ABSTRACT
Guided by Turner’s theory of liminality, this chapter explores how Afghan refugees in Islamabad use informal cricket and football (soccer) grounds as spaces of belonging and self-expression within the constraints of displacement. In contrast to the uncertain timelines of waiting in refugee life, the structured temporalities of clearly codified rules governing both cricket and football offer participants an alternative sense of order and duration. Furthermore, the pitch or field becomes a corridor that enables participants to step out of ethnic stratifications into a provisional community of rule-bound equals. These improvised sporting arenas act as temporary civic spaces where marginalized players momentarily experience fairness, agency, and recognition. The sporting games thereby do more than provide recreation; they represent small but meaningful acts of urban participation in a city designed to exclude them. The concept of Threshold Play is introduced as a mode of social creativity/adaptation through which marginalized communities reimagine fragments of the city as provisional democracies of movement, belonging, and shared agency. Within these improvised arenas, the choreography of play converts exclusion into participation, producing ephemeral publics bound not by citizenship but by acts of sport participation.
