This article critically assesses the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), once seen as a flagship of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and its failure to deliver on its ambitious promises in Pakistan. Instead of driving economic growth and cohesion, the CPEC exposed deep governance challenges – marked by institutional fragility, lack of elite consensus, and military dominance in policymaking. Strategic and security imperatives often outweighed economic rationale, resulting in a non-transparent process that sidelined parliament and marginalized provincial actors. Projects were selected based on political expediency rather than viability, leading to inefficiencies and delays. The CPEC also re-centralized power, weakening provincial autonomy and intensifying center-periphery tensions, particularly in Balochistan. In Gwadar, local communities saw disruption without benefit, fueling political discontent. Investor confidence waned amid an uneven playing field and the failure of Special Economic Zones to take shape. Far from transformative, the CPEC reinforced narrow elite interests, worsened federal strains, and deepened Pakistan’s economic and institutional uncertainties.

The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960, though subject to increasing stresses in recent decades (and “suspended” by India in 2025), was long hailed as one of the great success stories of international water disputes. A treaty negotiated to divide the Indus rivers to conform to the new territorial boundaries of the subcontinent’s 1947 partition, the IWT’s ultimate result was to effectively create two separate river basins operating in, and helping to define, distinctive Indian and Pakistani “national spaces” of water control—and “water nationalism.” However, another effect of this approach was also to encourage increasing internal competition—and conflict—over water within each country. This article argues that the roots of this structure go back to the abstract, and environmentally disconnected, form of “nationalism” that dictated the drawing of the original 1947 partition line, and to the ways that state water policy—and the IWT itself—reflected and responded to this.

Pakistan and India were born of conflict and have endured over seventy-five years of rivalry since their birth in 1947. This has led to South Asia being one of the least integrated regions in the world, constraining its economic potential and human development. Yet the relationship has not been one of unending conflict; there have been periods of calm and even hope. Cricket, a common heritage and passion for both, has often delivered episodes of optimism, providing glimpses of what India-Pakistan cooperation could achieve were a conducive environment provided. On several occasions cricket has succeeded in uniting people of the estranged nations, allowing the nascent cultural ties that have existed for centuries to flourish. This article looks at how periods of connectivity and rupture between India and Pakistan have been reflected in the cricketing ties between the two nations and how these ties have been impacted by the wider political environment.

This article examines the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) as a transformative political movement that has emerged from Pakistan’s historically marginalized borderland region. Immediately following the aftermath of Naqibullah Mehsud’s extrajudicial killing on January 13, 2018, the PTM exceeded its initial demand for justice to articulate a broader critique of state violence, militarization, and structural inequalities faced by Pashtuns in Pakistan. Drawing on postcolonial theory, this article attempts to situate PTM within the genealogy of colonial indirect rule and Pakistan’s continuation of exceptional governance in its frontier region through mechanisms such as the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), and to examine how such practices produced a space of exclusion in which Pashtuns were simultaneously securitized and silenced. The article’s main argument is that PTM represents a rupture in this historical pattern by generating a “neo-Pashtun consciousness” forged in urban centers through student politics; digital networks; and the lived realities of profiling, displacement, and everyday state surveillance. Through ethnographic accounts, the analysis highlights how PTM disrupted hegemonic binaries of citizen/terrorist and periphery/center by examining the internal contestations and ideological resistance the movement faced within the Pashtun community, which were shaped by state propaganda, class interests, and suspicion of authenticity. Mainly focused on both support and opposition to PTM within the Pashtun population, this article also argues that PTM sheds light on the dialectics of political agency in Pakistan, where hegemony and resistance continually redefine the boundaries of citizenship, justice, and collective memory.

In post-Independence South Asia, the spotlight often fell on land reform, such as the zamindari abolition that took place in parts of India after 1947. In Pakistan, the issue of land redistribution also surfaced periodically in the decades following independence. But, as the case of Sindh in the late 1940 and early 1950s reveals, the focus was on how to ‘modernize’ tenancy arrangements rather than achieving more equitable land reallocation, since—for some contemporaries—left unchanged these represented a major impediment to increasing agricultural productivity, and hence Pakistan’s overall development. This article explores the context in which Sindh’s 1947-48 Hari Committee of Enquiry was set up and its various recommendations that proved controversial, together with responses to the legislation (1950 Sind Tenancy Act) that followed, highlighting the role of officials and peasant representatives, and shedding light on this important but largely overlooked episode of development-related policy-making in Pakistan’s early years.

This article explores how the Pakistan television drama industry mediates collective notions of piety through visual registers. Explicit religious discourse is tightly regulated in the industry, and producers themselves often disavow producing religious content. However, the leakiness of production practices generates religious visual idioms that are transparently circulated and taken up by audiences. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Karachi with production teams in this culture industry, I argue that dramas are a central yet overlooked feature of religious publics’ formations in the digitalizing Pakistani mediascape. Focus on religious media in the anthropology of Islam has treated publics as mostly engaged with traditional sources of authority. Attending to scenes from three popular dramas—Meri Zaat Zarra-e-Benishan (2009), Shehr-e-Zaat (2012), and Khaani (2017)—elucidates how visuality is a central facet of how cross-media interactions enregister piety. Observations of cinematographic negotiations and reflections by creators on the ambiguity and efficacy of pious visuality contextualize how religious scenes in these productions come together. While the visuality of prayer scenes across these dramas emphasizes private personal piety, tracing how these images are scripted, depicted, and circulated online offers insights into how religious digital publics are shaped in contemporary Pakistan.

As India and Pakistan emerged as two new nation-states after 1947, questions around nationality and citizenship animated official and public discourses. While there were constitutional and legal pronouncements to clarify these matters, this article suggests that particular documents governing mobility became central to how such issues were framed and understood. In particular, this article focuses on the Indian passport and similar documents of mobility control, such as the domicile certificate, permits, and so on, to examine how they worked singly and in conjunction to frame the documentary life of belonging. The article also focuses on particular mobile groups, Muslim minorities and women married to non-Indians, to understand how these documents became central to their claims of citizenship and belonging.

When analyzing the nation-state, studies of Pakistan often portray the Pakistani state as autocratic and dictatorial. While the Pakistani nation-state performs various hegemonic roles, it is also “cultured.” This article illustrates this point by focusing on the nation-state’s patronage of cultural projects in the 1960s (and beyond), tracing the genealogies of sites in Lahore’s Greater Iqbal Park (the Minar-e-Pakistan monument, Hafeez Jalandari mausoleum, and the National History Museum) along with the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum in Karachi. The article centers these as “sites of memory,” exploring the hybrid tensions between tourism, citizenship, and modern memory in postcolonial Pakistan.

Sinf-e-Aahan (2021) and Ehd-e-Wafa (2019) are two scripted television shows produced by Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), the public relations wing of the Pakistan Armed Forces. Both shows merge the national, military spheres with domestic, civil spheres within its narrative universe, albeit in contrasting ways. This is a departure from military-sponsored scripted television made under the monopolistic state control of television. How do military-sponsored shows maintain the domestic and military spheres in their visual landscape? With attention to visual representation in the serials and using secondary data available on the production team’s choices, I argue that the conventions of domestic serial content force military characters to engage in issues of domesticity, such as marital conflict and reputation scandals. Military and familial logics meld together in instances where the military inserts itself into the domestic sphere within these shows, without embracing the messiness and moral ambiguity of such spaces.