Marriage in the ruins of war: Intergenerational hauntings in the Afghan diaspora

The data set and analytical choices

The article is based on a study carried out in two stages by Andreas Gadeberg Nielsen, Tahir Bakhtiary and Mikkel Rytter. ² In the autumn of 2015, 19 interviews were conducted with Afghan men aged 20–36 who came to Denmark in the period 1997–2015. They came either with their families or alone as unaccompanied minors or young men. The interviews were conducted in Dari or Danish. This material was supplemented throughout the summer of 2016 by 10 additional interviews. Together, the 29 interviews encompass both married men with concrete experience of weddings and family life, and young men with aspirations for their future marriages.

We decided from the beginning to focus on Afghan men. It was a pragmatic choice: since the three researchers conducting interviews were men, we reckoned that it would be difficult (maybe impossible) for us to interview young Afghan women about the delicate topic of partner choice and marriage. The decision was also motivated by the fact that most of the recently arrived Afghans are men.

Participants for interviews were recruited from all over Denmark through personal networks, Facebook, different Afghan youth organisations, a football team and some mosques. Contrary to labour migrants like the Turks or Pakistanis who, to a large extent, live in the suburbs of Copenhagen (cf. Rytter, 2013), the Afghan refugee families have been subject to the national dispersal policy of 1999 and therefore live scattered all over the country.

Our male informants – including Firooz, Hamza and Jaffar – often met their partners at educational institutions, through their engagement in youth organisations, on social media, via networks of family and friends, or at some of the many elaborate weddings in the Afghan community.

In this article we have made the analytical choice to focus on young men who have lived a number of years in Denmark and discuss the challenges involved in marrying someone from another Afghan family in Denmark. We have therefore deselected (1) the perspectives of young Afghans who came to Denmark as unaccompanied minors and (2) the Afghans hoping for a transnational marriage with a spouse from Afghanistan. Finally, the article will not deal with (3) the perspectives of interlocutors who wanted or hoped to find a spouse with a Danish family background. Each of these three categories of marriage and partner choice deserves to be explored further on a later occasion. ³

Marriage and partner choice in the Afghan diaspora

Marriage has been the focus of various articles exploring intergenerational relationships in different migrant groups. For instance, there have been discussions of how rituals and potlatch-like wedding celebrations are important for the constitution and extension of community networks (Rytter, 2013; Werbner, 1990; Wozniak-Bobinska, 2018), how different immigration regimes and legislation on family reunification reorganise transnational family networks (Fernandez, 2013; Kofman, 2004; Liversage and Rytter, 2014, 2015; Rytter, 2012b), and how male migrants challenge common ideas of masculinity as they enter uxorilocal households and have to accept the humiliation of being supported by their wife and in-laws (Charsley, 2005). Finally, some articles explore changing marriage preferences in upcoming generations of immigrants (Beck-Gernsheim, 2007; Rytter, 2012a).

Very little has been written so far about marriage and partner choice in the Afghan diaspora. Magnus Marsden and Diana Ibañez-Tirado (2015) write about marriage as an anchor among Afghan merchants in Central Asia and suggest that marriage is used strategically to create strong ties and relationships in new localities. Alessandro Monsutti, (2007) has suggested that an extended stay in Iran constitutes a rite de passage which transforms young Afghans from boys into men and makes them eligible for marriage when they return. Ashraf Zahedi (2007) discusses the dilemmas that Iranian women married to Afghan men face when the latter are expected to repatriate to Afghanistan because children of these transnational marriages are not granted full citizen rights in Iran, since they are considered to be Afghan (their father’s children) by the Iranian state. Finally, Marieke van Houte (2017) emphasises the importance of a local marriage for Afghans who have returned to Kabul after an extended period of time in Europe. In particular, undocumented migrants and rejected asylum seekers who are sent back in so-called Assisted Voluntary Return programmes often seem to marry shortly after they return as a means of reintegration into existing local networks and of gaining the advantage of support and security (Van Houte, 2017).

