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Surveillance Without Sovereignty: Colonial Afterlives and the Digital State in Pakistan
Pakistan’s adoption of digital surveillance technologies, from biometric identity systems to cybercrime laws, is often portrayed as a sign of modern state capacity, but it reveals something far more unsettling: the erosion of sovereignty and legitimacy in the digital...
The Trajectory of Terrorism: A Case Study of Pakistan
Terrorism in Pakistan has been the result of decades of its complex history, change in its alliances and majorly the influence of external forces intervening deeply into the country that had a significant impact on shaping its political, social and economic...
Escalation Without Exit: The Crisis Diplomacy Void in India–Pakistan Relations
It is evident from world history that, more often than not, diplomatic breakthroughs leading to lasting peace have occurred in the aftermath of wars. However, in the case of India and Pakistan, despite fighting three major wars (1948, 1965, and 1971), as well as...
The Nation-State Paradox: Unpacking the Discourse of Nationalism in Pakistan
Nationalism in Pakistan cannot be understood through the traditional lens of Western state formation. Unlike European nation-states, which evolved from shared language, ethnicity, and territory, Pakistan emerged in 1947 as an ideological state. Islam, rather than...
Decoloniality and AI
Technology and geopolitics are inextricably linked, reshaping the global balance of power and existing inequalities. It suggests that technological breakthroughs also shape the socio-political and economic realities of the Global South in ways that are reminiscent of...
Elite Capture & Colonial Shadows: Rethinking Public Policy in Pakistan
In Pakistan, the shaping of public policy goes beyond administrative or developmental considerations; it is heavily influenced by remnants of colonialism and a persistent reliance on Western paradigms. Discussions on elite dominance often centers around economic or...
Locating Colonialism, Imperialism and Coloniality in Post-Colonial Pakistan
Imperialism derived from the Latin word “Imperium” meaning “power”, is often understood in terms of exercising power, acquisition, and control by one state or territory over other states or territories. It is a systematic formative study of the making and maintenance...
Colonial Legacies: Inherited Structures constrain Women’s Mobility, Economic Power, and Access to Rights
Exploitative governance structures and cultural impositions left by colonial powers have detrimentally impacted postcolonial societies. Women, in particular, have been disproportionately affected by these legacies through restrictive gender roles, limited economic...
Surveillance as a Tool of Control: The Panopticon in Occupied Palestine
Israeli state terrorism and settler colonial political practices are tools of control and dispossession in occupied Palestine. Through violence, surveillance, and legal architecture, the Israeli state seeks to control and subordinate Palestinians, simultaneously...
Reshaping Global South Feminism in International Relations
International relations (IR) have long been shaped by Western-centric perspectives, often sidelining the lived experiences of the Global South. Specifically, the situation of women in the postcolonial world does not enter the mainstream feminist debates very...
Essays
Decolonizing (applied) linguistics in Pakistan
There is a growing tendency globally that suggests decolonizing the social sciences by disrupting colonial legacies. It is argued that the social sciences, including the field of linguistics, are heavily influenced by Eurocentric Enlightenment thinking.1 In the words...
On White Ignorance and being a security problem
What happens… when the researched become the researchers?1 W. E.B. Du Bois, in his celebrated work ‘The Souls of Black Folk’, articulates a question that persists between him and the other world, ‘how does it feel to be a problem?’ The question elucidates the...
Hegemony of Media Misrepresentation: New York Times’ Representation of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
The media does not operate in a vacuum from social, cultural, and political contexts. Its visualizations, texts, and reporting cannot be considered an isolated activity.1 Journalists are social actors who frequently negotiate and respond to a variety of political,...
Western hegemonic discourse on ‘Pakistan’ and the absence of counter-discourse from Pakistan: An introspective study
Disciplines entail power relations. In the discipline of International Relations, power, which is exercised in the form of ‘epistemic privilege’ by the West, ensures that only the West’s self-centered imaginaries of domination over the ‘rest’ are served.1 The...
The Intellectual Market is Rigged: Militarized Knowledge and the US Elite Think-Tank Network
Readers interested in global politics can be divided into two categories: those who are generally interested in the affairs of the world and want to keep themselves current with emerging geopolitical developments and then those who have more defined specific research...
