Afghan Pashtun asylum seekers’ ideological resistance in Germany

Ideological, material, resistance, backstage, social media, temporal, rationality, asylum, Afghanistan, Germany

Resumen

This article provides the migration experiences of Afghan Pashtun asylum seekers who have migrated from Afghanistan to German cities of Landshut and Cologne. This ethnographic study focuses more explicitly on how asylum seekers' patterns of resistance materialise against deportation and temporal rationalities (waiting and time). Nevertheless, there has been a notable lack of scholarly focus on asylum seekers' resistance. This paper also explores the significance of backstage in-person and virtual meetings and interactions which are consistently employed as spaces (informal meetings) where survival strategies are constructed, yet often underestimated in the literature. I called this whole process "ideological resistance" where survival strategies are constructed and which takes the form of "material resistance" when it comes up in actions. Within the present framework, the research paper argues that temporal rationalities do not consistently rule against asylum seekers; rather, they do provide them with an indirect means of resistance. During the course of my fieldwork in 2021, I found out that the liminal condition experienced by Pashtun asylum seekers possesses a positive aspect that motivates them to engage in critical thinking and develop survival strategies to address the challenges they face in their asylum cases.