This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Nassim Majidi on telling the stories of Afghans on the migration trail to Europe

By:   []

Date: 2021-08

Nassim Majidi, an Iranian-French migration expert, is the co-founder of the Kabul-based Samuel Hall think tank, which “conducts research, evaluates programmes and designs policies in contexts of migration and displacement”.

Here, Majidi talks to openDemocracy reporter Preethi Nallu about the impact of migration on Afghanistan refugees and their families back home, as well as solutions for successful reintegration.

Preethi Nallu: Your latest research in Afghanistan builds on your longitudinal study of Afghans on the migration trail to Europe. Could you explain how your research has evolved over the years?

Nassim Majidi: At Samuel Hall, we wanted to go beyond static accounts or discussions of migration flows, and comprehensive narratives. We wanted to follow an oral history method, where we would record interviews between our Afghan researchers, as the informed interviewers and Afghan migrants with personal experience of the events we wanted to study.

In 2016, our team at Samuel Hall came up with a simple idea: talk to Afghans travelling from Afghanistan to Iran, Turkey, Greece, and into Europe, through our Kabul office and our Afghan colleagues – a conversation by Afghans with Afghans along the migration trail. The aim would be to talk to them about their experiences, fears and aspirations, choices, compromises and sacrifices, but also what they learned through their migration journey.

We continued using this methodology in 2021 with an added component. We combined the migration trail conversations with conversations with family members, specifically with wives who remained in Afghanistan. We called them family-tracing conversations, whereby we spoke to the men abroad, and also to the wives at home, using a similar set of questions. The ‘tracing’ was built around the fact that traditional Afghan couples rarely had an opportunity to talk to each other at length, yet through our researchers, they managed to recreate a conversation across borders. The results are documented in a research we conducted for the World Bank. We hope they can inform gender-sensitive labour migration programming and policies, so that regular pathways are offered, while considering the needs of those who remain at home.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/parallel-journeys/nassim-majidi-telling-stories-afghans-migration-trail-europe/
[2] url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

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