Afghan Pashtun Asylum Seekers’ Ethnic Fault-Lines in the Domain of Backstage Politics

This article provides the migration experiences of Afghan Pashtun asylum seekers who have migrated from Afghanistan to Germany cities of Landshut and Cologne. This ethnographic study focuses more explicitly on how asylum seekers’ ethnic fault-lines re-inventing in the sphere of backstage. This paper also argues about the significance of backstage in-person and virtual meetings and interactions, which are consistently employ as spaces where Afghan asylum seekers actively construct different strategies against each other. These strategies develop which main purpose is to be dominant against other asylum seekers in the receiving society. Within this thought, the research paper argues that the bitter experiences of historical relationships among these ethnic groups in Afghanistan re-constructing in the receiving society. During the course of my fieldwork in 2021, I explored that the asylum seekers’ past experiences and memories against other ethnicities in their origin of country are always struggling for the right time-space to repeat itself in the future in more rigid form. In this way, Pashtun asylum seekers tried to be ahead in the field of cricket game as well as in other activities in order to be dominant against all asylum seekers and also present a positive image before German asylum officials.