Imperial Entanglements: Afghan Refugees and the Reimagining of Midwestern Identity in Muncie, Indiana

Abstract

This article examines how Afghan refugee resettlement in Muncie, Indiana challenges dominant narratives about both Midwestern homogeneity and refugee victimhood. Through research with Afghan refugees who arrived following the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, I analyze how everyday encounters between refugees and longtime residents reveal complex imperial connections. Drawing on Critical Refugee Studies, I argue that Afghan presence in the American Midwest is not incidental but directly produced by decades of U.S. military intervention. Cultural narratives that portray the Midwest as predominantly white are not only misleading but also fuel dangerous ideologies like nativism and white supremacy, which lead to anti-refugee and immigrant policies and practices that have dire consequences. By centering Afghan refugees within longer histories of imperialism, racialization, and migration, I demonstrate how face-to-face interactions produce unexpected alliances that question previously held ideologies and challenge U.S. empire. This work contributes to understanding how refugee integration collapses boundaries between foreign and domestic, revealing how empire fundamentally shapes citizenship, belonging, and regional identity in America’s heartland.

1. Introduction

Faridun Gul (a pseudonym) and I went to the post office to register the family’s new address in Muncie, Indiana. Faridun Gul and his family are some of the 130 Afghan refugees who have come to Muncie since the fall of 2021, when the U.S. accepted between 150,000–200,000 Afghans fleeing Taliban control after the U.S. military abruptly withdrew from the country after a 20-year occupation. Dan, a white man in his 40s, came to the post office window and seemed taken aback when he heard Faridun Gul speaking on his phone. Dan asked me if the man was speaking Pashto. Looking pleased, if not befuddled, Dan explained that he had not heard Pashto since his time serving in the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Dan shook Faridun Gul’s hand, asked him where he was from, told him where he had served, and gave me his direct phone line in case we had more questions about the postal service.

This brief exchange speaks to relationships between the local and global, how U.S. empire and militarism produce refugees, and how refugee resettlement to the United States results in new forms of citizenship, belonging, and home. The U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan for two decades (2001–2021) and the war between the U.S. and the Soviets, fought on Afghanistan soil before that (1979–1989), resulted in the arrival of Afghan refugees to the United States from the 1980s until today. Afghan refugees are here because the United States military—and paramilitaries, businesses, and nongovernmental organizations affiliated with U.S. forms of militarism—were there.1 As such, the arrival of Afghan refugees to Muncie in 2021 is a part of a longer history of migration in and out of the Midwest that is constitutive of empire, nation, and region. The Critical Refugee Studies Collective argues,

Contemporary refugee crises are largely the result of the Western world’s historical, sustained, and ongoing patterns of imperial and colonial violence and economic, social, and racial stratification. It follows that to make a case against these ongoing patterns of stratification, we need to reconceptualize the refugee not as an object of rescue but as a site of social and political critiques, whose emergence, when traced, makes visible the past, present, and future of Western imperialism and militarism that have been masked by humanitarian practices and pronouncements.

(Espiritu et al. 2022, pp. 88–89)

In this article, I center the resettlement of Afghan refugees to Muncie in 2021 as part of a longer history of racialization, imperialism, and migration to explain how cultural narratives and ideologies about race, nation, and empire come to have the power they do. I argue that cultural narratives that portray the Midwest as predominantly white are not only misleading but also fuel dangerous ideologies like nativism and white supremacy, which lead to anti-refugee and immigrant policies and practices that have dire consequences.

According to Halvorson and Reno (2022), regionalism (the Midwest, New England, the South, and so forth) is a cultural construct that ultimately serves nationalism. Regional narratives rely on forms of cultural production (writings, paintings, films, etc.) that uphold certain ideologies and social histories, “anchoring them to symbolic geographies of region, nation, and world, and erase a host of other interconnections and histories that do not fit into such dominant logics of region (and the interests they serve)” (Halvorson and Reno 2022, p. 162).

Regionalism has been used to respond to destabilizing forces such as industrialism, urban-to-rural migration, and increasing wage labor, but can also be seen in global projects of colonialism and white supremacy (Halvorson and Reno 2022, p. 10). The Midwest, they argue, has been predominantly constructed as a pastoral heartland, principally featuring agriculture and hardworking white farmers. Narratives of progress, for example, about westward expansion, “which foreground the resilient, virtuous, and economical white farmer (in contrast with the supposedly dependent or unresourceful other), conceal all the failures, violence, and various kinds of opposition that characterized white colonization” (Halvorson and Reno 2022, p. 59). In dominant narratives, the Midwest remains coded as white, overlooking the region’s actual diversity and complexity. Such narratives stem from the ongoing projects of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and U.S. empire that benefit whites the most.

Due to seminal sociological studies in the early twentieth century (Lynd and Lynd 1929, 1937), Muncie has played an especially outsized role in popularizing a particular vision of “typical” America that was white and Protestant. This image has contributed to a vision of American identity that was fundamentally racialized, even as it presented itself as neutral and universal. Muncie, like the Midwest more broadly, is more diverse than dominant imagery would lead us to believe. The article draws upon work by Mahmood Mamdani (2004) and Deepa Kumar (2021), who explain how various iterations of U.S. empire have fueled Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism and that to effectively combat this racism, we must confront empire.

