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Crisis of Pakistan’s state and society

That Pakistan has been in the throes of a crisis of state and society has become a commonplace over the years. This crisis may manifest itself in different ways at different times and affect different people, classes, communities, religious minorities, women, etc,..

Saulat Nagi

The generalised tendency prevalent in the world shows a dominant shift to the right. This is happening when neither any revolution is in sight nor any movement based on a ‘great refusal’ is threatening the status quo anywhere in the world. The lack of a revolutionary movement is where..

Dr. Qaisar Abbas

Challenging the conventional wisdom, this article argues that colonialism never left South Asia as it transformed itself into internal colonialism after independence. Strong shadows of British colonialism can still be seen in the colonial legacies of legal..

Rebuilding the Left

May Day 2019 came and went this year with the usual labour rallies throughout the country. However, as has been the case for several years now, the rallies were relatively small (especially when compared to the mammoth rallies of the working class..

Rashed Rahman

Global capitalist imperialism has transformed its production structures/systems in such radical ways today that much of the earlier analyses relying on an examination of the aggregation of separate national economies and the trade and capital flows between them ..

Dr. Nicolas Martin

Akhtar, Aasim Sajjad. The Politics of Common Sense: State, Society and Culture in Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Dr Akhtar’s new book on Pakistan is an ambitious and ultimately a pessimistic one. Its central argument is that ever since Ziaul Haq, the Pakistani public sphere has been mostly devoid of any socially progressive impulses. Collective action, and class-based collective..

Precarious straits

Pakistan has suffered throughout its existence from ‘experiments’ foisted on the polity. The common thrust of these ‘experiments’ was to prevent the emergence and consolidation of, at a minimum, a democratic state and society..

Reza Ali

In our article How Urban is Pakistan published in 1999, we analysed the preliminary results of the 1998 census, particularly regarding urban population. We noted that city populations were higher than what official data was prepared to reflect, pointing to the issue of definition..

Babar Ayaz

The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) government came into power riding the high horse of an anti-corruption campaign and gave the impression that once they are in the government, they would offer solutions to all the problems, including the economic situation..

Dr. Saulat Nagi

Eric Hobsbawm, one of the greatest Marxist historians, described the crash of 2008 as a “sort of right-wing equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall” (Seumas Milne: The Revenge Of History). The crash, according to Joseph Stiglitz, forced the capitalist cat to clamber up a tree and..