In this chapter the “Pashtun Borderland” – a key concept throughout the book – is framed as a distinct physical and geopolitical space. This space, it is argued, is shaped by the complex interplay of imperial aspiration by larger polities claiming their authority over this space and ethnic self-ascriptions arising as a consequence. The heavy ideological baggage both practices pivot on is somewhat disenchanted by significant lines of conflict which traverse the region and its communities: between lowland and upland communities, between local elites and subalterns and between urban and rural communities. It is claimed that the persona of the discontent, or troublemaker, is a systemic result of these complex constellations, heavily fuelled by the agendas of successive imperial actors and the making and un-making of temporary pragmatic alliances typical for this kind of environment, ideal-typically cast here as “Borderland pragmatics”.

Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2018) is the first major literary work to emerge from Australia’s offshore refugee detention regime in the Pacific. This essay examines Boochani’s landmark poetic-philosophical memoir for the way it exposes the systematic torture inside Manus Prison, Papua New Guinea. If, in the 1990s, the field of diaspora studies was reinvigorated by the apparently accelerated movement of people, money, and products, what purchase is a diasporic framework in the face of proliferating regimes of immobility? The chapter proceeds by thinking through three tropes common to diasporic narratives: first is the account of oppression that forces flight from the homeland; second are practical and ethical questions of hospitality/hostility, inclusion/exclusion, in the land of arrival; and third is the politics of collective identity in relation to the homeland. In short, how might we think of diaspora with its seeming opposite, detention?