While the Midwest has been racialized as white, the image of “refugees” has been portrayed as “large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance” (Said 1984, p. 52), the kinds of images we saw in Afghanistan as the U.S. military left. As such, the word refugee “functions as a potent instrument of politics and culture, wielded by those in power in the exercise and legitimation of that power”, argue the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (Espiritu et al. 2022, p. 13). The images serve to control and incorporate refugees into the dominant culture in certain ways, led by those in power, and linked to the necessary relief provided to refugees—or not—by those with the resources, time, and desire to provide or withhold that relief. Afghans have largely been viewed as deserving of U.S. citizenship, at least under President Biden, because they helped the U.S. military fight terrorism (Lopez 2021). Missing from such portraits is the longer story behind the U.S. War on Terror, including the Cold War, fought on Afghan territory, which was devastating for Afghanistan and Muslims globally (Mamdani 2004). “Refugee” is thus a political and legal designation as much as a humanitarian one.2

These two discourses—one a contested account about diversity in the Midwest and the other about the role of the U.S. in the world—collide and conjoin in Muncie through the process of resettling refugees. The intersection produces a complex and unfinished process of refugee integration that collapses the boundaries between here and there, foreign and domestic, and inside and outside that empire brings to the making of U.S. culture and citizenship (Erickson 2020; Kaplan 2002). Such tensions can lead to framing the refugee experience in a way that reinforce narratives that support U.S. imperialist outlook—for example, Afghans deserve to be here because they fought against the Taliban and thereby support U.S. empire—or the idea that the heartland comprises primarily white Protestants and thus refugees can only be imagined as outsiders alongside other racialized and religious minorities. Regionalism becomes part of the political forces of nationalism because it supports exclusionary and unifying nationalist images and effects that stand for the nation as a whole (Halvorson and Reno 2022). However, I show that face-to-face interactions between members of the dominant population and refugees also produce unexpected alliances and negotiations that question previously held ideologies and challenge U.S. empire.

2. Background and Methods

This paper is informed by more than two decades of engagement with the U.S. refugee resettlement program. In 2001, I began working as a case manager for a refugee resettlement agency in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Most of my clients were from the former Yugoslavia, South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Liberia, and Iraq. I found myself wanting to know more about the different conflicts that brought people from around the world to small and mid-sized Midwestern cities, and decided to pursue a graduate degree in anthropology. My dissertation and first book (Erickson 2020) were a comparative study of white secular Muslim Bosnians, Bosnian Roma, and Black Christian Southern Sudanese in Fargo, North Dakota. The book outlines how refugees impacted Fargo from the 1980s to the 2010s, showing how culture, political economy, and institutional transformations collectively contributed to the racialization of Fargo in ways that complicated its demographics and ultimately benefited the city (see also Erickson 2022). It also shows how cross-cultural and transnational understandings of race, ethnicity, class, and religion shaped daily citizenship practices and belonging.

In 2021, when I learned that a group of people was working to bring Afghan refugees to Muncie, I jumped at the chance to be involved and became a member of the advisory committee for the Muncie Afghan Refugee Resettlement Committee (MARRC). I helped set policies and practices for the organization, coordinated with refugee resettlement agencies in Indianapolis, and worked closely with one Afghan family in particular (Faridun Gul and his family). Because I did not initially approach this work as a researcher, it would not be ethical for me to share private details about the organization or this family here. I do not aim to analyze the resettlement process in Muncie. Rather, my aim here is: (1) to contextualize the resettlement of Afghan nationals within a longer history of U.S. empire, (2) to situate refugees within the field of Midwest Studies, and Middletown Studies in particular, and (3) to argue that local context is important in how refugee resettlement is carried out. The founder of MARRC, Bibi Bahrami, whom I discuss below, has read this article and given her consent to publishing it.

The primary methodology driving this paper is cultural critique as I describe the critical importance of narratives to the project of U.S. empire, but I also use ethnographic methods in describing the resettlement of Afghans to Muncie. As a member of the organization that initiated resettlement, I took notes about the work we were doing, tracked the number of refugees arriving in Muncie, communicated with refugee resettlement agencies in Indianapolis with whom we were collaborating, and worked with other members of the advisory committee to write policies and practices. I did this for about a year and a half in addition to working with one Afghan family in particular. I did not conduct interviews for this paper because the aim is not to analyze the everyday practices of refugee resettlement to Muncie but instead to situate resettlement within the larger literature on refugees, race, and empire. I relied on my prior employment and research experiences and literature on refugee resettlement to triangulate with my data in Muncie and my training as an ethnographer to check my biases.

In what follows, I provide a critical overview of Middletown scholarship to summarize dominant narratives of the Midwest and situate Afghans in a longer history of Muncie. Then I explain how the Oscar-nominated short documentary film, “Stranger at the Gate” (Seftel 2022) turns the image of the average Munsonian and the refugee on their heads. The film tells the story of how the Muslim community in Muncie welcomed Richard “Mac” McKinney, a white 25-year veteran of the Marines with PTSD, and a would-be bomber of the Muncie Islamic Center, thereby averting hundreds of deaths and leading to Mac’s conversion to Islam. Next, I describe the process of bringing more than 130 Afghans to Muncie beginning in 2021, an effort led by Bibi Bahrami, an Afghan American former refugee who came to Muncie in 1986, helped co-found the Muncie Islamic Center, and is featured in “Stranger at the Gate”. Finally, I explain the importance of tracing the tensions between democracy and imperialism from the local to the global level. Examining refugee resettlement in the Midwest can point to the often-hidden ways in which the cultural logics of regionalism link empire, nation, and race. Focusing on the local level can elucidate how dominant cultural narratives are (re)told and how ideologies are practiced, including the variety of ways that local actors challenge and support U.S. empire and white supremacy through refugee resettlement.