Despite these studies, little attention has been given so far to decision-events related to partner choice and marriage, and how they may bring atrocities and conflicts of the past up to the surface within and between Afghan refugee families.

War in Afghanistan and refugees in Denmark

This section presents a brief overview of Afghanistan’s turbulent history. This is a relevant context in order to understand the ‘fragmented diaspora’ (Khosravi, 2018) and the numerous divisions and rupture points occurring between Afghan refugee families.

Afghanistan has a long history as a pivotal point of war and conflict. In the 19th century, Afghanistan was stuck between superpower aspirations from Russia in the north-west and the British Empire in the south-east. Throughout three wars in the period 1842–1919, the British Empire attempted to gain control over Afghanistan’s territory in order to diminish Russian influence in Central Asia. Afghanistan subsequently became autonomous and, between 1919 and 1923, King Amanullah launched a series of modernisation initiatives following a European ideal. From 1933 to 1973, King Zahir Shah ruled. He was ousted in 1973 in a coup led by Daoud Khan, who, inspired by communist ideology, declared Afghanistan to be a republic.

However, the transition was not unproblematic, and after five years of wrangling between factions of communists and Islamists about the future of Afghanistan, the PDPA took power in a bloody coup in 1978. Among other things, the PDPA launched a number of land reforms and secured voting rights and education for women, which further provoked the landowners and various Islamic groups (Billaud, 2015: 47).

In order to secure the continuation of the communist government and obstruct the influence of the US and Saudi Arabia in the region, the Soviet Union decided to invade Afghanistan in 1979. Many Afghans from the country’s Western-educated elite, such as university professors, politicians and business owners, found themselves forced to seek refuge in this period (Danstrøm et al., 2015: 32; Van Houte, 2017: 43). In the following years, various Islamist Mujahedeen groups, often supported by the US, began to offer armed resistance to the occupying power. After nearly 10 years, the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988.

With the retreat of the Red Army, a gruelling and extremely bloody civil war broke out between the remnants of the communist party and various warlords fighting for power over the country, with forces mobilised on the basis of politico-religious beliefs and ethnic affiliations. In 1992, the combined Mujahedeen groups took over Kabul, but they were not able to share power, and Afghanistan was once again thrown into a period of bloodshed. The civil war raged until the Taliban seized power in 1996. The Taliban introduced an Islamic regime with religious and ethnic persecution in addition to extremely stringent rules of life (Billaud, 2015: 59). In particular, the Shia-dominated Hazara minority suffered adversity and persecution carried out by the Sunni- and Pashtun-dominated Taliban movement.

Following September 11, 2001, US President George W Bush declared ‘war on terror’ and started bombing Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama Bin Laden. In December the same year, the UN decided to deploy an international security force, the ISAF, in the country (Marsden, 2010). In January 2002, the Danish Parliament agreed to deploy Danish soldiers as part of the ISAF. According to the Danish Armed Forces, 9500 Danes had been deployed in Afghanistan by the time Denmark withdrew in 2014, with 43 Danish soldiers losing their lives in this period (Jessen and Fenger-Grøndahl, 2013).

To sum up, since the 1970s there has been war and conflict in Afghanistan, with shifting groups taking power and waging war against their opponents. This patchwork of conflicting groups and shifting affiliations is reflected in the immense differences in terms of the ethnicity, religion, social status and political background of the Afghans in Denmark. However, they also share the demographic fact that an increasing number of young people are now reaching the age at which marriage becomes relevant.

Intergenerational hauntings

In Spectres of Marx (1994), Jacques Derrida suggests that Marxism has continued to be evident as a kind of spectre after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991. In contrast to Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) postulate about the end of history and death of the grand narratives and ideologies, Derrida seeks to understand how Marx’s perspectives on justice and equality continue to be evident owing to their absence, as a kind of apparition that conditions the present. According to Derrida (1994: 99), this spectre will never disappear, but will return in order to remind us about potential futures. Derrida believes that the future is thus a kind of virtuality which entices, motivates and, in various ways, conditions the present (Fisher, 2012: 16). While Derrida (1994: 176) aims to bring new life and utterance to the spirit of Marxism, the hauntings that we will address in this chapter are radically different, with young Afghans using various strategies in an attempt to come to terms with family narratives filled with division, conflict and flight.

