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Captive Minds, Coloniality and International Relations
Ever since Stanley Hoffman1 exposed International Relations as a hegemonized discipline, there has been a growing trend among International Relations scholars to unveil the knowledge and power structures which sustain the hegemony of the West in knowledge production...
Reading Between the Lines: The Devil is in the Interpretation
“…now is not the moment to blame the victim,” writes Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Steven Tian, and Dan Raviv in Time Magazine1 while defending the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has made Gaza the world’s largest ‘open-air prison’2 and killed thousands of...
‘Eurocentrism’ in the Field of International Relations (IR)
The field of International Relations (IR) adopts a ‘Eurocentric’ gaze in envisioning world politics. With Eurocentric biases contaminating IR, the discipline is identified as being parochial and not representative of the non-Western realities. Various scholars from...
Power and Consent: Interpreting Gramsci’s Multidimensional Nature of Hegemony
Just as a captain cannot steer a ship without the crew's cooperation, rulers cannot exercise power without the consent of the governed or as Parker contends: Dominant groups in society, including fundamentally but not exclusively the ruling class, maintain their...
‘Decolonizing’ higher education in Pakistan: If not now, when?
A body of discourse is emerging on the practice of ‘decolonization’ within education and the larger social sciences. Putting it plainly, decolonization means “the undoing of colonialism.”1 Decolonization signifies a range of positions that argue that despite former...
“The rest of the world – and you know this very well, Federica – is not exactly a garden”: The West, the ‘Rest’ and the Tale of Forgotten Colonialism
Antique photograph of the British Empire: Annexation of the territory of the king of AdoBeginning with uncivilized and barbarians and then moving to failed states; fragile states; failing states; and rogues states, Ladies and gentlemen we have now arrived to the...
The Use of Human Shields in Contemporary Armed Conflicts
The 21st century has brought about multiple problems for democracies engaged in armed conflicts. One such major problem that has caught the attention of international humanitarian watchdogs is the use of civilians as human shields during hostilities. Despite existing...
Re-Thinking FATF and its Widening Mandate
The 21st-century interstate conflict has taken a shift from conventional kinetic warfare towards other means, one being the use of legal warfare, to achieve similar strategic state interests. The international legal establishment influenced by global powers has taken...
Russia-Ukraine War from a Global South Perspective: Unveiling Western Hypocrisy
I am writing to draw attention to the Western hypocrisy that is in full display following the developments taking place in Ukraine. On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a "military operation" in eastern Ukraine in a televised speech.1 The...
Security Discourses in Pakistan: Exploring the Marginalization of Non-Traditional Security in Pakistani Think Tanks
In the security discourse of Pakistan, the idea of non-traditional security has slowly but gradually gained traction. Even though the discussions on non-traditional security issues were not wholly absent before, it is the present government of Pakistan, led by Prime...
Essays
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
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...
Indian Cruise Missile Misadventure: Malfunction or Malafide Intentions?
Introduction The launching of the Brahmos cruise missile into Pakistan’s territory from India serves as a reminder for renewed threats to strategic stability in South Asia and points towards nuclear risks associated with Indian nuclear program. On March 9, an Indian...
Working Paper Series
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