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M Auwn Gurmani

It was late September 2018 when I along with some friends travelled from Lahore to Taunsa Barrage to attend the Sindh Saghar Sath (Indus People’s Tribunal) organised by Sindhu Bachao Tarla (Save Indus Plea), which is a small organisation of local fisherfolk..

Two Essays on Urbanisation in Pakistan

Reza Ali

In transitional societies, urbanisation and its key characteristics are major determinants of the political process. Independence, historically significant areas of poverty and social deprivation with their societal structures and explicit economic policies adopted by governments have contributed to the shaping of the urban systems and hierarchies in Pakistan..

Abdul Khalique Junejo

I started the journey of my life in the 1950s hearing the mantra: “Pakistan faces an existential threat.” As I grew older, this sound bite became more vociferous. Now when my grandchildren are in school, the phrase is still in vogue with even more ferocity..

Full Circle

Pakistan is no stranger to military domination. The country has seen four military coups since independence in 1958, 1969, 1977 and 1999. Almost half of the country’s existence since independence in 1947 has been spent under martial laws and military dictatorships..

Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur

On January 20, 2018, five days after the Voice of Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) reportedly agreed to suspend their protest for the recovery of missing persons for two months, a newspaper gave the good news: “Around a dozen people missing for many years reached..

Rashed Rahman

In a by now familiar rerun of the kind of creeping coups used by the US-led west in recent years to wring regime change in countries where the government does not kow tow to Washington’s hegemony, the left wing government of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela is..

Rashed Rahman

Ten left-wing parties and groups met in Lahore on December 29, 2017 and decided to work together towards a new united Left platform. After a debate during the meeting, in which two points of view emerged regarding the project of pooling their resources to ..

Mohammad Waseem

Underlying Pakistan’s three experiments with a federal arrangement in the form of the 1956, 1962 and 1973 Constitutions, there has been a persistent concern about constraining the numerical majority of the largest province, first East Bengal and later Punjab..

Rashed Rahman

The year 2017 marked the hundredth anniversary of the Russian communist revolution of October 1917. The hundred years in between have been the most violent in human history. The explanation for this phenomenon is incomplete without a recognition of the..