3. The Midwest, Muncie, and Middletown, USA

The Midwest is represented in media, social science literature, and popular culture as America’s Heartland, where our most authentic citizens (so-called “real” Americans) reside. This persistent coding of the Heartland as white is intricately connected to industrial capitalism’s development, its idealized rural counterpart, and its eventual deterioration through deindustrialization—functioning not merely as an economic framework but more significantly as a social structure that provided specific privileges, opportunities for advancement, and upward mobility, especially for white individuals (Halvorson and Reno 2022, p. 19). These co-constitutive elements of the Heartland distort the actual diversity and complexity of people and places in the Midwest. As such, a variety of commentators present immigration to places like Muncie as a supplier of racialized diversity to predominantly white communities. Such framing erases pre-colonial histories, nonwhite citizens and residents, and other forms of difference, for example, ethnic, linguistic, religious, gendered, political, social, sexual, and class differences.

In reality, the Midwest has always been a site of migrations, local and global in scope, from indigenous people to the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North, and immigrants and refugees from around the world. The Midwest was home to hundreds of Native American nations. Historically, Indiana is a region where the U.S. military violently removed the Myaamiaki (Miami) people, from their traditional homelands, some of the nation’s earliest refugees of the settler state and U.S. imperialism. African Americans have been in Muncie since at least the 1840s (Lassiter et al. 2004). Dominant imagery about the Midwest often fails to represent these histories. Instead, we are offered countless images of white farmers, industrial workers, and postindustrial survivors, such as those from Middletown, U.S.A.

Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd’s research on Middletown (Lynd and Lynd 1929, 1937), a pseudonym for Muncie, served as a seminal study of urban sociology and social change. The Lynds chose Muncie as their field site due to its small size, rapid transition from agriculture to industrialism, and small foreign-born and Black populations, which they consciously excluded from the study. The Lynds chose Muncie because it was economically diversified for a small city and well-suited for a study on the impact of industrialization, including the role of religion and class conflicts between the business class and working class. Despite class separation, the Lynds observed social harmony within the dominant, white population and de facto segregation between whites and Blacks.

During the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan controlled much of the city’s government and political system, and their anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-Black biases led to boycotts of businesses owned by minoritized residents and discriminatory housing covenants, especially in wealthier neighborhoods. When they excluded African Americans from their study, the Lynds did not consider that, in the 1920s, Muncie’s African American population was proportionally higher than it was in New York, Chicago, or Detroit. It had a relatively small foreign-born population because the local business class imported workers from Tennessee and Kentucky in a concerted effort to keep foreign workers out. The Lynds believed they could more easily isolate and analyze culture change and socioeconomic class over time if they ignored race and citizenship status and focused on the dominant white population. Though the Lynds were careful to write that Muncie should not be viewed as a typical American city (Lynd and Lynd 1929, p. 9), journalists and scholars have been building on Middletown studies since it was first published and continue to use Muncie as a bellwether for national economic, political, and cultural trends (Connolly 2005, 2010; Igo 2007; Younge 2016).

Most scholarship on Muncie, which is tracked by the Center for Middletown Studies at Ball State University, centers on demographic change, family and community life, or religious beliefs and practices among the white, Protestant population. Despite the exclusion of minoritized populations in early Middletown Studies, Muncie continued to serve as a representative industrial city in the United States. Sarah Igo (2007) argues that Middletown studies helped construct and popularize a particular vision of “typical” America that was explicitly white and implicitly Protestant and middle-class, contributing to a vision of American identity that was fundamentally racialized even as it presented itself as neutral and universal, as it reinforced myths of superior white merit and deservingness. A telling example of this was the 1937 publication of Margaret Bourke-White’s photo essay in Life magazine, which amplified Muncie’s association with typical America to a mass audience. When asked why the magazine devoted so much editorial space to Muncie, the editors stated, “’LIFE here presents 11 pages of [photographs] in the belief that they are an important American document. Here, set down for all time, you may look at the average 1937 American as he really is.’” “If the popularity of Middletown established Muncie’s role as a representation of what was typical of America,” argues Gupta-Carlson (2018), “the Life photographs deepened the imprint for the decades to come” (p. 48).

Just as Muncie served as a representative city for industrialism in the first half of the twentieth century, it served as an example of deindustrialization in the 1970s and 1980s (Connolly 2010). By 1985, the service sector had surpassed the manufacturing sector in total employment, but these jobs offered lower wages and fewer benefits than factory jobs once did. By the 1990s, most industries had left Muncie in search of cheaper labor, resulting in Ball State University and Ball Memorial Hospital becoming the two largest employers in the city. By the turn of the century, Muncie had fully transformed from a city built on “cars and jars” (Ball jars and other commodities resulting from the natural gas boom) to one of “meds and eds.” Ball Memorial Hospital and Ball State University are now the biggest employers in the city.

Interventions to the focus on white Protestants in central Indiana have focused on Muncie’s Black (Dennis 2012), Jewish (Rottenberg 1997), Latino (Vega 2015), Muslim, and South Asian American populations. The Other Side of Middletown (2004) is an award-winning study, modeled after the same six areas of social life as the original Middletown study, but focused instead on the African American population. Unlike the Lynds, outsiders who imposed questions on locals, the researchers guiding The Other Side of Middletown approached their study collaboratively as a dialogue with African Americans. In the book, we learn about African American history in Muncie going back to the mid-19th century, about Black workers, families and home life, religious practices and institutions, civil rights activism, racism, and leaders, like Hurley Goodall, Muncie’s first Black firefighter, school board member, politician, and co-editor of the book.