The aim of using terms like ‘hauntings’ (Cho, 2008; Navaro-Yashin, 2012; To, 2015) or ‘ghosts of memory’ (Carsten, 2007) is not to refer to supernatural phenomena, but instead to refer to signs, objects, statements or moods which point towards unfinished disputes with dramatic – and often fatal – events in the past impinging upon the present. Events like these are not necessarily personal, being more often collective and shared (Connerton, 2008). The psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (1994) suggest that unspoken and traumatic events within the family may constitute a kind of crypt, with things from the past still existing and influencing the present. The crypt becomes a hatch or a passage to the ‘unfinished businesses’ of the past, like the living dead whose diffuse, but concrete, presence can haunt individuals, families or entire groups of migrants.

One example of such an intergenerational haunting is provided by Grace M Cho (2008), who grew up in the US as a child of an American father, a G.I. stationed in Korea, and a Korean mother, who worked as a ‘hostess’ (sex-worker) around one of the many American military bases in Korea. Cho discusses how the silences in the American public concerning the brutal war effort from 1950 to 1953, which included the use of napalm and other violations of the civilian population, as well as the fact that becoming a ‘hostess’ was the only option available to thousands of young Korean girls, have created a kind of haunting of her generation of young American-Koreans. According to Cho (2008: 140), 9 out of 10 Korean women residing in the US today are former sex-workers, even though 9 out of 10 will deny it. Today, the silences about the war and the sex-work haunt the generation of young people who, like Cho herself, have never known the full story of their own origins or the sufferings which are the foundation of their privileged life and upbringing in the US. The fraudulent writing of history, and the great sense of shame existing among the first generation of Korean ‘war-brides’, is transferred in various ways to Cho’s (2008) own generation and results in a trans-generational haunting, and a ‘monstrous family of reluctant belonging’ (39). The Korean diaspora is tied together by means of all the personal secrets which no-one may or can know (Cho, 2008: 40).

Another revealing example of how the adversities of the past are passed on to new generations of refugee families is offered by Anja Kublitz (2011). She uses her fieldwork in and among Palestinian families in Denmark to discuss how the older first generation, who have lived parts of their lives in refugee camps in Lebanon, largely depict the conflict between Israel and Palestine as a question of territory and a clash between capitalist and Marxist worldviews. Among the younger generation of Palestinians raised in Denmark, the terror on September 11, 2001 – and all the controversy regarding Islam and Muslims that has been the order of the day since then (see Bleich, 2009; Rytter and Pedersen, 2014) – has transformed the territorial and political conflict into a religiously motivated confrontation between Islam and the West. Kublitz (2011) shows convincingly how silences between the two generations make it possible for the conflict to mutate in such a way that, even though the image of the enemy remains the same as before, the conflict is given new expressions and content.

Grace M Cho and Anja Kublitz both focus on hauntings which resemble the hauntings currently occurring within and between Afghan refugee families. Hauntings are not necessarily attached to individuals or personal histories, but gain their strength and vitality in groups such as families, networks of friends, ethnic groups or transnational diasporas (To, 2015: 76). The Afghan past is inscribed in materiality, discourse, narratives and social interactions; it is a kind of ruin which employs affective means to shape the perspectives, experiences and understandings of contemporary everyday life (Navaro-Yashin, 2012).

The three cases of Firooz, Hamza and Jaffar, all of whom have marriage aspirations, are now presented. The three bachelors have different ways of handling the friction they encounter within and between families of the Afghan community, and they employ different strategies to manage the past and chase the ghost of war back into the crypt.

