Constructing ‘Pakistan’ through Knowledge Production in International Relations and Area Studies
Pakistan is a failed state. It’s a fragile state; a failing state; a rogue state; a client state; a garrison state; an insecure state and a greedy state, to name just some of the many representations and categorizations that have been used to try and codify Pakistan’s behavior in international politics. To better comprehend this, let us take the issue of Pakistan’s state failure. The rhetoric of Pakistan’s state failure has remained strong in US policy circles. In 2008, Senior US Congressman Frank Pallone declared that “Pakistan is essentially a failed state. I do not believe the central government controls most of the territory of the country”.1 David Kilcullen, special advisor for counter-insurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, predicted in 2009 that ‘Pakistan may fail within six months’.2 President Obama in a public speech “described Pakistan as “fragile”’.3 Congressman Rohrabacher, who was the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, in a 2012 letter to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, wrote that, “it has become increasingly clear to members of the US Congress that Pakistan is a failed state and no amount of US aid money will ever change that”.4 Just one year later in 2013, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, discussing the threats facing Pakistan reiterated his stance that “Pakistan is in a state of institutional failure. It’s not a failed state, but you could argue it is a failing state”.5 More recently, Daniel Markey, who held the South Asia portfolio on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the US Department of State (2003-07) predicted that even though Pakistan “is a failing state in many ways […] it could fail in ways that are far worse than at present”.6 These ‘truths’ about Pakistan has sanctioned consequent scenarios that herald an ominous doomsday. For instance, Cohen argues that “the failure of Pakistan would be a multidimensional geostrategic calamity, generating enormous uncertainties in a world that craves order and predictability”.7 Similarly, Root believes that “Pakistan, in short, is a failing state with an arsenal of nuclear weapons and a dedicated core of Muslim fundamentalists. The consequences for all of us could be dreadful, indeed”.8 The most likely possible dangers of Pakistan’s state failure would be: “a complete collapse of Pakistani government rule that allows an extreme Islamist movement to fill the vacuum; a total loss of federal control over outlying provinces, which splinter along ethnic and tribal lines; or a struggle within the Pakistani military in which the minority sympathetic to the Taliban and Al Qaeda try to establish Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism”.9 These assertions encapsulate the gist of the dominant political discourse on Pakistan’s state failure.
Many American foreign policy-makers have been vocal about the problematic nature of Pakistan’s identity, but policy-makers, by the nature of their commitments, rarely have detailed knowledge about the issues that confront them. They therefore resort to relying upon different sources ranging from advisors to academic experts, to establish a representational framing of the policy to be adopted. For instance, how would it have been possible to speak of state failure had the concept not been first introduced in Foreign Policy magazine, still one of the widely read sources on International Relations?10 In that sense then, the construction of Pakistan’s multi-dimensional identity is a representation; hence is discursive, political, relational, and social rather than ‘true’, ‘real’ or ‘objective’. Consequently, to speak of identity as discursive and political is to argue that “representations of identity place foreign policy issues within a particular interpretative optic, one with consequences for which foreign policy can be formulated as an adequate response”.11 While foreign policy-makers play a vital role in the production and reproduction of representational identities,12 the concerns of this research revolve around the sources from which foreign policy-makers draw their representations, which are again based on representations articulated by a larger number of individuals and institutions. This book consequently turns toward the field of International Relations to explore how representational identities are constructed and produced within the field and made cogent for policy-makers.