Another addition to the breadth of Middletown studies is Himanee Gupta-Carlson’s Muncie, India(na): Middletown and Asian America (2018), part autoethnography and part community study about Muncie’s South Asian population. South Asians first came to Muncie to work at Ball State University, and then in the 1980s, as physicians at Ball Memorial Hospital, both part of Muncie’s transition from “cars and jars” to “meds and eds”. Later, South Asians came as part of the information technology boom. Gupta-Carlson’s book is a testament to the challenges of being at once invisible and hyper visible as a brown-skinned Hindu woman growing up in Muncie (Gupta-Carlson 2018, p. 21). Her experiences growing up in Muncie left Gupta-Calrson with a sense that she could not feel like Muncie was “home” because she “could not feel American in some normative sense of what an American was defined to be” (Gupta-Carlson 2018, p. 57).

The documentary “Muslims in Muncie” (Agnew 2018) traces 50 years of Muslims’ community building as told by a diverse group of community members from more than a dozen countries. Refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Malaysia, as well as African Americans, opened the first Islamic Center in 1969 in a house located on the Ball State campus. In the 1970s, the community grew with the arrival of more international faculty and students, doctors, and IT professionals. In 2007, community members raised enough money to move to a larger building in the Northwest part of the city. Featured in “Muslims in Muncie” are Dr. and Mrs. Bahrami, some of the co-founders of the Islamic Center. In 1979, when she was just 13 years old, “Bibi”, as she is affectionately known in the city, fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. During six years in a refugee camp in Pakistan, she met her husband and, in 1986, joined him in Muncie, where he was completing his medical residency. Over the next 40 years, the Bahramis would raise six children in Muncie and sponsor family members and other Afghans to join them. While her husband worked as a doctor, Bibi earned her GED and then a college degree from Ball State University. After 9/11 and the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan, she founded the Afghan Women’s and Kids’ Education and Necessities, or AWAKEN, a nonprofit organization that supports women and children in Bibi’s native city of Jalalabad. Twenty years later, she facilitated the resettlement of more than 130 Afghan refugees to Muncie and is the co-subject of the Oscar-nominated film “Stranger at the Gate”.3

If Middletown U.S.A. and Bourke-White’s photos in Life magazine contributed to the image of the average American as white, then scholarship and films about Muncie since the 1990s exemplify the actual diversity, community, complexity, and variable experiences with belonging that exist in the Midwest among and between minoritized communities. It challenges dominant images of the Midwest as primarily white and Christian or soldiers as uncomplicated protectors of American freedoms and instead projects an image of the Midwest as a chosen home for a diverse group of residents, from Muslims and Hindus to people of color and international professionals. The film “Stranger at the Gate” is one example of a challenge to these dominant narratives but more importantly serves to demonstrate how face-to-face interactions can lead to a powerful critique of empire, militarism, and white supremacy.

4. Stranger at the Gate: Challenging Images of Muslims and US Empire

The short film “Stranger at the Gate” constructs a narrative that Richard “Mac” McKinny discovered community, belonging, and Islam in Muncie. In the film, Mac explains that to get out of trouble in high school and earn his father’s respect, he joined the Marines, where he stayed for 25 years, until injury forced him to leave. At one point during his time in the service, he spoke with a higher-ranking person about coping. The officer looked squarely at Mac and said, “Mac, you’re on the range. You’re shooting at a paper target. As long as you can look at them as anything but human, you won’t have any problems”. But Mac had problems. Years later, after meeting Muslims face-to-face, Mac recounts that he had a dream that he was on the range and shot a paper target”. And instead of just a hole being put in that target”, he explains to the camera, “the target started bleeding. And I went down, and I wiped off the blood—it wouldn’t stop. That target would not stop bleeding. Blood was just flowing from the target. That’s when I really felt things were about to change”.

Mahmood Mamdani (2004) writes that proxy wars led by the U.S. during the Cold War marked a shift from targeting the armed forces of a government to its political representatives and then civilians. Doing so blurred the distinction between military and civilian targets. According to Mamdani, this blurring led to political terror—the targeting of civilians for political purposes—as a sustained strategy in peacetime combat. “Practiced consistently”, Mamdani argues, “terrorism consciously distinguished between targets and victims” (Mamdani 2004, p. 88). In the language of low-intensity conflict, victims, as distinct from targets, came to be known as “collateral damage” (Mamdani 2004, p. 88). “In fact”, writes Deepa Kumar (2021) “to avoid backlash around the number of civilians killed by drones, the United States simply decided to designate all military age men in countries being struck as combatants” (p. 9). Viewing humans as collateral damage takes a toll on victims, of course, but also on aggressors, which we see in the case of Mac. Indian scholar Ashis Nandy (2009) explains that colonialism colonizes the mind as well as bodies and geographical regions. Nandy (2009) argues that colonialism handicaps the colonialist even more than the colonized because it can result in cognitive dissonance. Once a colonizer (or occupier in this case) begins thinking of colonialism as anything but a justifiable civilizing mission that was flawed would amount to questioning the entire moral premise of colonialism and its aftermaths.

After Mac left the military and came to Muncie with his wife and daughter, like so many veterans, he began dealing with the aftermath of soldier life. “Towards the end of my military career”, he explains, “I was totally different. The fact of being involved in so many deaths over the years, it was a crazy time, man”. Mac’s now ex-wife, Dana, explains that Mac became so angry at seeing women in hijab at the local Walmart that she would steer him to other aisles to avoid them. When his daughter came home from school and asked why another student’s mom wore a dress that covered her face [a burqa], he became so angry that he scared her.