Firooz’s religiosity

In 1999, Firooz and his father fled the Taliban. The Taliban were after his father because he was a Shia Muslim who worked for an international company. He was therefore labelled an ‘infidel traitor’. They went from Afghanistan towards Iran on foot, and initially left behind the rest of the family in Mazar-i-Sharif. Firooz’s mother and siblings joined them later in Teheran, where his uncle lived. A humanitarian NGO helped the family to reach Denmark, where they were first accommodated in Middelfart and then moved to Sønderborg.

Today Firooz is 25 years old and is studying marketing at university. The persecution in Afghanistan has left its mark: his father suffers from post-traumatic stress, and his mother from severe depression. So Firooz does all the grocery shopping, takes care of the monthly bills, drives his siblings to leisure activities and takes his parents to the doctor.

In addition to his studies and obligations at home, he also works full time at a restaurant in Sønderborg in order to save up for his future wedding, which he estimates will cost about DKK 300,000. He is reluctant to accept any money from his future in-laws, so he is saving up himself. Even though Firooz has met a girl from another Afghan family in Denmark, and even though she also wants to marry him, the marriage will be complicated. She comes from a Pashtun-Sunni Muslim background – so in this case, the conflict-ridden Afghan past is a far larger problem than Firooz’s financial difficulties.

Like Firooz, the girl has been in Denmark since her early childhood. She is studying in Aarhus, wears a headscarf and is from a family that (according to Firooz) is more religious than his own. They have met a few times without their parents and agree that they will aim for the traditional Afghan proposal (khastgari), where a series of ritualised visits between the families takes place before highly esteemed members of the boy’s family formally ask for the hand of the girl.

However, the two young people are worried about how their respective families will react when they learn of their plans. As a Hazara and Shia Muslim, Firooz is considered to be different from his Pashtun and Sunni Muslim girlfriend. Even though Firooz emphasises that he sees the ethnic, political and religious divisions within the Afghan diaspora as a remnant of the past, the decision-event of selecting a marriage partner re-actualises old divisions from Afghanistan – whether he likes it or not.

Firooz, his bride-to-be and their respective families are shaped by two different versions and experiences of recent Afghan history. It was Sunni Muslim Pashtuns, just like the girl’s family, who headed the oppression and persecution of Firooz’s family. He is therefore worried about whether the two families will be able to get along, and especially about whether the girl’s family will accept a non-Pashtun Shia Muslim suitor like him. But Firooz has a plan: ‘I’m planning to tell him [the girl’s father] that I am more religious than I actually am, then I’ll have to wait and see what happens’. The strategy is to present himself as ‘more religious’ than he actually is, in order to try to earn the favour and respect of his potential father-in-law.

Firooz’s marriage plans and his life in Denmark in general seem to be shaped by tensions from the past in Afghanistan: he is haunted by ethnic and religious conflicts of which he has very limited primary experience or recollection – although he knows enough about them to realise that they will be a problem.

Hamza’s disappointment with his mother

Hamza was born and raised in Denmark. The family came to Denmark in 1985 after fleeing the war in which Hamza’s father was part of the Mujahedeen movement who fought against the Soviet occupation. The family is Tajik, but Hamza does not think that ethnicity should be important. He has friends with a variety of national backgrounds, including Afghan friends and acquaintances from various ethnic groups. So Hamza does not see any problem in the fact that the girl he wants to marry is Pashtun. Despite the many historical relations and alliances across the boundaries between the two ethnic groups, Tajiks and Pashtuns have fought against each other on several occasions on either side of various local and national conflicts in Afghanistan. For instance, many Pashtuns were (sometimes forced) allies of the Taliban, whereas most Tajiks supported the Northern Alliance who fought against the Taliban, headed by the great Tajik hero, Ahmed Shah Massoud. ⁴

In spite of his desire to distance himself from the Afghan past, Hamza’s marriage plans and the conflict-ridden past are intertwined. Just before our first interview with Hamza, ⁵ he had asked his mother permission to marry the Pashtun girl. The mother reacted disapprovingly because of the girl’s ethnicity or ‘tribe’ as Hamza says:

She [his mother] criticised the girl because of something as random as her tribe, it’s pretty regrettable. I was actually pretty disappointed about my mother. It was an understandable reaction, because she imagines that discord and disagreements could occur, which she wants to avoid. We’ve just been corresponding on Facebook a few months, but we’re certain that we would like to get married. I just have to meet her family. She [his girlfriend] has not yet talked to her family. Well, actually I’m not certain of how it works with khastgari [proposal] and all that, because I was born and raised in this country… My mother is supposed to contact her mother – so I have to talk to my mother.

However, a couple of weeks later, Hamza announces on Facebook that he is engaged. In our next conversation he prefers to talk about the future wedding and marriage, instead of explaining about the conflicts and negotiations: ‘There’s real love between the families now, so why should we talk about problems?’. Whereas he mainly talked about the difficulties of the conflictual past in the first interview, he now prefers to talk about how wonderful it is going to be to share the future:

We’ve agreed that we should not care too much about the past and all that. All of the conflicts. Because then we will never move on. It is time that we look forward, and the families actually agree about this… I think.

A Tajik from the North and a Pashtun from the South

Jaffar is 31 years old and came to Denmark as an asylum seeker with his mother and siblings back in 2000. They lived at an asylum centre in Funen until they were accommodated in Roskilde. A couple of years later the family was reunited when his father joined them in Denmark. Many of his siblings are married and now live abroad. Jaffar himself also got married to a Danish-Afghan woman and now has a little son.

In Jaffar’s early childhood in Afghanistan, his father was employed in a leading position, in the PDPA government’s administration. The family thus led a relatively privileged life under the occupation of the Soviet Union. When Najibullah’s ⁶ government fell in 1992, the war broke out in full force, and the Mujahedeen took over. At that time, the family lived in the centre of Kabul, in the apartments reserved for government employees. During a short period of ceasefire, Jaffar’s father sent his wife and children to Mazar-i-Sharif, where they stayed with some relatives. He himself stayed in Kabul.

Despite his former employment, Jaffar’s father obtained a position in the new administration. As he explained:

My father is Tajik, we are Tajik. It just might have something to do with that. Rabbani ⁷ [the new president] was Tajik, and there are several of my kin who knew Rabbani and fought the Soviet Russians… maybe that’s why my father worked with them.

Today, Jaffar is married to a young Afghan girl from Denmark. They met each other through mutual friends, but once again the two young people’s ethnic identities were relevant: ‘I’m a Tajik from the North and she’s a Pashtun from the South. Her family is more conservative and traditional. My family is more liberal’. Jaffar emphasises that his wife’s family does not directly sympathise with the Taliban:

It’s not directly my parents-in-law, but other members of her family. If for example there’s a suicide bomb in Afghanistan, I feel remorse for the loss, while their reaction is more like ‘it had to happen’, or ‘there’s something going on behind the scene and others are behind this’ – and that’s even when the Taliban takes responsibility! So there’s still a long way to go in these family relations… it’s because they are Pashtun.

After a prolonged process involving a series of problems, the two families ended up accepting each other – at least to such a degree that they could allow the marriage and go through with a wedding. But Jaffar concludes, in a tone of resignation, that it is very difficult for his father to reconcile with the fact that his daughter-in-law has a Pashtun background.

Everyday diplomacy in a segmented diaspora

The narratives of Firooz, Hamza and Jaffar regarding their marriage plans are different, but they all reflect the way in which the war and conflicts in Afghanistan are re-actualised in Denmark. In all three cases, partner choice was a decision-event that motivated the bachelors to negotiate with their own parents, their bride-to-be and her family with the focus on who they are and who they want to be (Humphrey, 2008). In this respect, the outcome of the decision-event can be seen as a specific articulation of, and for, the future.

