Blog Post. Unmaking Belonging: The Mass Deportation of Afghans from Iran and Pakistan
This blog post is written by Antonio De Lauri, Research Professor at CMI.
In recent months, Iran and Pakistan have expelled well over a million Afghans, according to United Nations and IOM estimates. It is one of the largest mass deportations in recent history, an erasure of decades of belonging, labour, and community ties that had woven Afghans into the social fabric of their host countries. At crossings like Islam Qala in Herat, convoys of buses unload families who have lived for years, or generations, outside Afghanistan. Many arrive exhausted, carrying little more than a few bags and the memory of the cities they were forced to leave. What unfolds on these borders is mass displacement in reverse, the forced unravelling of lives once built in exile.
To call these movements “returns” is to misunderstand their violence. The act of deportation unravels what can be defined as the moral economy of everyday life. For decades, Afghans have been integral to the Iranian and Pakistani economies, especially in construction, agriculture, and services. Now, amid sanctions, economic crisis and shifting political moods, raids sweep through working-class neighbourhoods, papers are confiscated, and people are herded onto buses. The language is bureaucratic , “irregular migration,” “documentation drives”, but the experience is humiliation. Deportation performs sovereignty by transforming the poor into evidence of state power.
What awaits them across the border is not safety but uncertainty. Afghanistan today is a country in suspended animation: governed by an internationally contested Taliban administration, constrained by sanctions, and battered by drought, food insecurity, and poverty. Women and girls are excluded from most education and employment; civic life has withered; entire communities live under surveillance and fear. Those returning find that the places they fled, homes ruined by war, farms desiccated by climate change, no longer exist. Many young deportees have never set foot in Afghanistan before; their sense of “home” is linguistic rather than territorial, held in their parents’ memories.
Deportations are not just administrative acts. They are a form of unmaking, the systematic dismantling of social worlds, which turns borders into technologies of value and hierarchy, deciding whose lives count. From Europe to the United States, we see a growing number of states performing these acts of violent removal and the systematic creation of migrants’ illegality.
The politics of exclusion enacted by Pakistan and Iran is inseparable from a broader regional and global neglect. Afghanistan has been abandoned to isolation: its assets frozen, its government unrecognised, its people caught between sanctions and survival. Donors insist on moral conditions for aid, but the moral costs of abandonment are borne by the poor. Iran and Pakistan, each struggling with inflation, energy crises, and international and internal insecurity, convert that global disavowal into domestic spectacle. Expelling Afghans becomes a way to perform order - to claim sovereignty amid disorder. Yet this performance corrodes the moral foundations of the region. It replaces solidarity with scapegoating, interdependence with denial.
The tragedy unfolds alongside deepening environmental collapse. Afghanistan is one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. Drought, erratic rain and flash floods have already displaced millions. Many Afghans who left for Iran or Pakistan were not fleeing war alone but the slow violence of ecological breakdown. Their forced return closes the last safety valve in a collapsing environment. In provinces like Herat or Nimroz, newly arrived families compete for scarce water and land with residents who are themselves struggling to survive. Climate stress, political repression, and deportation feed into one another, creating a cycle of recursive displacement, with entire families uprooted again and again.
To understand this crisis properly is to see how belonging itself has become precarious. The region’s borders are not only lines on a map but social instruments that produce inclusion and exclusion. Over generations, Afghans, Iranians, and Pakistanis have built shared lives, through work, marriage, and faith. Deportation severs those ties, denying the everyday connections that can bound the region together. It signals a retreat into fear and a narrowing of political imagination: a world where the migrant is forever foreign, no matter how deep their roots.
Regional stability will not be achieved by expulsion. It will require recognition that movement, not immobility, is what sustains the enactment of interconnected futures. Something that the United States and several European countries are dramatically failing to recognize. Regional stability is more likely to emerge from policies that recognise long-term Afghan residence, through legal pathways, work permits, and documentation, than from repeated waves of deportation. At the same time, international donors should move beyond punitive politics and support livelihoods inside Afghanistan without making assistance a hostage to recognition debates. Climate adaptation, water cooperation, and humanitarian access are not optional, they are the minimal conditions for a livable future.
There are no dramatic scenes that can summarise this politically-induced crisis, only the ordinary movements of people forced to start again. In the border towns of Herat and Kandahar, returnees wait for registration, for transport, for news, for a place to sleep. Their presence reveals how deeply intertwined Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan remain, despite political denials. What is unfolding is a reconfiguration of the region’s social fabric - one that will depend on whether states choose containment or solidarity as their organising principle.
The views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of CMI.