Carol Anderson’s (2016) concept of “white rage” is useful for understanding Mac’s responses to women in hijab. White rage, according to Anderson, is driven by resentment towards black advancement. Wage rage manifests in all manners of policies, laws, and racist practices, from police violence to baseless and disproportionate incarceration of Black and Brown people and racialized discrimination in education, healthcare, and housing. Islamophobia is a form of structural racism that targets Muslims and people who “look” Muslim. Keeping in mind there is no biological basis for race and that religions are not synonymous with race, targeting Muslims based on race is problematic, to say the least. Following Deepa Kumar (2021), I argue that race must be viewed as both ideology and practice rooted in the political economy of empire: “Empire creates the condition for anti-Muslim racism, and Islamophobia sustains empire” (Kumar 2021, p. 21). In this context, Mac’s response is upsetting but perhaps not surprising. Especially since the post-9/11 United States, Islamophobia has become a common, even acceptable form of racism (see, for example, President Trump’s Executive Order that banned foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from visiting the country for 90 days). The ideology of Islamophobia erases the vast diversity that exists among the world’s 2 billion Muslims and instead reduces “Muslims”—and by extension those racialized as Muslims—to a caricature “whose behavior can be predicted, explained, and controlled” (Kumar 2021, p. 49). Thus, even those Afghans living in the U.S. who are not Muslim may be racialized as Muslim and therefore subject to anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobic practices.

Mac began to plot how to kill as many Muslims in Muncie as possible—“hoping for at least 200 or more”—and decided the Islamic Center was the place to do this. He went to scope out the mosque and make a plan. Jomo Williams, an African American, first saw Mac as he walked towards the masjid [mosque] and said, “I knew something was wrong”. Williams asked Mac if he needed help. The Bahramis and others welcomed him to stay for prayers. So, he went back again the next week, and again after that. “I needed the peace”, says Mac in the film, “I just wanted to stop the voices”. Dana explained, “When Mac went to the mosque and the way he was treated, the way he was embraced, it did save his life. It saved the lives of the community”. Later, the FBI raided Mac’s home looking for bomb materials, which he had already disposed of, but the raid resulted in his family and new Muslim friends learning of his plot to bomb the Center. The response? Bibi invited him to dinner.

“Stranger at the Gate”, then, not only challenges dominant images of Midwesterners and refugees but also of soldiers. Mac, a white soldier, is the person in need of saving, and his saviors are Muslims and people of color. Cultural images and Hollywood films perpetuate the myths and promises of the soldier and serve as a cultural weapon of global empire (Boggs and Pollard 2016). Unpacking the multitude of images of Afghanistan is beyond the scope of this paper, but like the dominant imagery of the Midwest, images of Afghanistan post 9/11 are “part myth, part history, part fantasy”, serving simultaneously “as a lens for deciphering the present, imagining the future, and for reinterpreting the past” (Ivanchikova 2019, pp. 8–9). For the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to continue, the real physical and symbolic effects of war on civilians and soldiers—for example, trauma, vulnerability, injury, divorce, and addiction—had to be hidden from people both inside and outside the military (Lutz 2002). The costs of war have been downplayed and ignored by a complicit media, the challenges of monitoring the effects of such a complex institution in far-flung places, and hidden in a shroud of simplified histories, public relations work, and propaganda, including Hollywood films (Lutz 2002). War also creates worthy and unworthy victims.

Take, for example, Malala Yousafzai, executive producer of the film “Stranger at the Gate”. The daughter of a Pakistani education activist, from a young age, Malala stood up for the right of girls to be educated. In 2011, she received Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize. The following year, when she was just 16 years old, the Taliban attempted to assassinate Malala for her activism. She became a global activist for peace and education and was the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She continues to work for education, women’s rights, and global peace. A lesser-known young woman who is the same ethnicity, age, religion, and nationality as Malala is Nabila Rehman, who came to testify in front of the House of Representatives, where she gave testimony about the U.S. drone attack that killed her grandmother. “What did my grandmother do wrong?” she asked the nearly empty room. Momima Bibi was a 67-year-old grandmother, wife of a retired high school headmaster, and the only midwife in her village, and was killed while picking okra with her granddaughter. Malala’s victimhood serves the narrative for the Global War on Terror and justifies intervention against a violent Other who harms innocent young women who want to go to school, whereas Nabila’s victimhood challenges the dualistic and imperialist hubris of Western ideology (Wajahat 2015). Malala is a worthy voice for peace and women’s rights, of course, but why isn’t Nabila?

Lila Abu-Lughod (2002) has explained the importance of Afghan women in justifying the War on Terror, part of a longer history of justifying colonialism as a way “to save brown women from brown men” (Spivak 1988), and Muslim women from Muslim men (Kumar 2021). Abu-Lughod (2002) explains, “When you save someone, you imply that you are saving her from something. You are also saving her to something. What violences are entailed in this transformation, and what presumptions are being made about the superiority of that to which you are saving her?” (788). Western imperial powers helped save Malala from the Taliban by transporting her out of Pakistan to England, where she currently resides; they increased women’s access to education, but they also killed Nabila’s grandmother. To speak of one and not the other is a political act.

The murder of Momima Bibi and countless others was decades in the making, begun long before 9/11 and the War on Terror. Mamdani (2004, p. 87) explains that after defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal at home, the U.S. government decided to harness and even to cultivate terrorists in the struggle against guerrillas who had come to power and regimes it considered pro-Soviet. This struggle was largely waged in Afghanistan, where the explicit goal was to kill as many Soviets as possible while also handing the Soviet Union its own Vietnam. The endeavor was successful in that Afghanistan became the Soviet Union’s longest-running war, just as Vietnam had been the U.S.’s longest-running war—until, of course, Afghanistan. Afghanistan, then, more than any other location, was the high point of the Cold War, becoming the bloodiest regional conflict in the world (Mamdani 2004, pp. 119–20).