Among other things, the three narratives illustrate how Afghans in Denmark have to juggle multiple identity categories, each of which makes different claims about the past and the present: there is a significant difference between whether one is an ‘Afghan’ or a ‘Dane’, coming from ‘Kabul’ or ‘Sønderborg’, from ‘North’ or ‘South’, being ‘communist’ or ‘religious’, ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’, ‘Sunni’ or ‘Shia’, ‘Pashtun’ or ‘Hazara’, and so on. In a study of public spheres among Pakistani migrant families in Manchester, Pnina Werbner, (2002) suggests that the complexity of the migrant community is best understood as a ‘segmented diaspora’, involving flexible alternation between different identities and self-representations, depending on the specific situation and context. Correspondingly, Steven Vertovec (2007) has suggested the term ‘super-diversity’, which refers not only to social interrelations with several different migrant groups, but also to how internally, in each of the different migrant groups – in this instance the Afghan group – an array of identity markers relates to different narratives about who one is, where one is from, and where one is going.

Firooz, Hamza and Jaffar try to encompass the diversities with which they are confronted in their choice of partner by mobilising broader, more general and inclusive identity categories (cf. Baumann, 2004). This strategic effort to retell the history of yourself and your family can be seen as a specific kind of ‘everyday diplomacy’ (Marsden et al., 2016). The term ‘everyday diplomacy’ combines balancing political cooperation with efforts to restrain and resolve international conflict situations, but also emphasises that the capacity to accept compromises and recognise the just intentions of the other party is important in numerous everyday encounters. In order for Afghan families to be connected in marriage, a kind of everyday diplomacy is often required. The cases, and our data in general, illustrate three broad identity categories which are mobilised in an effort to create common ground for shared narratives.

The first is the way in which the national identity of ‘Afghan’ has become particularly salient for families living outside Afghanistan, whereas back in Afghanistan they were largely defined by ethnic and religious networks and identities. Magnus Marsden (2016: 308) suggests that the awareness and emphasis of the national identity and imagined community of Afghans is connected to the rise of the Taliban movement in the 1990s. On the other hand, the migrants and refugees, roughly speaking, became ‘Afghan’ when they left Afghanistan. In diaspora, people relate to one another on the basis of national categories while ethnic, religious and political differences recede. Especially in the Danish welfare state, where everyone is categorised and counted, the newcomers have been pooled together under the national category: ‘Afghan’, regardless of their widely different ethnic, political or religious affiliations. Furthermore, various NGOs and associations such as the Afghan Youth Association in Denmark (AYAD) have worked in recent years towards creating an all-embracing, shared identity as Afghans in Denmark. ⁸

The second broad identity category is ‘refugee’. Regardless of your background, and regardless of which side you supported and perhaps fought on in the shifting wars and conflicts, the families in these three cases share the legal category and status of being refugees. This means that they all have concrete experience of fleeing from Afghanistan and experience of the Danish asylum system. Furthermore, ‘refugee’ is not only a status that one shares with other Afghans in Denmark, but also an international category that embraces all who have attained this status outside their home country. Both the legal category ‘refugee’ and the national identity ‘Afghan’ rest on the idea of a ‘national order’ (Malkkii, 1995) in which all human beings in the world are organised in terms of their affiliation to a nation-state – even stateless people are defined by their absence of any such affiliation.

Finally, the third category is the broad religious identity of ‘Muslim’. Firooz tries to convince his future family-in-law about his seriousness and just intentions by exaggerating his religious background. Likewise, for Hamza the fact that his future wife is a Muslim is more important than her national or ethnic background. Several studies of migrants in Europe emphasise that religious identities have become particularly relevant for new generations in diaspora (see Kublitz, 2011; Pedersen, 2014; Rytter, 2013, 2018). By mobilising the idea of a common Muslim ummah, the upcoming generation attempts to overcome the sectarian boundaries between Sunni and Shia Muslims, or the ethnic–political conflicts between Pashtuns, Tajiks and Hazaras in Afghanistan. The tendency seems to be to either reduce (or completely renounce) one’s religious background or to embrace and cultivate it. But the aim of both these strategies is to overcome alterity and create a platform for new shared narratives and identity.