A Critical Security Studies approach to Regional Security: SAARC during COVID 19 Crisis
Abstract Due to the global and transverse dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic, the human security approach has found relevance in the policy corridors and prompted interest in regional cooperation. The growing consideration of the human security paradigm is a welcome...
Institutionalizing Women in Peace and Security within Pakistan: Challenges and Prospects
All societies recovering from conflicts or natural disasters face adverse long-term effects. The process of rehabilitation and rebuilding society from scratch holds multiple obstacles. However, the experience and the process of recovery are not particularly the same...
Narratives, Information Disorder and Strategic Communication: The Case of EU Disinfo Lab and Pakistan’s Policy Response
A narrative is a story, a story that resonates with people. We identify with the stories that are contextualized in some sort of believability and relevance. The more the stories are embedded in our frame of reference, the more we find them acceptable, tolerable,...
The Non-Traditional Security Threat of Climate Change in South Asia
The new security agenda that emerged towards the end of the Cold War allowed a reconfiguration of the concept of security. There was a shift from traditional to non-traditional security dimensions. This approach shifts away from the state-level perspective in...
Reorienting Pakistan’s Foreign Policy: From Multilateralism to Bilateralism
Pakistan’s threat perception has overshadowed its foreign policy. Since independence, Pakistan has adopted a security-centric foreign policy.1 Another feature of its foreign policy has been the fixation on multilateral diplomacy. This preference for multilateral...
Expert Commentary
Spectre of Formal American Empire – All Vengeance, No Vision
The specter of a formal American Empire of Might Makes Right—an idea many mistakenly believed long dead—has reemerged with a vengeance after Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025. The reckless and dangerous force driving US power today is its revival of...
America in Crisis: Will there be a peaceful transfer of power?
The United States enters 2024 with a deep sense of foreboding. As Republican primaries loom to find their nominee for the November presidential election, US politics hits new lows. Donald Trump’s CV plumbs new depths as several states are contemplating barring him...
Mobilising Knowledge for Power, to Obscure Where it Lies and How it Works – It’s What American Universities, Foundations and the State, Do
Emily Hauptmann, Foundations and American Political Science: The transformation of a discipline, 1945-1970 (University press of Kansas, 2022) It is almost banal to say that “knowledge is power” and yet, even then, miss the woods for the trees. Most of us tend to think...
“Who Won the Iraq War? Twenty Years On, Iran, China and Russia boosted while US loses ground in the region”
Introduction The twentieth anniversary of American-led aggression in Iraq generated a Great Debate around what was achieved, squandered, and why the US intervened in the first place. This particular anniversary of a crime against peace is especially poignant because...
Poly Crisis or Organic Crisis? The Crisis of the United States and the US-Led World Order
(Lightly edited transcript of an Inaugural Lecture by Professor Inderjeet Parmar, City, University of London, to the students and faculty of the Department of International Relations, PUC Minas, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 13 April 2023) It's a pleasure and an honour to...
One Year of War, More to Come: Rooted in Global Crisis of Imperial Power Politics
One year on, the ‘Ukraine war’ – aka Russia’s illegal aggression amid a strategy of US/NATO expansionism, over a state that voluntarily relinquished its weapons of mass destruction moving closer to the EU and NATO - shows few if any signs of abating. It has featured...
Endless War, Elite Propaganda, and Mass Fear: Drivers of American Imperial Power
Book Review: Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2021)The veteran national security reporter Seymour Hersh recently published an article strongly indicating...
Fascism and Far Right Extremism is Mainstream, Systemic, and Protected by Establishment Liberals
The recent attack by supporters of Jair Bolsonaro on Brazil’s legislative, presidential and supreme court buildings, while city police largely looked on, has been analysed as the work of Bolsonaro alone, as a threat that’s largely been dealt with by the authorities,...
Colonial Undertones of Western Nonproliferation Discourse about Pakistan
Following the end of World War II, nuclear proliferation was characterized as the biggest security challenge to international peace and security by Western states (predominately the United States). The discourse on nuclear proliferation has several strands, and it...
War in Ukraine and Law of War
During the post-World War II era, states in general, abstained from resorting to the use of violent force in resolving their bilateral disputes. The relative decline of inter-state wars in past seventy-odd years stands out as one marker of adherence of states to this...
Working Paper Series
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