Much of the real impacts of war are hidden from view (Osman 2022). Scholars of war and militarism have long explained that the myths and promises of war for the soldier are misleading and all-encompassing, shaping every aspect of family and civilian life. Kenneth Macleish’s (2013) research shows that both deployed and non-deployed service members have experienced a heightened risk of suicide since the U.S. went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, due to the stresses of repeated deployments, family conflicts, repeated moves, and physical and emotional wear. Mac is not alone in struggling with the aftermath of war as a soldier. There are many overlapping ways in which the sacrifices and needs of soldiers are overlooked and downplayed in deference to the U.S. military and larger project of empire (Matson 2011), and many more than cover up the impacts of war on civilians (Espiritu 2014).

A team of activists, social scientists, and physicians have monitored the lives lost because of the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan through an initiative called the Costs of War Project, which looks beyond lives lost in violence to consider those who have died as a result of illness, injuries, and malnutrition that would not have occurred had the wars not taken place (Lutz and Mazzarino 2019). They argue that war creates an amalgam of health crises and consequences that tend to co-occur, are global in scale, and occur through multiple routes. As such, Stranger at the Gate highlights just one of many routes that the War on Terror has taken and Muncie is thus a site to interrogate U.S. forms of empire, democracy, and diversity, co-constitutive elements in the process of U.S. culture and nation-building. The film approaches refugee lives with nuance, care, and complexity, and demonstrates the ways that Bibi and other Muslims (re)present themselves, not in grateful deference to Muncie or the United States, but in relation to their own need for livability, safety, and dignity (Espiritu et al. 2022).

5. Refugee Resettlement as Imperial Inheritance in Muncie

In August 2021, as images of screaming Afghans desperate to get out of the country flooded our televisions, veterans were organizing ways to get them out. Organizations such as Project Exodus Relief, Evacuate Our Allies, and Iraq and Afghan Veterans of America worked to evacuate and provide support to Afghans who supported the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Media helped make the withdrawal a spectacle that neglected to interrogate two decades of failed occupation, including the deaths of thousands of Afghan civilians like Momina. Tens of thousands of Afghans were evacuated in the wake of the withdrawal and flown to U.S. military bases where they awaited resettlement. During this period, a letter to the Muncie Star Press editor made the case for bringing Afghans to Muncie. Hicks (2021) argued that the work retired military officers were doing to bring Afghan refugees to the United States,

Should usher in the most popular immigrant group to ever come to our shores. American cities, particularly in the people-starved Midwest, should be lobbying hard to receive these Afghan immigrants. This population is mostly educated and is largely composed of families whose men fought alongside us against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. This is a small group. Fewer Afghans will come to America than the number of people who crossed our southern border illegally in any single month of the Trump or Biden presidencies. Still, these immigrants are enough to help resurrect several struggling cities around the nation.

There is much to unpack in this short passage. Both the federal government and average Americans showed considerably more support for Ukrainians during this time period than for Afghans. According to Barbara Franz (2025), support for Ukrainians “included creating multiple pathways for entry and the largest private sponsorship program for refugees in the country’s history” (p. 75). This is in contrast to the structurally unequal and often violent ways in which many Afghans, other refugees, and asylum-seekers are dealt with at the U.S. border and in the country’s immigration system. Differential treatment of Ukrainians and Afghans, according to Franz (2025), “draws attention to the long-established racialized patterns of reception and rejection that have historically defined the U.S. immigration system” (p. 75).

Hicks also describes the Midwest as “people-starved” and suggests that Afghan “immigrants” could help “resurrect” struggling cities. Following Abu-Lughod’s (2002) question, “Do Muslim women need saving and where are we saving them to?” we should also be asking, “Why did Afghans need saving to begin with, and where are we saving them to?” Muncie has been faced with a declining population, though there was some growth beginning in 2021, the same year that Afghans began arriving. These population trends reflect the complex process underway in communities such as Muncie that are striving to reinvent themselves in ways that do not fit with dominant anti-immigrant political and media narratives. By the 2010s, Muncie’s advanced manufacturing sector had partially rebounded from its slump, and there are currently hundreds of manufacturing jobs available in Muncie, but not enough workers to fill them. Some factories have offered to transport new employees to work and offered childcare. The service sector, too, is eager for workers. Welcoming refugees and immigrants could help alleviate labor shortages and contribute to the increase of students in Muncie public schools, as Hicks argues, but viewing them as city-saviors is problematic, especially in an anti-immigrant, nativist Trump era. In other words, welcoming refugees, especially Muslim refugees and other racialized and religious minorities, into an imperial system that presides over war, genocide, and torture does little to dent racism or challenge U.S. empire (Kumar 2021).

Like Hicks, I, too, have used an economic and humanitarian frame to make the case for supporting refugee resettlement to Muncie in hopes of swaying people to accept refugees because myths against refugee resettlement obscure the facts (Erickson 2021). For example, it is misleading to say that refugees and immigrants are taking jobs from “hard-working” Americans (Besteman 2016). In July 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services found that refugees and immigrants bring in more government revenue than they cost in social services over time. The report never saw the light of day, however, because the Trump administration suppressed it (New York Times 2017). In another report, researchers argue that while resettlement policy is usually framed as a humanitarian issue, “it is often the economic impact of refugees that leaves the most enduring impression” (New American Economy 2017, p. 2). These arguments narrowly center on the importance of refugees’ economic contributions rather than social, political, or civic contributions and needs.

