Methodology and Empirical Design

This article is based on qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2022, primarily in Islamabad and Lahore, combining semistructured interviews and informal focus-group discussions with Pashtun university students and urban dwellers. In total, the study draws on 50 to 55 in-depth interviews and four focus-group conversations, conducted across multiple university campuses, student hostels, and informal community settings.Footnote ⁵

Conducting interviews over several months allowed the research to capture both continuity and change in political attitudes as the PTM evolved and state responses intensified.

The interlocutors were not socially homogeneous. The majority of Pashtun students interviewed came from lower-middle and precarious middle-class backgrounds, often originating from the former FATA and southern districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Many were first-generation university students whose families had experienced displacement, surveillance, or economic disruption due to military operations. Alongside this group, the research also engaged a smaller segment of aspirational middle-class students, particularly from settled districts, whose educational trajectories were oriented toward incorporation into state institutions such as the military or civil bureaucracy.

These class positions shaped distinct political orientations toward the PTM, which has been discussed in detail in the last part of this article. For more precariously positioned students, the PTM represented a means of articulating collective grievance, dignity, and constitutional citizenship in the face of everyday securitization. For others more securely placed within pathways of state inclusion, the movement was often viewed as politically risky, disruptive, or incompatible with upward mobility. Recognizing these internal class differences is essential to understanding both the PTM’s appeal and the ambivalence it generates within Pashtun society.

Studying Borderland(s)

The study of borderlands and frontiers has attracted significant academic scholarship since the mid-twentieth century, particularly during the Cold War period when Area Studies became an expansionist project in US universities. However, the foundational study of the frontier actually began earlier, in 1893, when the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner published his seminal article, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” which placed great emphasis on examining frontier populations and their interactions. The contemporary critical use of the term “borderland” is widely attributed to the Chicana author and activist Gloria Anzaldúa. It was her work that popularized the term and initiated its widespread use in academic discourse.Footnote ⁶ In the Pakistani context, the region known as the “borderland” or, more commonly, the “Frontier,” attracted significant scholarly attention from both regional and international scholars and agencies following the launch of the Afghan Jihad (holy war). This US-backed holy war was executed with the assistance of Pakistan’s military to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Consequently, the borderland along the Durand Line became a prominent focus of both academic and journalistic inquiry. The area on both sides of the border further became a central concern for security analysts after the 9/11 attacks, when the Global War on Terror was launched to combat Al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden—the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks—who had fled to this borderland and was using the region as a base for his future activities.Footnote ⁷

However, these borderland studies mainly focus on the security dimensions of the borderland, or on how to manage and control this region for peace-building and security-related initiatives.Footnote ⁸ Beyond these security-related studies, this article analyzes the borderland(s)—in both singular and plural senses—as fluid and complex spaces. These spaces are predominantly shaped by asymmetrical power and violence. Yet they are also highly productive and creative, serving as sites for generating narratives of resistance and for developing new political theories. Located within postcolonial theory and method, this study of borderlands and frontiers seeks to reclaim this space for social science and humanities scholarship. It does so by emphasizing its difference from the mainland in two key ways:

First, how the British colonial state approached borderlands as a distinct entity to control them, a mechanism that pushed these areas into being categorized as no-man’s lands (alaqa-ghair) and as barbarian geography.

Second, it investigates the borderland as an emerging geographical space, often culturally and politically distinct, where compelling political and social processes take place, thus providing a vital new field of study within postcolonial studies.

By emphasizing the above inquiries, this article aims to shift the focus of borderland/frontier studies beyond military and security studies and to critique Eurocentric approaches to borderland studies, which are often applied only minimally to non-European societies. For example, Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems Theory approaches borderland/frontier regions through dependency theory, framing frontiers as politically, culturally, and economically docile zones dependent on the core. This reductionist framework casts the frontier-periphery as merely passive recipients of innovations and ideas emanating from the core.Footnote ⁹