The negative understanding of Pakistan continues to dominate discourse, despite various challenges to the typological categorization of Third World States, and by extension Pakistan,13 on the grounds that such categorizations are either useless 14 or neo-colonial.15 However, many of the insights offered by the critics of the dominant discourse on categorizing states are either ignored or overlooked in International Relations literature, thereby naturalizing quite unabatedly a specific interpretation of Third World states (and again, by extension, Pakistan). A similar ontological and epistemological debate between other mainstream positions on Pakistan and their critics ensues. It is through knowledge that a specific identity of Pakistan is constructed and a meaning assigned to it.16 For instance Shaikh’s monograph, entitled ‘Making Sense of Pakistan’, readily affixes an identity to the Pakistani state and its people as a contortion that does not make sense. Similarly, before even beginning to examine the Pakistani state, Ziring establishes from the outset Pakistan’s identity in his exposition entitled ‘Weak State, Failed State, Garrison State: The Pakistan Saga’. Another example is Gregory’s work, ‘Pakistan’s Security: The Insecure State’. The representational practices produced within academic discourse through naturalization and categorization have imbued Pakistan with an identity created through an imposition of interpretation rather than being, as Campbell puts, “the product of uncovering an exclusive domain with its own pre-established identity”.17
How are we to approach these ostensibly different articulations which aspire to affix a certain meaning to Pakistan? The profusion of the literature on the ‘perverse reality’ has, considering Pakistan’s often cited geostrategic importance to western interests in the region, given rise to questions about the status and the nature of the Pakistani state, with scholars indulging in extensive inquiries seeking to answer questions such as ‘what is Pakistan?’ and ‘why is it the way it is?’. Within the International Relations literature purporting to understand Pakistan’s reality, there is a propensity to intellectually secure Pakistan within a resolute system of ontological ‘truths’. Scholarship seeking to unravel the supposed intricacies of Pakistan’s ostensibly amorphous identity usually tends: first, to focus on the Pakistani military, its link with extremism inspired militancy and its role in the democratic processes of the state;18 secondly, to pursue a research agenda centering on exploring the Pakistani ‘nation’;19 lastly, to explore Pakistan’s place in the world specifically through the prism of its relations with the US, India and China.20
These debates then depend on, produce and reproduce knowledge on Pakistan which consequently generates Pakistan’s ‘reality’. In essence then, Pakistan is what we know about it. Considering that knowledge does not exist independently of our theories, concepts, ideas and language, the ‘reality’ of Pakistan does not exist outside our appropriations and interpretations. This does not however mean that Pakistan does not exist independently of our thoughts and ideas. What it means is that the world “cannot be accessed, understood or rendered meaningful in the absence of speech and interpretation and […] reality therefore ceases to constitute an already given empirical referent which knowledge and truth must correspond and refer to.”21 Thus the argument here is not that Pakistan lacks materiality, but that we can only know Pakistan through discourse.22 This leads us to ask a different set of questions such as: how is Pakistan produced, reproduced and articulated to form the body of knowledge in International Relations through which we have come to know it? How is Pakistan spoken of and how is it constructed? By exploring these questions we necessarily turn our gaze away from Pakistan and towards the discourse that produces Pakistan, and in doing so shift focus from the question of being to the question of becoming. This question is the focus of this study. What is not attempted here is to trace historically how Pakistan has been defined, explained or understood by various interpretive communities (such as International relations scholars, Area Studies specialists and think tank experts) and then to supplant these understandings with our version of what Pakistan is. Nor does this study attempt to counter arguments on Pakistan by sifting through arguments to determine which hold more veracity and usefulness and which are poorly equipped to understand Pakistan. Instead this study investigates another question. How is the meaning of Pakistan fixed or stabilized via practices of interpretive communities? In other words our fundamental research question is: how is the ‘truth’ on Pakistan produced, and how is this truth represented, fixed and stabilized through the writings on Pakistan? What are the conditions under which it is possible to make authoritative claims about Pakistan?
About the Author
Dr. Ahmed Waqas Waheed
The author is the Executive Director of Roads Initiative.
This excerpt is part of Constructing ‘Pakistan’ through Knowledge Production in International Relations and Area Studies, a monograph published by Palgrave Macmillan and is available at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-15-0742-7
1 L Jha, “Pakistan a Failed State: Frank Pallone,” Hindustan Times, 2008, http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/pakistan-a-failed-state-frank-pallone/article1-356611.aspx.
