Performing the Afghanistan–Pakistan border through refugee ID cards

This paper explores the relationship between surveillance, refugee ID cards, population control, and the making of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in the 2000s and 2010s. The paper uncovers how, in the security-dominated Pakistani state, during the Soviet-Afghan War it was politically expedient to host a large Afghan refugee population in the country and make use of a flexible Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but in the “Global War on Terror” this no longer applies. As geopolitical circumstances change, this paper explores how ID cards for Afghan refugees are tools of surveillance that facilitate refuge and the legal/documentary, social, and physical exclusion of the non-citizen refugee. These forms of exclusion allow the Pakistani state to “perform” the Afghanistan-Pakistan border into effect. The border is not simply located at the territorial frontier but is in process and comes into being through the control over the mobility of citizen and non-citizen populations and forms of social exclusion that are enacted through surveillance and documentation.