Regarding the colonial and postcolonial differential treatment of Pakistan’s borderland between Pakistan and Afghanistan and emerging narratives, this region is often perceived as distinct from the mainland. Rather than being valued for their potential, the region and its inhabitants were treated as inferior and were therefore subjected to a separate set of laws and regulations. This continuity of colonial difference, as Pakistan—continuing colonial legacies such as the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) and militarized governance—has treated the borderland as an exception to standard civic belonging. This treatment of difference was not the continuation of previous rules or something inherent in the race or genes of the Frontier’s people; instead, these mechanisms were developed by the British Empire to regulate and manage the population of this region. By this, the frontier was solemnly regularized and managed by the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), thus excluding the people of the Frontier from the colonial state’s legal system.Footnote ¹⁰ Because of this exclusion from the state’s law, people in the Frontier relied on traditional justice methods like jirga (a local group made up of regional elites, religious scholars, and representatives from the state) to resolve disputes. Interestingly, for the state, the purpose of this Jirga system in the Frontier was to control its subjects through indirect rule, where sovereignty was exercised—because a member of the Jirga often acted as a political agent representing the state—and therefore, the Jirga was no longer an independent institution. People came to see the state through the Jirga. This indirect rule meant there was no direct interaction between the state and its subjects, which put the state’s legitimacy and sovereignty at risk and loyalties shifted and changed over time. Because the state lacked formal institutions in the Frontier, ethnic and religious leaders often used their power to enforce justice, punish wrongdoers, and regulate behavior for moral reasons. This demonstrates that excluding the Frontier residents from the state’s law led to the development of alternative systems of justice and governance and encouraged different groups in the area to resist external control, such as the state and its institutions.

This indirect rule also allowed the state to exclude the Frontier from its legal system, to use it as a buffer zone, and to violate every right extended to the subjects of the state through its constitution but at the same time functioned as an active space where different resistance movements emerged, spanning the religious, nationalist, and Marxist, and sometimes even the pro-democratic.Footnote ¹¹

Borderland, Urban Space, and Theorizing “Support” for Ptm

Connecting the history of the Frontier with the current wave of neo-Pashtun consciousness is an attempt to argue that PTM’s expanded critique is an argument for the epistemological crisis with the postcolonial state of Pakistan. The movement’s narrative directly challenged the hegemonic national story or “narration” of the nation, which is built upon the pillars of a secure, unified state under the guardianship of a powerful military.Footnote ¹² To incorporate the PTM’s counternarrative of state-sponsored violence and ethnic marginalization would be to destabilize the very foundations of that national self-conception. The borderland’s experience had to remain an externalized, silenced history to preserve the coherence of the center’s story. Yet, it is precisely from this marginalized space of exception that resistance emerges. The PTM stands as the latest manifestation of a long subaltern tradition of generating powerful counternarratives. The very mechanisms designed to control and isolate the Frontier—the absence of the state’s law, the indirect rule—paradoxically created the conditions for the emergence of a potent political voice that seeks to reclaim its history and demand a reimagining of the state itself, not from the center, but from its most productive and creative periphery.

The emergence of PTM represents a critical rupture in Pakistan’s political landscape, one that can only be fully understood through its urban manifestations and its challenge to the postcolonial state’s management of its periphery. As Sana Haroon’sFootnote ¹³ work on the Frontier elucidates, the tribal regions have long been governed as a space of exception, where the state’s legitimacy is fluid and mediated through indirect rule (as mentioned above), creating a vacuum often filled by alternative structures of authority. The PTM, however, marks a significant departure. It is not a resistance movement emanating solely from the mountainous borderlands but a modern, political project born from the convergence of war-induced displacement and the specific conditions of urban centers, especially comprising university-going students and urban dwellers.Footnote ¹⁴ These cities, often imagined as sites of opportunity and modernity within the national narrative, became the crucial incubators for what I term a “new Pashtun consciousness.”

This consciousness emerged directly from the experience of the Pashtun diaspora from the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), who migrated to urban centers like Karachi, Islamabad, and Lahore seeking refuge from militarization and economic devastation. Yet, as this article demonstrates using data collected from university students and urban dwellers in Islamabad and Lahore, urban spaces did not provide a sanctuary of belonging; instead, they emerged as new sites of subjugation. Here, the state’s disciplinary power, once exercised from a distance through proxies and legal exceptionalism like the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), became direct and intimate. The routine harassment, the extrajudicial killings epitomized by the murder of Naqibullah Mehsud, and the pervasive crisis of enforced disappearances transformed the abstract violence of the Frontier into a tangible reality on the streets of the metropolis. This was a phenomenon of the postcolonial state, which often replicates colonial practices by governing differentiated populations through exception; the Pashtun body in the urban core became a site where this exceptionalism was violently enforced, rendering their lives disposable within the very heart of the state.