Perhaps most importantly, Hicks opens his letter with a call to move past finding blame for the collapse of Afghanistan’s government “because there’s plenty to go around” and instead suggests we “be concerned with drawing lessons from this experience” and “find[ing] ways to honor the unfinished work of those men and women, living and dead, who sacrificed in Afghanistan” (Hicks 2021). According to Mamdani (2004),

Perhaps no other society paid a higher price for the defeat of the Soviet Union than did Afghanistan. Out of a population of roughly 20 million, 1 million died, another million and a half were maimed, another 5 million became refugees, and just about everyone was internally displaced. UN agencies estimate that nearly a million and a half went clinically insane as a consequence of decades of continuous war. Those who survived lived in the most mined country in the world. Afghanistan was a brutalized society even before the American bombing began.

Afghan refugees did not flee a repressive Taliban simply to be saved by a benevolent U.S. government. The Taliban and its form of political Islam were not born in isolation. Though a product of complex domestic forces, it was also produced in encounters with Western powers during the Cold War (Mamdani 2004, p. 14) and in conjunction with 20 years of U.S. occupation.

We might also have learned from our experiences in Vietnam. Espiritu (2014) argues that the figure of the Vietnamese refugee, the purported grateful beneficiary of the U.S. gift of freedom, has been key to the (re)cuperation of American identities and the shoring up of U.S. militarism in the post-Vietnam War era. Like in Afghanistan, the suffering of Vietnamese in and outside of the country during and in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion remains “unmentionable and unmourned in most public discussions of Viêt Nam” (Espiritu et al. 2022, p. 88). Like Southeast Asian refugees who were accepted to the U.S. on humanitarian grounds in the wake of the Vietnam War, the acceptance of Afghan refugees serves to legitimize the United States as a humanitarian leader while obscuring its failures in Afghanistan (and beyond) and affirming itself as a liberal democracy (Mamdani 2004). In any case, Muncie did welcome more than 130 Afghan refugees to Muncie led not by veterans but Bibi Bahrami.

Upon learning that more than 7000 Afghans were being temporarily housed in Camp Atterbury near Indianapolis, Bibi spoke with refugee resettlement agencies in Indianapolis and representatives in the U.S. State Department. She learned that there was a need for housing and resettlement of Afghans in Indiana outside of the Indianapolis metro area, which was short on housing, resettlement staff, and volunteers. She was confident that Muncie residents would support her initiative of bringing Afghans to the city because they had been supporting her, her family, and her organization, AWAKEN, for decades. The first callout meeting for the Muncie Afghan Refugee Resettlement Committee (hereafter MARRC) brought 20 people to the Islamic Center in Muncie, including me and my then 9-year-old daughter, to discuss how to best support nearby refugees and perhaps welcome some of them to Muncie. The sense of urgency was palpable. We needed help and people in Muncie responded. People donated furniture, household items, toys, time, money, and even vehicles and homes. Volunteers worked tirelessly picking up and sorting donated items, setting up apartments, arranging appointments, and raising money. At more than one MARRC meeting, as volunteers strategized and shared stories of support for Afghan new neighbors in Muncie, someone stated, “Muncie needs this!” But what exactly did Muncie need and how could Afghans fulfill that need?

Muncie has never been an official site for refugee resettlement, and thus there was no template for such work in Muncie. As a result of the Refugee Act of 1980, refugee resettlement in the 1980s shifted from a model of primarily faith-based voluntary sponsorship of refugees to federally supported institutions with paid staff, case management, and more accountability, but they still relied heavily on volunteers (Erickson 2012). From the 1970s until 2017, annual refugee ceilings were set as high as 230,000 under President Carter and as low as 18,000 under President Trump in his first term. Because Trump set such historic lows for refugee admittance in 2020, resettlement agencies across the country were forced to lay off staff and cut services. As such, they were not prepared for the tremendous influx of Afghans and Ukrainians. Some estimate that the plummeting number of refugee arrivals during the first Trump presidency caused the permanent closure or indefinite suspension of operations of nearly a third—more than 100 out of 325—of the country’s local resettlement offices across the nation, reducing the organizational capacity of refugee resettlement agencies by 50–80%, depending on region (Franz 2025, p. 61). The Biden government made few proactive federal efforts to restore the barely functioning Refugee Resettlement Program and instead implemented programs that rested almost exclusively on private sponsors (Franz 2025, p. 62). As such, resettlement agencies needed large numbers of volunteers to help them do the most basic tasks of resettling Afghans and other refugees.

To broaden and share the work of resettlement, MARRC recruited “welcome families”, people who would sponsor an individual or family. Welcome families were tasked with supporting everyday needs of new neighbors, including grocery shopping, enrolling children in school, arranging medical appointments and transportation, paying bills, helping fill out paperwork or register new addresses at the post office, answering questions and serving as the main point of contact with institutions in the city, or taking families on social outings. I became a welcome family and witnessed how the lack of a well-established resettlement structure lent itself to grassroots infrastructure gaps and diverse approaches to serving as welcome families, which could be confusing if not frustrating to new neighbor families. Lack of training or knowledge about the diversity of Afghanistan or refugee resettlement in general sometimes also resulted in racialized expectations of refugees.

It is important here to note the diversity that exists among Afghans and volunteers in Muncie. While a majority of the Afghans who came to Muncie are Pashtuns, who speak Pashto among other languages, there are also Hazaras and Dari speakers. There is a range of education levels among men and women, some of whom have university degrees and others who have had little to no formal education before arriving in the U.S. Some Afghans are practicing Muslims, while others are not. Some lived in urban areas like Kabul, while others had spent more time in rural areas. Volunteers, too, were diverse and included university professors, doctors, stay-at-home mothers, Ball State students, and retirees from different professional fields. Some volunteers were practicing Muslims, while others were practicing Christians, and others shared no religious affiliation.

