In search of a caring state: Migrations of Afghans from Iran to Germany

Abstract

When Afghans began fleeing war in the 1980s, the Iranian state welcomed them on an ethical premise of care towards fellow Muslims. However, since the 1990s, Iran has pursued exclusionary policies towards their Afghan population. Drawing on fieldwork among Afghan asylum-seekers who arrived in Germany from Iran, this article shows how fantasies of alternative social contracts can motivate migration, and shape relationships with host states in the aftermath. Afghan migrants hoped to ‘opt in’ to a relationship with the German state, which they imagined as more ‘caring’ than the Iranian one. However, in Germany, they were granted limited rights, and only after substantial conditions were fulfilled. Afghans’ interpretations of these outcomes reveal fears and assumptions around state–citizen relations, which they had carried over from Iran, and which informed their reimagination of the German state post-migration.

Ethical Endeavours

“…(Burnyeat and Sheild Johansson 2022: 222) Th e issue studies how the social contract -as an emic concept and normative ideal -shapes people's expectations, experiences and imaginations of futures of statesociety relations in diff erent settings. Sara Lenehan (2022), for instance, analyses Afghan refugees' imagination of the German state as more 'caring', and the confusion they experienced aft er arriving in Germany when they realised that state-society relations fundamentally diverged from their expectations. Similarly, Gwen Burnyeat (2022), in her analysis of the Colombian peace accord, shows how the government and the public had fundamentally diff erent assumptions of what a peace accord should entail and especially about how it should be voiced and communicated (the government deployed rational and contractarian language while the public longed for emotional engagement), which in the end led to the public's rejection of the deal.…”

An anthropology of the social contract: The political power of an idea

“…For instance, Sara Lenehan’s interlocutors, Afghan refugees who left Iran for Germany in the hope the German state would be more ‘caring’, became confused, indignant and deeply distressed when their experiences of state–society relations diverged from their expectations. She analyses how this refugee population, the Iranian state, Islamic jurisprudence, and the German state’s refugee laws, all produced divergent emic understandings of social contracts (Lenehan, 2022, this volume).…”