This paradox of urban marginalization is best understood through the experiences of students from the Frontier region who migrated to urban spaces in Pakistan, as well as the people who settled for work/labor in Pakistan’s urban centers. In Islamabad, university students and young activists—many of whom had migrated from FATA and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa—transformed the PTM sit-in (dharna) into a hybrid site of enunciation, where students, workers, and urban dwellers articulated political claims, identities, and solidarities. Here, Pashtun identity was neither confined to earlier nationalist idioms nor subsumed within statist counterterrorism frameworks. Instead, it was rearticulated as a discourse of rights, justice, and citizenship, thereby unsettling dominant binaries—citizen/terrorist, periphery/center, victim/agent—and, in the process, crystallizing the “neo-Pashtun consciousness” embodied by the PTM. Consequently, the urban experience forged a new political subjectivity among Pashtun youth. They faced a dual crisis: of belonging, stigmatized by a militant stereotype that marked them as the perpetual “other,” and of existence, denied the full rights of citizenship and subjected to constant state surveillance and violence. This created a profound political vacuum. The traditional Pashtun nationalist parties, constrained by an old politics tethered to territorial electoral constituencies and historically repressed by state and nonstate actors since the Afghan Jihad, failed to address the daily, embodied oppression faced by this Pashtun urban diaspora.

It was into this vacuum that the PTM emerged, articulating a subaltern voice that is typically silenced when it transgresses the scripts permitted by the powerful.Footnote ¹⁵ Initially, its demand for justice for Naqibullah was a permissible grievance. However, as its discourse expanded to critique the broader architecture of the military-state complex and the historical injustices of the war economy, it was swiftly met with the hegemonic force of the center. The movement’s power lay in its ability to rearticulate the Pashtun-state relationship and define citizenship on new terms and lines. Its demands—for constitutional equality, the restoration of missing persons, and an end to resource exploitation—transcended ethnic particularity to speak to a universalist language of rights and democratic accountability.

The substantial support for the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) among urban Pashtun youth, especially students and city dwellers, who were at the forefront of PTM, was not a spontaneous or abstract political choice but was forged in the material and discursive crucible of urban life itself.Footnote ¹⁶ This support was rooted in a confluence of factors: the direct experience of ethnic profiling and state surveillance in cities, the development of a critical political consciousness within university spaces, the pervasive sense of existential threat that connected the violence of the periphery to the alienation of the core, and the utilization of digital media by PTM’s supporters to circumvent a hegemonic media blackout.Footnote ¹⁷ Furthermore, this mobilization took shape in a political vacuum in which conventional Pashtun political actors, limited by fixed territorial bases of representation and historical repression, failed to voice the lived grievances of a generation shaped by the post-9/11 war economy.Footnote ¹⁸ The emergence of the PTM, therefore, represents the political society of the Pashtun urban diaspora organizing itself to make claims on the state, claims that were previously rendered invisible or illegitimate within the official channels of civil society and representative politics.

The historical genesis of the PTM is inextricably linked to the instrumentalization of the Pashtun tribal belt as a strategic frontier. For decades, this region was subjected to a form of indirect rule and legal exception, first under colonial-era regulations like the Frontier Crimes Regulation and later by the postcolonial Pakistani state.Footnote ¹⁹ This policy created a zone of anomie where the normal social contract was suspended. As Ismat Shahjehan, a political activist and member of the core committee of PTM, told me, “The state’s use of this territory as a frontline boundary against Soviet invasion, then the War on Terror, drone attacks, and military operations had a catastrophic human cost, resulting in over 60,000 civilian deaths and creating millions of internally displaced persons (IDPs)”.Footnote ²⁰ The pain and displacement caused by this perpetual war economy created a latent demand for a political outlet. As another respondent, Abdur Rahman from Quaid-i-Azam University astutely observed:

The transformation of the Mehsud Tahafuz Movement (MTM) into the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) in Islamabad was the pivotal moment where this private, contained grief erupted into public, political claim-making. It was, as Ismat Shahjahan confirmed, the urban youth—politically savvy from their engagements in student politics—who rejected the elders’ decision to disband after meeting with the premier. This act of defiance marked a generational shift, signifying the transition from a tribal demand for justice to a modern, political movement articulating a broader vision of rights and citizenship.Footnote ²²

For the tribal Pashtun students migrating to urban centers like Islamabad, the city presented a paradox. It was simultaneously a site of opportunity and a site of profound alienation. The experience of being consistently named as “Khan Sahib”—a term reductively associated with gatekeepers—was a moment of rude awakening. This was not a simple case of cultural misunderstanding; it was a manifestation of what Frantz Fanon described as the “epidermalization” of inferiority, where the colonial gaze imposes an identity upon the subjugated body.Footnote ²³ One of my respondents from the Islamic International University in Islamabad experienced this directly, realizing that his Pashtun identity automatically categorized him within a specific, subservient class in the urban social hierarchy. While sharing his experience, he reiterated that being subjugated due to one’s Pashtun identity can be tolerated but being tribal is always labeled as something inherently bad, as in with one’s body, mind, and even soul, so that whenever he erred—for instance, if his friends or he made mistakes, his mistakes were attributed to his Pashtun identity first and then to his tribal/frontier identity. This double marginalization is a routine phenomenon when one is living one’s life among mainland Pakistanis.Footnote ²⁴

As argued earlier, this oppression was not met with docility, but rather led to the development of a resistance, just like in colonial times in the Frontier, but this time in a new shape, which I called “neo-Pashtun consciousness.” In the development of this neo-Pashtun consciousness, the university space in cities became the critical site for processing this alienation. It provided the tools—critical theory, history, and a community of dissent—to transform a personal feeling of shame into a collective political analysis. As the respondent Sohail Ahmed, who was doing a PhD at Quaid-I-Azam University at that time, argued, “The university was where they could discuss the urban miseries and reflect on the dehumanization of our region.”Footnote ²⁵

This process echoes the critical pedagogy, which allows the oppressed to name their world and, in doing so, begin to transform it.Footnote ²⁶ The PTM provided the ultimate platform for this transformation. One of my respondents, who then became an active member of PTM and was working at a local shop in Islamabad, shared his experience of how PTM provided a platform for him to express his alienation:

This was not just an emotional speech but rather a deeply contextual narrative about the “security state role in the Frontier and was an act of counterhegemony in the core of the country.”Footnote ²⁸ He was seizing the very term used to marginalize his community and reappropriating it to critique the actual structures of power—the military establishment—that perpetuated their suffering. This aligns with Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the “war of position,” where subaltern groups challenge the cultural and ideological dominance of the ruling bloc.Footnote ²⁹

This othering extended beyond class to encompass a deeply ingrained caricature of Pashtuns as inherently masculine, intolerant, extremist, and conservative. This stereotype, as my respondents Sami Ullah Mohmand and Haider Zaman attested, is a direct inheritance of the colonial construction of Pashtuns as a “martial race,” a label used to both recruit and control certain ethnic groups by defining their identity in purely militaristic terms.Footnote ³⁰ The postcolonial state, rather than dismantling this racist taxonomy, perpetuated it, particularly after 9/11, when the Taliban identity was seamlessly grafted onto the Pashtun body. This had a crippling effect on the individual psyche, leading to what Sami Ullah called a “skepticism of my identity.”Footnote ³¹ This other-ization worked beyond gender, and Pashtun female students were equally stereotyped in urban centers of Pakistan. Commenting on Pashtun women’s experiences, one female respondent, Sana Rehman, shared her experience at her university, that whenever she dressed in modern style, the non-Pashtuns’ reaction was the following:

The PTM’s significance, therefore, lay in its creation of a powerful counterdiscourse. By centering the voices of women like Sana Ijaz, Gulalai Ismail, Ismat Shahjehan, Wranga Luni, and many more, the movement actively dismantled the monolithic image of Pashtun women.Footnote ³³ It demonstrated that Pashtun women were not silent victims as presented in most of the mainstream media or academia, but rather active agents of resistance, not necessarily in liberal-secular terms, but resisting within sociocultural and religious boundaries, and sometimes within the homes, villages, and in everyday practices.Footnote ³⁴ This woman’s activism is not new; rather it has deep historical roots in the region in the form of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement (1929–47).Footnote ³⁵ The PTM thus provided what Chandra Talpade Mohanty calls the “epistemic space” for marginalized women to define their own realities and histories against the grain of dominant, often patriarchal and orientalist, narratives.Footnote ³⁶

