Aasim Sajjad Akhtar
Biographic Data
| ID | 161798 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Aasim Sajjad Akhtar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Aasim Sajjad |
| FAMILY NAME | Akhtar |
| SIGNATURE | AKHTAR A S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Quaid-i-Azam University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0557-8712 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 88 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
State, imperialism, and the national question in Pakistan
Situated at the gateway of South and West Asia, the Pakistani state has garnered significant geostrategic rents from global and regional powers through much of its history. US imperialism has been its primary external patron, facilitating a dominant role for the military, which, in turn, has presided over an uneven developmental regime based on the extraction of resources from, and suppression of, ethnic peripheries. This imperialist-backed and m…
The Delusions of Liberal Democracy: Imperialism and Militarism in Pakistan
Against a backdrop of political turmoil and a popular uprising, Aasim Sajjad Akhtar examines how the contradictions of liberal democracy have played out in Pakistan. Exploring the dynamic between the U.S.-backed, militarized Pakistani political elite and the rise of reactionary politician Imran Khan, Akhtar shows how Khan has employed empty anti-imperialist rhetoric to mobilize a discontented populace—and how this could be counteracted with a gen…
Climate Breakdown in Pakistan: (Post) Colonial Capitalism on the Global Periphery
Amongst the most devastating extreme weather events in recent years, the 2022 Pakistan floods ostensibly triggered a new-found urgency to reduce emissions and redress other underlying causes of human-induced global warming. Yet multinational corporations and Western governments remain non-committal about shifting away from non-renewable energy, offering meaningful climate and debt financing, or substantively reducing emissions. Meanwhile, the mod…
Transforming a praetorian polity: The political economy of democratization in Pakistan
This paper analyzes the hegemonic role of the military vis-à-vis elected civilian governments in Pakistan from the vantage point of institutional political economy. Absence of “good governance” on the part of elected civilian governments is often depicted as the key underlying factor that allows the military to maintain its dominance over state and society. In sharp contrast, we argue that the emphasis on “good” governance as a pathway to democra…
The Spatial Politics of Infrastructure‐Led Development: Notes from an Asian Postcolony
This essay introduces the Symposium on the spatial politics of infrastructure‐led development in Pakistan. It situates the Symposium (and the research site of Pakistan) with respect to the geographical literature on infrastructural politics more broadly, and the Belt and Road Initiative specifically. The essay also previews the seven contributing articles of the Symposium through a discussion of three cross‐cutting themes: securing the periphery,…
The Checkpost State in Pakistan’s War of Terror: Centres, Peripheries, and the Politics of the Universal
Pakistan is one of the most militarised and unevenly developed political economies in the post‐colonial world. Already acute extractive logics in long‐suffering ethnic peripheries have intensified alongside state repression after the regime of the so‐called “war on terror” was initiated in 2001. In this paper, I contrast the brutalising effects of securitised infrastructure, or what I call the “checkpost state”, with the “politics of the universa…
The unfinished project of decolonisation: A revisionist reading of Pakistan at 75
For much of its history, Pakistan has been analysed through binaries that suggest an existential conflict between liberal democrats and illiberal theocrats. In fact, ideological polarisation has always existed within Pakistan’s militarised structure of power. This article proposes a revisionist reading of Pakistan’s history prefacing foundational logics of class, ethnic-national and state power. It is only by explicating such underlying structura…
Dispossession and the militarised developer state: Financialisation and class power on the agrarian–urban frontier of Islamabad, Pakistan
Pakistan’s capital Islamabad is one of the country’s fastest growing cities, the labouring poor comprising the majority of its residents. Many migrants from rural hinterlands and war-ravaged regions reside in informal squatter settlements on the city’s rapidly expanding agrarian–urban frontier. In recent years, violent demolitions of these settlements, known as katchi abadis, have increased in accordance with the growing demand for land as a fina…
The War of Terror in Praetorian Pakistan: The Emergence and Struggle of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement
In January 2018, a spontaneous march of young men from the region of Waziristan descended upon the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, dramatically exploding the myths about the so-called war on terror in the "tribal" border zone with Afghanistan. This organic mobilisation became the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), a civil rights uprising embodying the repressed rage of a generation of Pashtun youth that had come of age in the shadow of violence pro…
The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor
Three hundred years after what became known in the nineteenth century as the Great Game—a struggle for regional hegemony between the British and Russian Empires—Southwest Asia remains an imperial staging ground. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in September 2001 signaled Washington's desire to cement its hegemonic position, but seventeen years later it is mired in an unwinnable war, even as the U.S. economy—and that of much of the Western world—e…
Dreams of a Secular Republic: Elite Alienation in Post-Zia Pakistan
