RSC Public Seminar Series, Trinity Term 2026
Series convened by Associate Professor Catherine Briddick and Dr Uttara Shahani
About this talk
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?
About the speaker
Sanaa Alimia is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Aga Khan University, London. She is the author of Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan (University of Pennsylvania Press and Folio Books), which won the 2025 AIPS Book Prize and the 2024 Bloomsbury Book Prize. She has held academic positions in the UK, Germany, and Pakistan, held a British Academy/Leverhulme grant, and has worked in the policy sector in Kenya.
Alimia serves in several editorial roles, including with Edinburgh University Press and the collective of Red Pepper magazine. She publishes across academic, policy, and journalistic platforms. She divides her time between Nairobi and London.