In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, one of the foci of public anxiety was the means by which terrorist networks distribute funds to operational cells. Media attention zeroed in on the informal banking system known as hawala, which allows groups and individuals to move money across borders outside the control of states and international regulatory agencies. Early on, Bush administration officials spoke confidently of breaking hawala networks, but as time has progressed, such talk quieted down, perhaps to avoid compromising ongoing intelligence operations, but more likely because policymakers came to recognize the difficulty of disrupting, much less destroying, the hawala system. In his book War and Migration: Social Networks and Economic Strategies of the Hazaras of Afghanistan, Alessandro Monsutti provides an in-depth, ground level look at the hawala system, not as an operational tool of terrorists, but as a means of coping and – in some cases – surviving for poor Afghan Hazaras living in Pakistan and Iran. The discussion of hawala is one highlight of Monsutti’s skillful ethnography of the farflung networks Hazara refugees and migrants have maintained as they have sought security and employment far from their homeland in the barren central highlands of Afghanistan.

Monsutti conducted fieldwork in Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan between 1993 and 2001. This was a tumultuous period in Afghan history, bracketed by the final collapse of the communist government in 1992 and the American invasion at the end of 2001. The focus of War and Migration is the stories and experiences of a handful of Hazara men from different villages in Ghazni Province, whom Monsutti originally encountered in Pakistan and Iran, and with whom he later traveled to Afghanistan. In Monsutti’s view, “migration is a dynamic process that leads to complex adjustments… not a simple act of going somewhere followed by integration or assimilation in the host country or return to the country of origin.” (2005: 30) For the Hazaras, migration is a constant rather than an anomalous element in their society that antedates the political crises of the last three decades.

For all their openness to transience, recent anthropological exercises in “multi-sited” ethnography still maintain the traditional anthropological focus on place and community, even if the number of sites of study has expanded. As Monsutti indicates, however, mobility has been the constant for Hazaras for generations, and the principal question he poses is how Hazaras create and reproduce relations of solidarity in conditions of insecurity and transience. In elaborating his response, Monsutti relates his work to the theoretical arguments developed by Hannerz and others on “network” societies. What matters to Monsutti is less the sites where people reside than the ways in which networks of mutual assistance arise among members of transient populations.

In Monsutti’s view, the central problematic in Hazara society is “the quest for trust” (2005: 30), and central to this quest is the institution of hawala, which allows individuals not merely to transfer funds, but more fundamentally, to weave social networks that connect individuals in webs of significance and reciprocity that provide flexible but enduring bulwarks against the uncertainties of conflict and dislocation. Hawala transfers have more in common with “gifts” in the Maussian sense than with free market bank exchanges. Like Mauss’s “gift,” these transfers are “total social facts” binding workers, intermediaries, moneychangers, shopkeepers, and families back home in moral as well as economic relationships that pay little cognizance to borders or governments, even while they obey a more binding law of reciprocity and moral obligation.

The chapter on money transfers will be the most interesting for many readers, given the political saliency of the institution, and Monsutti provides a level of personal and empirical detail that has been missing in most journalistic descriptions of hawala. The transfers Monsutti tracks are simple exchanges involving relatively small amounts of cash, but the complexity of even these straightforward transactions gives evidence of why it has proven so difficult for law enforcement officers to break hawala networks employed by terrorist networks. For all his illuminating detail, however, Monsutti’s focus is ultimately not on the transactions per se, but on the social and moral role they play in the lives of Hazara refugee/migrants.

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