Apart from the students, PTM’s main support also comprised the urban dwellers and workers in the cities of the country. The experience of urban Pashtun dwellers, particularly those living in informal settlements (katchi abadis), further illustrates the material basis of support for PTM. Their migration from the conflict zones of the periphery to the urban core did not bring safety but merely a different modality of violence. The state’s security apparatus, instead of offering protection, became a source of perpetual harassment. The practice of registering their Computerized National Identity Cards (CNICs) with local police stations and being summoned for every local crime transformed their identity from one of citizenship to one of victim of perpetual suspicion. This is a classic technique of “biopower,” where state power is exercised through the management and surveillance of populations deemed to be “risky.”Footnote ³⁷

The feeling of being constantly watched and profiled creates what Manan Afridi, one of my respondents, described as a “continuous fear,” a lawlessness that has followed them from FATA to the capital city, Islamabad.Footnote ³⁸ Manan Afridi reiterated her response to seeing a police officer coming near her: “I strongly desired to hide or even omit our place from my CNIC.”Footnote ³⁹ This desperate act, or in James C. Scott’s words, “infrapolitics”—the small, everyday acts of resistance employed by subordinated groups to navigate and mitigate oppressive power structures, is happening on a routine basis with Pashtuns in Islamabad.Footnote ⁴⁰ In this context of daily dehumanization, the PTM emerged not as a vehicle for delivering material benefits like “shelter, food, and water,” but as, Janat Gul, one of my respondents, beautifully articulated, as a “resistance to violence in its natural way.”Footnote ⁴¹ The movement provided a language and a platform to articulate this collective pain, transforming individual alienation into a powerful collective consciousness. Janat Gul’s statement, though simple in words, has powerful meanings: “Even if you do violence to animals, they would show some anger… we are human,” and is a profound claim to humanity and a rejection of the state’s implicit categorization of Pashtun lives as disposable.Footnote ⁴²

Along with informal physical spaces, this collective consciousness was also facilitated and amplified by digital spaces, that is, social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter (now X), which played a crucial role in connecting the fragmented Pashtun diaspora. As this article identifies, corporate national media functioned as an arm of the hegemonic ruling bloc, manufacturing a consensus of “returning peace” and “development” in FATA that bore little resemblance to the reality on the ground. Digital platforms, particularly Facebook, provided an alternative public sphere where this official narrative could be challenged. They allowed individuals to bypass the media blackout and discover shared experiences of violence and surveillance. One political party activist, upon listening to Manzoor Pashteen’s speeches online, decided to support the movement despite state propaganda labeling it as foreign-funded and Pashteen as a traitor. He concluded, “Whoever is supporting or funding PTM, I can’t deny the movement, because he [Pashteen] is speaking the right things (speni speni khabri kawi) [translated from Pashto].” This highlights a key function of digital media in resistance movements: they enable what Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community,” but one based not on print capitalism but on shared digital counternarratives. It connects the “individual miseries with the collective,” allowing a taxi driver in Lahore who had lost a brother to enforced disappearance to see his story reflected in the experience of an internally displaced person (IDP) in Peshawar, with the miseries of a student in Islamabad, and so many other similar connecting stories.

Along with the state oppression and profiling of Pashtuns and the resistance to it, the support and the rise of PTM must also be understood within the context of a profound political vacuum. The established Pashtun nationalist parties, though historically significant, were structurally incapable of addressing the specific crises of the post-9/11 era.Footnote ⁴³ The established political parties’ were restricted to the land and were bound by the logics of electoral competition. If any political party or person dared to question, they would be subjected to violence. There are cases of political victimization in which political parties have lost many leaders to terrorist attacks, thus leading to a political vacuum. However, their failure was also discursive; they could not articulate the raw, embodied grievances of a generation that had lived through drone strikes, military operations, and urban profiling. The PTM did not emerge in opposition to classical Pashtun nationalism—indeed, it consciously drew on the legacy of Bacha Khan’s nonviolent resistance—but it was a significant departure. It was a movement for the IDP, the extrajudicially killed, the disappeared, and the profiled, and for constituencies that existed outside the traditional frameworks of territorial electoral politics. It gave representation to those who were completely censored, whose stories were absent from both national television and the agendas of established parties. In doing so, the PTM did not just demand justice for Naqibullah Mehsud, it demanded a fundamental renegotiation of the relationship between the Pashtun citizen and the state, challenging the very structures of militarism and ethnic hierarchy that have long defined Pakistan’s political order. The urban space, with its contradictions of opportunity and oppression, its universities and its katchi abadis, was the forge where this new political consciousness was smelted, making the city not just a backdrop but a central actor in the movement’s genesis and growth.