Within a year, MARRC accomplished the extraordinary feat of initiating refugee resettlement to Muncie, finding housing for at least 130 individuals and families, enrolling children in school and extracurricular activities, transporting them to doctor and dentist appointments, including surgeries and cancer treatments, driving people to grocery stores and pharmacies, finding employment, and raising more than $350,000. Additionally, a variety of ad hoc programs were created for Afghans, for example, a sewing circle for women and cricket teams for men, not to mention a diversity of relationships that have developed because of and independently from MARRC. These everyday practices, within and outside of organized activities, including the friendship between Mac and Bibi described above, and relationships between newly arrived refugees and their welcome families, show the variety of practices and relationships that are forming in the city.

Moved by the crisis in Ukraine, Muncie’s Republican Mayor briefly established an ad hoc committee to bring more refugees to the city, especially Ukrainians, but also submitted a letter of support to MARRC for its work bringing Afghans to Muncie. While this is not surprising when considering that Muncie has been faced with a declining population for 50 years, and struggling to find enough workers for its economy, it is counterintuitive in the context of the national anti-immigrant political environment. During one meeting of the ad hoc group, the major suggested he might call Republican governors who created a media spectacle by sending more than 100,000 undocumented migrants from their states to “sanctuary cities” (cities that welcome migrants) in progressive-leaning states to tell them to send the migrants to Muncie, too. The disconnect between Republican approaches to refugee resettlement at the national level and welcoming efforts at the local level reflects the complex process underway in communities such as Muncie that are striving to reinvent themselves in ways that do not fit with dominant political and media narratives. These tensions between democracy and imperialism are at play on local levels across the country. As Cornel West argues, “democracy matters require that we keep track of the intimate link between domestic issues and foreign policies” (West 2005, p. 10). It is also important to develop critical awareness of region, which means noticing when certain places and people come to stand in for the nation as a whole, even if it is by being unremarkable, pitiable, or deplorable that they do so” (Halvorson and Reno 2022, p. 163).

Donald Trump, for example, deploys the Midwest trope to support an idyllic heartland comprising whites while attacking immigrants. In a campaign speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in October 2024, then-candidate Trump accused Haitian immigrants of eating animals in Springfield, Ohio, and then promised to “liberate” the Midwest from “illegal aliens”. He also made remarks in Wilmington, North Carolina, in which he said migrants are “attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest” (Ronen and Schneider 2024). Such narratives are indicative of the kinds of policies he has enacted during his second term as President, policies that uphold white supremacy, nativism, and empire with dire consequences.

Shortly into his second term as President, Trump indefinitely suspended the U.S. refugee resettlement program, leaving tens of thousands of already-approved refugees stranded in dangerous conditions in different countries around the world. In April 2025, the administration ended the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for at least 9000 Afghans, stating that Afghanistan was now stable enough to return. In reality, returning would be a death sentence for many (Lawrence and Bowman 2025). At the same time, Trump accepted a small number of Afrikaners, white South Africans, as refugees, claiming they are facing racial genocide, which is part of a global white conspiracy theory known as “The Great Replacement Theory”, that has European and American versions. The European version centers on the belief in a Muslim takeover, though it is also linked to nationalism and the ideal of racial purity within the nation-state. The U.S. version centers more on race, the replacement of white Americans by non-white immigrants and minorities in general, not just Muslims (Anti-Defamation League 2021). Such differential treatment of refugees and immigrants based on race, class, and religion is part of the longer history of the U.S. predicated on settler colonialism, white supremacy, racial capitalism, and other structural inequalities that the U.S. has never fully addressed (Dunbar-Ortiz 2021).

6. Conclusions

Refugees from Afghanistan are here because our military was there. Just as Afghanistan has changed as a result of U.S. imperialism, so too have Muncie and other resettlement sites changed because of Afghan refugees, the effects of which continue to play out in schools, medical clinics, sites of employment, immigration offices, homes, and public spaces. Refugee resettlement in Muncie points to the often-hidden ways in which the cultural logics of regionalism link empire, nation, and race. Focusing on the local level can elucidate how dominant cultural narratives are (re)told and how ideologies are practiced, including the variety of ways that local actors challenge and support U.S. empire and white supremacy through refugee resettlement.

I showed, for example, that U.S. veteran Mac McKinney nearly bombed the Muncie Islamic Center, hoping to kill hundreds of people, until he actually met the people he planned to kill. The film “Strangers at the Gate” explains that his desire to kill was related to his serving in the U.S. military in Afghanistan. His encounter with Muslims face-to-face rather than through the barrel of a gun not only ended his plans of killing but also facilitated his conversion to Islam and critiques of U.S. militarism. Interactions between refugees like Bibi and native-born U.S. citizens like Mac multiplied in new ways when Bibi led efforts to resettle a diverse group of Afghans to Muncie in 2021. Different iterations of imperial entanglements can be seen across the Midwest.

Refugee resettlement, and migration more broadly, are products of global social, economic, and political patterns, but also local struggles and negotiations. As an imperial nation-state, any given location can be a site of investigation into the reach of U.S. empire. Studies of empire must find balance between the universalizing expressions of imperial rule like nativism and white supremacy and cultural specificities in how they play out at the local level. For example, Muncie’s Republican Mayor has not espoused the kinds of anti-refugee rhetoric that Republicans at the national level espouse. Studies of empire must also address strategies for challenging and strategies for maintaining control of U.S. empire, for example, by investigating local racialized hierarchies and religious preferences, and call attention to doubts about the legitimacy of the venture. Writing against empire means challenging dangerous ideologies like nativism and white supremacy at the local level in order to influence everyday practices into being more accepting of refugees and immigrants and to influence policies that protect them.