This book analyses the discourse on Pakistan by exploring the knowledge production processes through which the International Relations community, Asian and South Asian area study centres, and think-tanks construct Pakistan’s identity. This book does not attempt to trace how Pakistan has been historically defined, explained, or understood by the International Relations interpretive communities or to supplant these understandings with the author’s version of what Pakistan is. Instead, this study focuses on investigating how the identity of Pakistan is fixed or stabilized via practices of the interpretive communities. In other words, this book attempts to address the following questions: How is the knowledge on Pakistan produced discursively? How is this knowledge represented in the writings on Pakistan? What are the conditions under which it is possible to make authoritative claims about Pakistan?

​This edited volume highlights a type of violence largely overlooked by peace psychologists; it explores ‘epistemic violence’ which refers to the silencing of the marginalized, racialized and colonized people in the process of knowledge production. This book celebrates the voices and the agency of the subalterns, honoring their visions, testimonies and struggles to push boundaries and create spaces for peace within oppressive environments. “Visions and Praxis from below” refers to peace visions and struggles of the people who live “below the vital ability of shaping the world according to their own vision”. It is a challenge to the hegemonic perspective that ‘credible’ thinking on peace can only be done by the people ‘from above’. This perspective will add to the understanding of not only peace psychologists, but all those who work toward social justice.

Developed over six chapters, Pakistan’s Nuclear Exclusion provides an account of how orientalism is a lived experience of post-colonial racism, injustice, and inequality amongst members of the nuclear community in Pakistan. The account is produced through interviews with members of the community consisting of students, academics, and physicists in Pakistan. Rahim offers unique insights into how Pakistan’s nuclear community is not only perceived and represented but also how it seeks to operate in a wider nuclear community dominated by Western nuclear powers. The provision of such highly contextualised insights is enabled by the book setting out to both (a) provide analytical space for and (b) ‘give voice’ to how orientalism is experienced in the everyday of their lives. Consequently, the work provides (1) an analysis of how ‘dominant discourses’ of nuclear management and their ‘pictures of reason’ are exclusionary, (2) an analysis of the core features of orientalism as they pertain to Pakistan’s nuclear community; and (3) empirical findings which produce categories of the experience of orientalism into areas of the everyday – exclusion, making a career, Islamophobia, technology denial and self-reliance. Pakistan’s Nuclear Exclusion is enormously valuable to the research community as well as extremely well-conceived and researched. In addition, much of the methodology chapter offers a level of sophistication and self-reflection that translates well in the interview material and its subsequent analysis.

This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of South Asian foreign policy, examining the complex history and present state of South Asian foreign policy, the foreign policy of the countries of the region, as well as their relationships with their neighbors and key external players, such as China and the United States, in an effort to understand South Asia’s place in the world order. It illustrates the future trajectory of foreign policy in the region and analyses future of regional arrangements like SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) and BIMSTEC. The handbook is structured in five parts, each representing a focused area of enquiry: Foreign Policy Relations within South Asia Relations within Indo-Pacific Relations with China, Europe and the United States Security A carefully selected collection of 26 chapters written by experts on South Asian foreign, economic, and security policy, this handbook provides an objective yet accessible overview of the history and current state of foreign policy of each country and the region. It is an authoritative reference work for academics and students as well as international think tanks, research institutes, and non-governmental organizations working on South Asian Politics, Asian Politics, Foreign Politics, International Affairs, World History, and International Relations.

The word ‘territory’ has taken on renewed significance in a world where its close association with state sovereignty has made a serious comeback, invoked alike by proponents of Brexit in the UK, ‘Making America Great Again’ in the USA, and myriad populists from India to Brazil by way of Italy and Hungary. The word has had a contentious history in social science and political theory. In its first seven years, the journal Territory, Politics, Governance has published numerous articles examining the ways in which territory figures into contemporary political debates and its limits as a concept when applied to a world in which sovereignty never has simply pooled up within self-evidently distinctive blocs of space named as ‘territories.’ Among other things, the limits of territory are apparent in terms of the history of a global capitalism that always bursts beyond established boundaries, the fact that some states are much more powerful and exercise much more spatial reach than do others, and that the political uses of territory in its current usage date back predominantly to seventeenth century Europe rather than being historically transcendental or worldwide. The articles in this book are selected from Territory, Politics, Governance to survey many of the dilemmas and questions that haunt the concept of territory even as its current efflorescence in political discourse ignores them.