The Anatomy of Opposition: Deconstructing Resistance to the PTM

In the previous part, a detailed analysis was provided on how material and ideological conditions fostered support for the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM). This section turns the analytical lens to an equally significant phenomenon: the substantial opposition it faced from within the Pashtun community itself. The PTM’s political expression, which came to serve as the lingua franca of political discourse at the time, was never universally accepted; instead, it remained contested. This internal opposition is not a mere footnote but a critical element for understanding the complex political landscape of the post-9/11 relationship between the Pakistani state and the people of the borderland. I seek to argue that the profound power of state ideological apparatuses, the strategic calculations of class interest, and the pervasive culture of suspicion that thrives in a national security state are the actual basis of opposition to PTM. By categorizing this opposition into three intertwined strands—the ideological, the class-based, and the conspiratorial—in this section, I argue that resistance to the PTM was not a simple lack of awareness but an active, structured political stance, cultivated by decades of militarized Pakistani nationalism and the co-optation of ethnic elites into the state’s power structure.Footnote ⁴⁴ This opposition demonstrates the success of “hegemony”—the process by which the ruling bloc secures the consent of the governed to its own domination, even when that domination is against their objective interests.Footnote ⁴⁵

The most potent and publicly articulated form of opposition was ideological, framing PTM as an anti-state, foreign-funded entity. This narrative is a well-worn tool in the Pakistani state’s arsenal, deployed to discredit any challenge to its foundational myths and power structures.Footnote ⁴⁶ The effectiveness of this label lies in its ability to tap into a deep-seated nationalist sentiment, one that has been carefully cultivated through what are known as Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), namely education, media, and official historiography.Footnote ⁴⁷ These apparatuses work to normalize the extraordinary violence inflicted upon the Pashtun community during the War on Terror, recasting it as a necessary “sacrifice for the nation.” This framing was powerfully articulated by one of my respondents, who stated the following:

This statement is a textbook example of hegemonic consent. The respondent acknowledges the suffering but internalizes the state’s justification for it, viewing any critique of the institutions that orchestrated that suffering as a profound betrayal. The state’s language of “collateral damage” performs a crucial ideological function: it erases the state’s role as an active perpetrator (or oppressor) and blurs the lines between victim and martyr, between a crime and a sacrifice.Footnote ⁴⁹

This hegemonic narrative constructs a specific state-citizen relationship where the state is the benevolent protector and the citizen’s duty is unwavering loyalty. One respondent expressed this view starkly:

This perspective rewrites history to paint Pashtuns as perpetual dissidents, framing state inclusion in the army and bureaucracy as an act of grace rather than a right of citizenship. It completely inverts the PTM’s narrative, transforming a movement born from victimhood into an act of aggression. This inversion was further enabled by state censorship and propaganda. The experience of a female student is telling: “My mind was skeptical about the military operation… it was later when I watched a Pakistani television drama that cleared the picture for me, and I realized that the military operations are genuine.”Footnote ⁵¹ Here, popular culture becomes an ideological state apparatus, manufacturing consent by presenting a sanitized, heroic version of military operations that obscures their brutal reality on the ground.Footnote ⁵²

