A case in point: Pakistan has opted not to be a signatory of the Geneva Convention or the U.N. Refugee Convention, and the country’s Foreigners Act allows authorities to arrest, detain, and deport any foreigner who lacks proper documentation.
Nation-states, unfortunately, have arrogated the power to render any individual—without any cogent reason—an alien on their own land by blocking their identity documents. The individual loses all rights to a decent life and is exposed to the brutalities of the State, being inside/outside the law at the same time.
