Racialized Mass Forced Population Transfer: Pakistan’s Deportation Regime

This article rethinks deportation from the Global South. It examines how colonial legacies, postcolonial state formation, War on Terror securitization, and global norms of deportability converge to render refugees as deportable subjects. The article shows how Pakistan has developed a racialized deportation regime targeting Afghans that has resulted in their mass forcible transfer. Although many Afghans are a part of Pakistani society through long-term settlement, most have remained legally excluded and thereby vulnerable to removal. Whilst Pakistan’s expulsions of Afghans have been long in the making, they have accelerated since the War on Terror and even more so since the state announced plans for mass removal in 2023. The result is not simply an immigration enforcement campaign that targets individual border transgressors but a project of demographic reengineering through the collective expulsion of a racialized population.