2 A Gupta, Is Pakistan a Failing State?, Policy Brief (Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, 2009), http://www.idsa.in/idsastrategiccomments/IsPakistanaFailingState_AGupta_160609.
3 Gupta.
4 H Imtiaz, “Pen Friends: Rohrabacher Writes Letter to Gilani, Calls Pakistan a ‘Failed State,’” Express Tribune, 2012, http://tribune.com.pk/story/373354/pen-friends-rohrabacher-writes-letter-to-gilani-calls-pakistan-a-failed-state/.
5 J Morrison, “Embassy Row: ‘A Failing State,’” Washington Times, 2013, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/4/embassy-row-afailing-state/?page=all.
6 D Markey, No Exit from Pakistan: America’s Tortured Relationship with Pakistan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 10.
7 S Cohen, “The Nation and the State of Pakistan,” The Washington Quarterly 25, no. 3 (2002): 118.
8 H Root, “Pakistan: The Political Economy of State Failure,” The Milken Institute Review 7, no. 2 (2005): 74.
9 F.W Kagan and M O’Hanlon, “Pakistan’s Collapse, Our Problem,” New York Times, November 18, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18kagan.html?pagewanted=print.
10 Both authors Gerald B. Helman and Steve R. Ratner are now academics at the University of Michigan.
11 Lene Hansen, Security as Practice : Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (Routledge, 2006): 7.
12 A seminal work in this regard is David Campbell’s exposition on US Foreign Policy in David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
13 Roxanne Lynn. Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Mineapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Pinar Bilgin and Adam D. Morton, “Historicising Representations of ‘Failed States’: Beyond the Cold-War Annexation of the Historicising Representations of ‘Failed States’: Beyond the Cold-War Annexation of the Social Sciences?,” Third World Quarterly 23, no. 1 (2002): 55–80, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3993576.
14For instance see J Logan and C Preble, “Fixing Failed States: A Dissenting View,” in The Handbook on the Political Economy of War, ed. C Coyne and R Mathers (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011), 379–96; R Wilde, “The Skewed Responsibility Narrative of the Failed States Concept,” ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law 9 (2003): 425–29; Anna Simons and David Tucker, “The Misleading Problem of Failed States : A ‘ Socio-Geography ’ of Terrorism in the Post-9 / 11 Era,” Third World Quarterly 28, no. 2 (2007): 387–401, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436590601153887; A Hehir, “The Myth of the Failed State and the War on Terror : A Challenge to the Conventional Wisdom,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 1, no. 3 (2007): 307–32, https://doi.org/10.1080/17502970701592256.
15See R Gordon, “Saving Failed States: Sometimes a Neocolonialist Notion,” American University International Law Review 12, no. 6 (1997): 903–74; Branwen Gruffydd Jones, “The Global Political Economy of Social Crisis: Towards a Critique of the ‘Failed State’ Ideology,” Review of International Political Economy 15, no. 2 (April 16, 2008): 180–205, https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290701869688.
16 Farzana. Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan. (Oxford Univ Press, 2012); L Ziring, “Weak State, Failed State, Garrison State: The Pakistan Saga,” in South Asia’s Weak States: Understanding the Regional Insecurity Predicament, ed. T Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 170–95; Shaun Gregory, Pakistan’s Security : The Insecure State (Routledge, 2007). Some others instances are A Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (New York: Public Affairs, 2011); Ishtiaq Ahmed, Pakistan the Garrison State : Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011) (Oxford University Press, 2013); B. Riedel, “Pakistan and Terror: The Eye of the Storm,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 618, no. 1 (July 1, 2008): 31–45, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716208316746; I Kfir, “The Crisis in Pakistan: A Dangerously Weak State,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 11, no. 3 (2007): 75–88.
