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Origins and challenges of the pandemic and a post-coronavirus world

The current COVID-19 illness gripping the world is caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the second severe acute respiratory syndrome virus to emerge since 2002 (the first was the SARS epidemic). As a result of its rapid spread..

Prof Tariq Rahman

Zakaria, Anam., 1971: A People’s History from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. 393pp., Penguin Random House 2019

Anam Zakaria is the author of two books: Footprints of Partition (2011) and Between the Great Divide (2018). Both are oral histories based for the most part on oral narratives. This is her third book in this genre and by far the most difficult to write for reasons which will emerge in this review..

Lucien Gauthier

The headline of the business daily Les Echos expresses alarm at the fall of the stock markets and the general crisis of the production system. It is not the Coronavirus that is provoking the economic crisis, but it is a revealing and accelerating factor..

Death of imagination
Rashed Rahman

Husain Haqqani: Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State, Harper Collins, India, 2018

Husain Haqqani is no stranger to Pakistani (or global) audiences. Student leader, journalist, political activist/operator, Ambassador, author, he has worn many hats in his life. Currently he has chosen to live in self-imposed exile in the US in the wake of the Memogate case that eventually, for all its sensationalist hype, ended as a damp squib.

Professor Dr. Maqsudul Hasan Nuri

As an umbrella term, ‘national security’ encompasses many dimensions. Hence there is a need of it being perceived in the right perspective and proportion. A common prevailing assumption is that security leads to conditions of all-round well-being and economic development in a society. This is true only where the sine qua non is in place: balanced and well thought out security, but if it is lopsided or overplayed, negative consequences could follow, impeding relations with neighbours, national harmony and economic development.

Rashed Rahman

The insecurity and paranoia of the establishment increasingly on display is about to ‘conquer’ new heights (or lows, if you prefer). Having muzzled and gagged the mainstream media through financial strangulation (reduction of government advertising) and..

Book Review

An interesting study

Prof Ian Talbot

Dr. Ilhan Niaz: The State During the British Raj: Imperial Governance in South Asia 1700-1947

S M Naseem

There  has been a notable shift in the methodological perspective adopted by Development Economics (DE) from a predominantly macroeconomic stance in the postwar period to a prevailing microeconomic focus in the 21st century..

Rashed Rahman

In the name of ‘socialist modernisation’, the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) since 1978 imposed markets on the economy by government fiat, forcibly broke up the communes in favour of family contracts on the land they tilled..

Dr. Majed Akhter

Siddiqi, Ayesha, In the Wake of Disaster: Islamists, the State and a Social Contract in Pakistan. 186pp., Cambridge University Press 2019:

In the Wake of Disaster advances a range of theoretical arguments through an examination of the political aftermath of massive flooding events in the lower Indus Basin in 2010 and 2011. Siddiqi interrogates post-disaster political spaces through political..