One element in the everyday diplomacy of young Afghans and the ways in which they negotiate the past apparently revolves around distancing yourself by various kinds of ‘active forgetting’ (Connerton, 2008). For instance, when Hamza succeeds in persuading his family to look forwards and not discuss the past, this is not necessarily because they have reached a mutual understanding of specific historical events, but rather that they agree to not talk about the past and to look forwards instead. The tensions between the Tajik and Pashtun families seem to be accompanied by a mutual understanding of the fact that they are all ‘Afghans’ and ‘refugees’. The diplomatic concord consists of an active effort to exorcise the spectre and chase it back into the crypt: marriage is only possible if the parties involved let the past stay in the past.

Firooz’s plans are haunted by sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shia groups, and by ethnic differences between Pashtun and Hazara groups – both creating a fundamental doubt and mistrust which has to be handled if he wants to bring the families together and get married. Correspondingly, in Jaffar’s case, it is the father’s political engagement in the PDPA and the family’s subsequent flight that are re-actualised when the newly-wed couple’s Tajik and Pashtun families are brought together.

Taken as a whole, the three cases show that war and flight are not only events of the past, but also exist in the present and shape the future. The lives of the parents and experiences from Afghanistan continue to haunt the younger generation (cf. Abraham and Torok, 1994). It is this kind of intergenerational transmission of adversities and atrocities that Grace M Cho (2008) calls a ‘monstrous family’ (39). The presence of unresolved tensions from a conflict-ridden family, history makes considerable demands on the young people’s strategic and diplomatic abilities in their efforts to achieve the marriage they want and hope for.

Politics, tragedies and transnational friction

So far, we have discussed individual cases of three young men, and how they negotiate their partner choice and marriage aspirations with their family. However, since the Afghan families in Denmark are embedded in a ‘transnational social field’ (Levitt and Glick Schiller, 2004) current dramatic events in Afghanistan also need to be taken into consideration. Actually, Afghan families often face different challenges in their aspirations of everyday diplomacy. Their attempt to create encompassing categories such as ‘Afghan’, ‘refugee’ or ‘Muslim’ are fragile and the new identities need ongoing confirmation and identity-work in order to become a common platform. Here, current political developments in Afghanistan can be a severe challenge. Families in Denmark are constantly updated about events taking place in Afghanistan via international news, social media or personal networks. Political developments are soon circulated and discussed in the Afghan diaspora. According to Hamza, his parent’s generation constantly discuss Afghans politics and often end up in heated confrontations:

When my father criticises the Taliban, there may be a family who are supporting the Taliban and then they start criticising the Mujahedeen and so on. It’s this ongoing struggle. It might not be so obvious and direct; it’s more little hints and remarks that are mentioned once in a while. You’re able to sense it, but fortunately it has now improved a lot. Especially in the younger generation, my own generation, who were born and raised here or have come to the country, we have put many of these political disputes behind us and instead found out what common interests we have. So, this is a positive side of the new generation, we don’t care too much about the political feuds that have been in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, events in Afghanistan also risk destabilising the new common narratives among families in Denmark. One example was the brutal killing of Farkhunda Malikzada, in Kabul on 19 March 2015 (see Fluri and Lehr, 2019). The 27-year-old Farkhunda had a confrontation with a local mullah, who, stripped of arguments, accused her of having burned a copy of the holy Quran. The rumours of her scandalous act mobilised a mob that chased Farkhunda around in the streets shaming her for blasphemy. At first local authorities tried to interfere, but the crowd was out of control and Farkhunda ended up being beaten and stoned, before she was run over by a car and dragged around in the streets until she died. The police did nothing to stop it.

