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The year of living dangerously

The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) government led by Imran Khan has completed one year in office. It is a year filled with tension, acrimony and an incremental shrinking of the space for freedoms of assembly, expression, and the media (mainstream and social)..

Dr. Ishtiaq Ahmed

Punjab consists essentially of plains through which migrants, fugitives and invaders down the centuries entered the Indian subcontinent after crossing the mountain passes in the northwest connecting Afghanistan to central and west Asia..

Abdul Khalique Junejo

Known historian K K Aziz had titled his inimitable treatise The Murder of History. I had read it a few years ago. But I never imagined that one day I would literally see this proverbial murder of history with my own eyes. I never conceived that history would be bleeding in front of me..

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..