In this pioneering volume, leading scholars from a diversity of backgrounds in the humanities, social sciences, and different area studies argue for a more differentiated and self-reflected role of area-based science in global knowledge production. Considering that the mobility of people, goods, and ideas make the world more complex and geographically fixed categories increasingly obsolete, the authors call for a reflection of this new dynamism in research, teaching, and theorizing. The book thus moves beyond the constructed divide between area studies and systematic disciplines and instead proposes methodological and conceptual ways for encouraging the integration of marginalized and often overseen epistemologies. Essays on the ontological, theoretical, and pedagogical dimension of area studies highlight how people’s everyday practices of mobility challenge scholars, students, and practitioners of inter- and transdisciplinary area studies to transcend the cognitive boundaries that scholarly minds currently operate in.

Central Asia is a relatively understudied neighbor of Afghanistan. The region is often placed into a number of historical and political contexts—a section of the Silk Road, a pawn in the “Great Game,” the “spillover” state that exemplifies the failure of US foreign policy—that limit scholarly understanding. This edited volume contributes by providing a broad, long-term analysis of the Central Asia–Afghanistan relationship over the last several decades. It addresses the legacy of Soviet intervention with a unique first-hand selection of interviews of former Soviet Central Asian soldiers that fought in the Soviet–Afghan War. It examines Afghanistan’s norther neighbors, discussing Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan—their strategy for Afghanistan, their perception of challenges and opportunities of the country, and patterns of cooperation and conflict. The collection also looks at recent US strategic initiatives in the region, in particular the New Silk Road Initiative that envisions a growing Central Asia–South Asia connection.

Pakistan at Seventy-Five investigates the countrys multi-layered issues in the context of a post-colonial polity marked by diversity, heterogeneity, stratification and volatility. This wide-ranging discourse engages with diverse formal and informal actors as markers of identity, historical events and social conditions, as well as global geo-political and neo-colonial centreperiphery relations that shape narratives about the nation and the constructions of a sense of belonging. The editors and contributors utilise multi-faceted and multi-layered approaches, focusing on (1) identities, and questions of diversity and pluralism; (2) horizontal and vertical technologies and geographies of power related to questions of trust, legitimacy, participation, and governance; and (3) the distribution, deprivation and vulnerability of sociocultural, political, and human resources. Studying Pakistan has been subject to different approaches, including decolonial, indigenous, and feminist perspectives. This volume draws out alternative epistemological and methodological viewpoints: the insideroutsider conundrum, centreperiphery asymmetries, hegemonic discourses, and practices within Pakistans national/international academy. The chapter contributions are the outcome of a unique interdisciplinary research cooperation at Quaid-i-Azam University, focussing on early career researchers. Presenting a multiplicity of voices and trajectories, Pakistan at Seventy-Five provides new input to existing debates and directions for future scholarly endeavour.

Fuelled by social equity concerns, there have been vigorous debates on the appropriateness of certain non-state actors, particularly those with commercial and entrepreneurial motives, to meet universal education goals. There are further questions on the relative effectiveness of government and private schooling in delivering good learning outcomes for all. Within this debate, several empirical questions abound. Do students from poorer backgrounds achieve as well in private schools as their advantaged peers? What are the relative out-of-pocket costs of accessing private schooling compared to government schooling? Is fee-paying non-state provision ‘affordable’ to the poorest households? What is the nature of the education market at different levels? What are the relationships between different non-state actors and the state, and how should they conduct themselves? The chapters in this volume present new empirical evidence and conduct critical analysis on some of these questions. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Oxford Review of Education.