The murder of Farkhunda Malikzada created a lot of discussions in Afghanistan and resulted in huge public demonstrations in Kabul agitating for women’s rights in the patriarchal society and against local police and authorities who was accused of still being influenced by the ideology and mindset of the Taliban movement.

The killing was also met with outrage and contempt among Afghans in Denmark. Ten days later, Danish-Afghan organisations arranged a commemoration at the central town square in Copenhagen. The commemoration memorial was announced on AYAD’s home-page: ‘The event is supposed to show our common stance against the horrible killing and show our respect with the victim. We stand together and face extremism and the cruelty committed under its dark shadow’. Approximately 1000 participants attended the commemoration and prominent members of the Afghan community gave speeches in Dari, Pashto and Danish from the back of a truck. The obvious goal was to highlight the impact of religious extremism and (the lack of) women’s rights in Afghanistan, but indirectly the commemoration was also meant to mark the unity of Afghans in Denmark despite their differences in gender, age, political affiliation, ethnicity and religion.

In general, ongoing attempts of ‘everyday diplomacy’ are porous and fragile. Tragedies in Afghanistan like suicide bombs or the brutal killing of Farkhunda Malikzada can have transnational effects and create friction between families in the Afghan diaspora (cf. Rytter, 2010). Such events may expose and revitalise the conflicts and atrocities that families have deliberately attempted to leave behind.

Conclusion: The potentiality of decision-events

In a recent article, the anthropologists Magnus Marsden and Diana Ibañez-Tirado (2015) discuss Afghan merchants in Odessa, Ukraine, who have a more or less deliberate strategy of marrying local women. Marriage is utilised as a kind of anchor which mobile traders can cast out in order to create connections and strong ties in a new destination and expand existing network to also include local families.

None of the young men included in this article presents their marriage as instrumental in the same way. On the contrary, partner choice and marriage are described as being based on mutual romantic feelings and decisions made by the young people themselves. ⁹ They will not let their families’ conflicting histories and atrocities of the past in Afghanistan stop them. Instead, the three young men aspire to create a connection between their own family and the girl’s family by mobilising broad categories such as ‘Afghans’, ‘refugees’ or ‘Muslims’. However, like the Afghan traders in Odessa, the cases presented here suggest that marriage is a crucial decision-event and a stepping stone for the articulations of new futures, seeking to overcome some of the boundaries and alterity that exist between Afghan refugee families. Nevertheless, despite their efforts it is precisely these ethnic, political and religious differences that haunt the youngsters when they introduce their chosen one to their family, and the tensions often seem to increase after the confetti of the grand wedding has subsided and the two sides have to start to recognise and treat each other as one big family.

In general, this article suggests a new research agenda in which we start to pay more attention to the ways in which war, conflicts and atrocities of the past may reappear decades later and have to be dealt with in fragmented diaspora communities. It highlights how the vital conjunctures of partner choice and marriage are a good place to study such potentially disruptive dynamics and local attempts at reconciliation. Ritualised transitions like childbirth, divorce or death may have a similar potential to propel people, families and entire migrant communities in new directions and afford new articulations of identity, being and belonging (see Pedersen and Rytter, 2018).

All the complications that Firooz, Hamza and Jaffar face in their attempts to achieve the preferred marriage illustrate that the war in Afghanistan is not over, but continues to be the object of negotiations across generations and between families in the fragile Afghan diaspora. The ongoing reconciliation process relies on the capacity for ‘everyday diplomacy’ and the ability, will and determination of everyone involved to interact and communicate despite their different family trajectories, experiences and religious-political worldviews. Jaffar’s father is a good example of the kind of diplomacy that is required. After reluctantly accepting his son’s choice of a wife with a Pashtun background, he is now looking more optimistically to the future and has, according to Jaffar, conceded that:

Heck, we live in Denmark. I might not agree, and her [his daughter-in-law’s] family might have their viewpoints. But you [Jaffar] can help make it better… merely the fact that you have a son [the grandchild], who is both Tajik and Pashtun. He won’t have these problems.