A second, deeply rooted ideological opposition stemmed from the perception of PTM’s ethnic nationalism as an existential threat to Pakistani nationalism. Since its inception, the Pakistani state has struggled to manage its ethnic pluralism, often promoting a homogenizing “one nation, one ideology” narrative where Islam is meant to supersede all other identities. This project intensified under Zia-ul-Haq’s regime, and its legacy is a deep suspicion of ethnic claims-making. PTM, despite its focus on civil rights, was immediately placed within this genealogy of “threats” to national unity, seen as a continuation of historical movements like the Bengali struggle for independenceFootnote ⁵³ and the ongoing Baloch struggle for independence. This view was summarized by a government civil servant in Islamabad, where he stated that “Ethnic nationalism is a threat to the ideology of Pakistan because ethnicity leads to division and differences…. The slogan of lar ao bar, yao Afghan Footnote ⁵⁴… symbolizes that PTM wants unification with Afghanistan.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This interpretation weaponizes the cultural reality of the Durand Line—that it divides a shared Pashtun homeland—and transforms it into a secessionist threat. It demonstrates how the state’s ideological machinery successfully equates any assertion of ethnic identity with a desire to break the country apart, effectively shutting down space for a multicultural, federalist conception of Pakistan.

The ideological opposition to PTM also had a distinct religious dimension, often articulated by students of madrasas (Islamic religious educational institutes]. A respondent from a madrasa in Islamabad told me the following:

This critique privileges a transnational Islamic Ummah Footnote ⁵⁷ over a localized ethnic identity and judges political movements by their adherence to a specific religious-political agenda. It reflects a successful hegemonic project that has positioned the state’s foreign policy concerns (Kashmir, Palestine conflicts) as the only legitimate foci of political solidarity for pious Muslims, thereby discrediting movements focused on internal injustices.

Beyond ideology, opposition to PTM was also driven by concrete class interests and a pragmatic calculus of survival. Like other nationalities’ integrations into state structure through services and participation, Pashtun nationalism has also historically been, in part, a struggle for a share of state power.Footnote ⁵⁸ A significant segment of the Pashtun population, particularly from the Peshawar valley of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has been successfully integrated into the state’s power structure, comprising an estimated 35 percent of the military and bureaucracy.Footnote ⁵⁹ For this class and those aspiring to join it, resistance politics to the state and its institutions represent a direct threat to their social and economic upward mobility. Their opposition is not necessarily about believing state propaganda but about protecting their investment in the system. A student from the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) in Islamabad expressed this fear clearly:

For this student, politics is not about rights but about risk. The “future” is a narrowly defined path of upward mobility within the existing structure, and any deviation is seen as a dangerous gamble. This fear was poignantly illustrated by a former worker of a nationalist political party from Mohmand Agency, who now owns a shop in Lahore:

This testimony reveals the devastating cost of political engagement in a context of state abandonment and militant violence. It is a rational calculation of precarity; the state offers no protection to its critics. Therefore, the only logical choice is depoliticization and a focus on individual survival. A businessman from Mardan who has a settled business in Islamabad spoke even more bluntly:

This is the voice of a class that has learned to navigate patronage networks for material gain. It views politics through a purely transactional lens, and PTM, lacking the power to distribute resources or provide protection, is seen as a poor investment.

The third form of opposition to PTM was perhaps the most paradoxical: a deeply rooted suspicion that has persisted among the Pashtuns—that “PTM itself is a creation of the state’s intelligence agencies.” I was unaware of this particular form of opposition, but it also caught my attention during interviews with respondents. By thoroughly analyzing this type of opposition, I conclude that a conspiratorial mindset is not necessarily a sign of ignorance but can be a rational response to living within a deep state where the military establishment has historically manipulated political projects. A respondent from the Islamic International University, Islamabad, expressed this doubt:

Another respondent pointed to the movement’s rapid growth as evidence that “People have spent many years gathering people on a single point… but PTM has gathered many people in a very short time… which indeed has support from the intelligence agencies of the country for some vested interests.”Footnote ⁶⁴

This opposition is fascinating because it does not dispute PTM’s facts or grievances. Instead, it doubts its authenticity. It reflects a profound cynicism and powerlessness, a belief that no genuine opposition could ever emerge or be allowed to thrive. As one student in a focus group discussion argued, “PTM was created by the military to look for and find the anti-state actors in the country.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In this view, the movement is a honeypot, a trap set by the very power it claims to challenge. This conspiratorial opposition is the ultimate testament to the state’s success in destabilizing truth and fracturing political solidarity. It leaves citizens trapped between a state they cannot trust and opposition movements they cannot believe in.