17 David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 1992): 24.
18 See for instance, A Siddiqa, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2007); C Fair, “Pakistan’s Democracy: The Army’s Quarry?,” Asian Security 5, no. 1 (2009): 73–85, https://doi.org/10.1080/14799850802611552; Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha, Pakistan’s Arms Procurement and Military Build-Up 1979-99: In Search of a Policy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End : The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Riedel, “Pakistan and Terror: The Eye of the Storm”; S Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ahmed, Pakistan the Garrison State : Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011); Aqil Shah, “Getting the Military Out of Pakistani Politics : How Aiding the Army Undermines Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 3 (2011).
19 Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan.; D Kux, Pakistan: Flawed Not Failed State (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 2001); Ishtiaq Ahmed, “Pakistan’s National Identity,” International Review of Modern Sociology International Review of Modem Sociology 34, no. 1 (2008): 47–59, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41421657; B C Upreti, “Nationalism in South Asia: Trends and Interpretations,” Source: The Indian Journal of Political Science The Indian Journal of Political Science 67, no. 3 (2006): 535–44, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41856240; Cohen, “The Nation and the State of Pakistan”; Sumit Ganguly, “Pakistan: Neither State Nor Nation,” in Multination States in Asia: Accommodation or Resistance, ed. Jacques Bertrand and André Laliberté (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 309; Christophe. Jaffrelot, Pakistan : Nationalism without a Nation? (London: Zed Books, 2002).
20 Harsh V. Pant, “The Pakistan Thorn in China—India—U.S. Relations,” The Washington Quarterly 35, no. 1 (2012): 83–95; M. Beckley, “China and Pakistan: Fair-Weather Friends,” Yale Journal of International Affairs 8, no. 1 (2012): 9–22; M. Kugelman, “Can China Deliver in Pakistan?,” World Politics Review, 2009, http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/4733/can-china-deliver-in-pakistan. Ahmed Waheed, “Pakistan’s Dependence and US Patronage: The Politics of ‘Limited Influence,’” Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs 4, no. 1 (2017): 1–26; Ahmed Waheed, The Wrong Ally: Pakistan’s State Sovereignty under US Dependence (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018); Salamat Ali Tabbasum, “Political Economy of US Aid to Pakistan: Democratization or Militarization?” 1, no. 1 (2013): 22–31; Teresita C Schaffer, “US Influence on Pakistan: Can Partners Have Divergent Priorities?,” The Washington Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2002): 169–83; C Cohen and D Chollet, “When $ 10 Billion Is Not Enough : Rethinking US Strategy toward Pakistan,” The Washington Quarterly 30, no. 2 (2007): 7–19; C Cohen, A Perilous Course: US Strategy and Assistance to Pakistan (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007); A Rashid, Descent Into Chaos: The World’s Most Unstable Region and the Threat to Global Security (London: Penguin, 2009); Robert M. Hathaway, “Leverage and Largesse: Pakistan’s Post-9/11 Partnership with America*,” Contemporary South Asia 16, no. 1 (March 6, 2008): 11–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/09584930701800362; C. Christine Fair et al., Pakistan: Can the United States Secure an Insecure State? (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2010); P Miller, “How to Exercise U.S. Leverage Over Pakistan,” The Washington Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2012): 37–52, http://csis.org/publication/twq-how-exercise-us-leverage-over-pakistan-fall-2012.
21 Helle Malmvig, State Sovereignty and Intervention : A Discourse Analysis of Interventionary and Non-Interventionary Practices in Kosovo and Algeria (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2.
22 In the Pakistani context, few studies have sought to explore how we know what we know, but invariably barring a few exceptions such as Nizamani’s work in Haider K. Nizamani, The Roots of Rhetoric : Politics of Nuclear Weapons in India and Pakistan (Praeger, 2000)., most have looked inwardly at the production of knowledge. Almost all though have either analyzed discourse through an analysis of media content, and statements of policy-makers and experts in the media.