By Dr Mujib Abid, World BEYOND War, July 10, 2026

I believe that commitments to peacebuilding are best generated from a plurality of cultural locations and knowledge perspectives. Migrants are often viewed as people that can bridge cultural divides, materially and culturally connect societies, and as a result enhance harmony, understanding and coexistence. Some have called this ‘cultural hybridity,’ a syncretic identity negotiated over expectations of purity or attempts at imposition of racialized essentialisms. In occupying more than one cultural location at once, displacement can be experienced alongside immense creative empowerment. Others have noted how migrants are ‘multi-identitied,’ that they can wear more than one hat at a time, and depending on the situation, they can choose to switch between their identities. This is more than just code switching as a matter of necessity.

This hybridity or identity pluralism is a resource, an advantage, what sets migrants apart, such that they can contribute positively to both of their cultural addresses. With accessibility to more than one cultural location, migrants get to pick and choose, critiquing each with reference to the other.

Cultural hybridity, for instance, can mean over time there is a growing mainstream appreciation for Sufi mystic musical traditions of Qawalli in Melbourne, but then also, the inverse of that holds true, in that because of migrants crossing borders regularly, there also is a growing appreciation for hip-hop in New Delhi.

This exchange, made possible in great part by diaspora communities, extend to more pressing debates, in particular that of community peacebuilding and anti-war activism. Here I’d like to take a moment to reflect on my experience with the Afghan Peace Volunteers (APVs).

By the time I encountered the APVs in 2013, I had become deeply disenchanted with Western involvement in Afghanistan. It was the height of the War on Terror: a brutal occupation, a peace process stalled by the American insistence on ‘reintegration’ (of foot soldiers) over reconciliation, and a Taliban insurgency steadily reclaiming the countryside while refusing to enter negotiations. Soon after I was introduced to the APVs, in early 2014, I visited their centre in Kabul, getting to deliver a workshop on nonviolence in Islam. In truth, I mostly wanted to meet everyone in person. Could a community like this really exist in my city?

To call it a breath of fresh air would be an understatement. It felt like an oasis, a reminder that other possibilities existed, a politics of alterity somehow willed into existence. Here was a community daring to imagine a different future, and cultivating a different set of tools to reach it: nonviolence, anti-war activism, collective care and communal self-reliance, relationality, and environmental sustainability through permaculture. It was a quiet but powerful reminder that peace was possible, lived through everyday acts of tolerance, compassion and care. Over the years, the APVs became a constant in my life. I got to know the volunteers, the international supporters, and during my increasingly frequent visits to Kabul between 2018 and 2021, the APVs centre became a place where I recharged, sought refuge, meditated, and escaped the suffocating pessimism that so often engulfed the city.

From these sojourns, I would return to my life of research and community work in Brisbane, often with affirmation for the utility of my contrarian and counter-hegemonic academic work and a renewed zeal for my activist work. I’d share my learnings with the community of peace activists, trying to bridge the two worlds. There are, indeed, profound lessons to be learned in struggling for peace against the grain of a city that was so intensely militarised, culturally and materially, and against the grain of a settler-colonial society that facilitated that process of militarisation over there.

In a sense, the lessons travelled in both directions. Afghanistan was not just a recipient of peacebuilding knowledge, it became a source of it.

Then August 2021 happened. The return of the Taliban brought about a new wave of mass exodus for Afghans, including many of the APVs, who are now scattered across the world. From Europe and the UK to North America, Australia, South America, and of course the regional countries, many of the volunteers are living in involuntary displacement.

Choosing the path of exile is never easy. Should volunteers seek refuge when the space to continue their work no longer exists? Or should they double down, precisely because the imperative to speak truth to power has never been more urgent? These are not abstract questions, but deeply personal ones that many have had to confront.

Given this new reality, the question becomes how to sustain the work of the APVs, and many like them, through diasporic peacebuilding. Working closely with Afghans in Australia from my position at the university and beyond, it is clear to me that despite the ruptures brought about by involuntary, traumatic and transformative migration trajectories, Afghan communities remain committed to reimagining social relations, advancing social justice, and building peace.

In that pursuit, they often face considerable challenges. Communities must navigate complex power dynamics.

There are securitised border regimes that prefigure unidimensional, singular identities, risking the reduction of hybrid, multi-identitied individuals into caricatures that see the world only in binaries: black and white, us and them. This, in part, helps explain the deeply reductionist fixation on language, ethnic identity, and the hardening of singular identities. Melbourne has seen much of this. It risks erasing what I see as one of the greatest advantages of being an Afghan migrant.

There is also a dominant discourse that constructs the Afghan refugee as the grateful migrant. On its own, there is nothing wrong with gratitude, especially given that many Afghans in Australia arrived through the humanitarian program. The problem arises when gratitude becomes an expectation: an expectation to disavow critical language, to forego what was learned elsewhere, and to let go of aspirations for more just social relations. This, too, risks erasing the cultural hybridity and plural identity an Afghan migrant.

In short, peacebuilding in the Afghan diaspora is a delicate, continuously improvisational exercise. It requires striking a balance between priorities here and there, traversing multiple knowledge traditions (and inviting them into dialogue where necessary) while withstanding the policy and cultural onslaughts that seek to narrow the possibilities for peace.

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