Though opposition to PTM within the Pashtun community is complex and cannot be dismissed as false consciousness, it is a multifaceted political stance shaped by the powerful interaction of state ideology, class interest, and a pervasive culture of suspicion. The state’s hegemonic project, carried out through education and media, successfully redefined a struggle for rights as an act of treachery. The pragmatic calculation of a middle class integrated into the state’s power structure prioritized individual mobility over collective risk. Additionally, the deep state’s history of political manipulation fostered a cynical skepticism that undermined the possibility of genuine resistance. Together, these elements of opposition highlight the significant challenges faced by any social movement aiming to challenge the militarized and centralized power in Pakistan. They demonstrate that the battle is not only fought in the streets or on social media but also deep within the consciousness of the very people the movement seeks to represent.

The Dialectics of Political Agency: Between Hegemony and PTM

This article has endeavored to move beyond a simplistic binary of success or failure in analyzing the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement. Instead, it has delved into the complex and often contradictory processes that shape political agency, seeking to understand not just that Pashtuns supported or opposed the movement, but how and why such divergent positions emerged from within the same ethnic community. The formation of political will or agency, as this article demonstrates, is a dialectical process, caught between the powerful gravitational pull of state hegemony and the emergent forces of resistance.

The analysis reveals that support for PTM was not a spontaneous eruption of anger but the product of a long, subterranean development of political consciousness. This consciousness was forged in the informal, interstitial spaces that exist on the margins of the state’s disciplinary apparatus: university study circles, private discussion groups, and digital platforms.Footnote ⁶⁶ These arenas functioned as a “political society” of the urban Pashtun diaspora—spaces outside the formal channels of civil society where subaltern groups organize to make claims on the state. Within these spaces, a counterhegemony was painstakingly built. Through critical engagement with history and theory, Pashtun youth were able to decode the state’s narrative of the War on Terror, transforming their personal experiences of profiling, loss, and displacement into a structured political critique. The PTM did not create this consciousness; it provided it with a public stage and a political vocabulary. The movement’s power lay in its ability to articulate what was already being whispered in private, turning individual “rumors” and shared stories of military-Taliban collusion into a collective claim for rights and recognition.

Conversely, opposition to the PTM was equally structured and not at all due to a mere lack of awareness. It was the product of a highly effective hegemonic project of state ideological apparatuses. The national education system, mainstream media, and official historiography worked in concert to produce a “common sense” that equated critique of the military with treason, recast horrific violence as noble “sacrifice,” and framed ethnic nationalism as an existential threat to the nation. For many Pashtuns, particularly those from settled districts integrated into the state’s military and bureaucratic structures, subscribing to this “common sense” was a rational choice. It was a strategy of survival and upward mobility within the existing power framework, a pragmatic calculation where supporting the PTM posed an unacceptable risk to their class interests and familial security. Their opposition reflects that “hegemony’” operates not just through coercion but by securing the active consent of the governed, even to their own collective subordination.

Thus, the puzzle of why the same ethnic group found itself on opposing poles is solved by tracing the divergent paths of political socialization. The supporters, often from the most marginalized tribal areas, developed a “good sense” through counterhegemonic spaces. This “good sense” allowed them to critically dissect the state’s common sense and articulate an alternative political vision based on justice and constitutional rights. The opponents, often from more privileged class positions within the Pashtun community, had their political agency shaped by the state’s hegemonic institutions. Their “spontaneous philosophy” while feeling like independent thought, was in fact a reflection of the state’s successfully manufactured consensus.

Ultimately, the story of the PTM is a stark illustration of the unequal terms of political engagement in a national security state. The state engaged with these two broad trends that I have described in this article in fundamentally different ways. It met the resistance of the supporters with direct coercion, censorship, violence, and enforced disappearances. It engaged with the opposition to PTM through the softer power of ideology, rewarding their consent with inclusion and the perks of patronage. This analysis underscores that the fate of social movements is not determined solely by their moral clarity or the justice of their cause, but by the arduous work of building counterhegemonic consciousness against the immense, often violent, power of the state to shape the very will of the people it governs. The PTM’s legacy, therefore, lies not in success or failure binaries, but in its profound demonstration of how political agency is made, unmade, and contested in a postcolonial state by employing borderland experiences in locality as well as in urban centers.