Since the onset of the "war on terror," an apparently irreconcilable "secular-religious" divide has come to the fore in Pakistani society with ostensibly deep historical roots. In this article the "divide" is critically interrogated through an historical-sociological analysis, including detailed interviews with a small sample of both "secularists" and leftists who do not subscribe to the "secular-religious" binary. The article emphasises that sub…
Conspiracy and statecraft in postcolonial states: Theories and realities of the hidden hand in Pakistan’s war on terror
This paper is a cautiously sympathetic treatment of conspiracy theory in Pakistan, relating it to Marxist theories of the state, structural functionalism and Machiavellian realism in international relations. Unlike moralising mainstream news reports describing terrorism in terms of horrific events and academic research endlessly lamenting the ‘failure’, ‘weakness’ and mendacity of the Pakistani state, conspiracy theory has much in common with rea…
The Socialist Imperative: Left Politics in Contemporary Pakistan
It has been almost a quarter of a century since the onset of events that culminated in the collapse of 20th-century state socialism. In many mainstream accounts, the disintegration of the Soviet Un
Islam as Ideology of Tradition and Change: The “New Jihad” in Swat, Northern Pakistan
Scholarly interest in religio-political movements in the Muslim world has increased dramatically in recent times. Given the considerable variety of movements that are inspired by Islam, it is imperative that overly general and descriptive analyses be avoided in favor of thoroughly contextualized studies of individual movements. In this article I adopt an interdisciplinary approach bridging the fields of history, anthropology, and politics to stud…
Pakistan: Crisis of a Frontline State
For more than 50 years, Pakistan has functioned as imperialism's "frontline state." The military has remained the country's dominant political player and the basic precepts of bourgeois democracy remain conspicuous by their absence. Since the military coup in October 1999, the configuration of power in Pakistan has become subject to serious internal contradictions, in large part because of the "war on terror" and the loss of public prestige of th…
Why Capitalism has Failed: And Why We Must Not
If Seattle 1999 and subsequent mobilizations of the anti-capitalist movement could not compel the ideologues of capitalism to concede that their predictions of the “end of history” had been prematu
The New Vanguard: Challenges for the Left in Asia and Africa∗
The ever intensifying calls for the building of a “21st-century socialism” spearheaded by Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales mark another phase in the stunning resurrection of the global left. Comprehensi
Reading between the lines: The mullah – military alliance in Pakistan
While the history of political Islam is intricately connected to southwest Asian geo-politics, there is evidence that the emergence of the religious right as a political force in Pakistan is an outcome of state patronage. Following the ‘War on Terror’, corporate media and official western representations of revivalist trends in Pakistan have been almost completely de-contextualised. This representation has provided both the dominant military stat…
Cuban Doctors in Pakistan: Why Cuba Still Inspires
The signs point to the fact that the symbol of the Cuban revolution is reaching the end of his road. Even if it does not formally mark the definitive end of almost fifty years of undisputed leadership at the helm of the island republic, Fidel Castro's handing over of power to brother Raul in late July is surely a precursor to what will happen sooner rather than laterThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent a…
The Professionalization of Political Culture
The state as landlord in Pakistani Punjab: Peasant struggles on the Okara military farms
Marxist theories of peasant revolt have identified different strata within the peasantry that adopt widely varying roles in rural conflict. However, a complex interplay of class and primordial factors has been identified in studies of Pakistani Punjab, where in a unique revolt beginning in 2000, peasants cultivating not private but public land have engaged in a widespread civil disobedience campaign against the state. This group of tenant farmers…
Are We Not a Working-Class Movement
Privatization at Gunpoint
The transfer of assets from peripheral states to international financial oligarchies is one of the defining tenets of the neoliberal counter-revolution. As a general rule, this latest form of neocolonial transfer of surplus to the industrialized core has proceeded relatively successfully in many peripheral states, with many Latin American states standing out as significant exceptions. In Pakistan, where the ruling state oligarchy has historically…
The state as landlord in Pakistani Punjab: Peasant struggles on the Okara military farms
Marxist theories of peasant revolt have identified different strata within the peasantry that adopt widely varying roles in rural conflict. However, a complex interplay of class and primordial factors has been identified in studies of Pakistani Punjab, where in a unique revolt beginning in 2000, peasants cultivating not private but public land have engaged in a widespread civil disobedience campaign against the state. This group of tenant farmers…
Dispossession and the militarised developer state: Financialisation and class power on the agrarian–urban frontier of Islamabad, Pakistan
Pakistan’s capital Islamabad is one of the country’s fastest growing cities, the labouring poor comprising the majority of its residents. Many migrants from rural hinterlands and war-ravaged regions reside in informal squatter settlements on the city’s rapidly expanding agrarian–urban frontier. In recent years, violent demolitions of these settlements, known as katchi abadis, have increased in accordance with the growing demand for land as a fina…
The Checkpost State in Pakistan’s War of Terror: Centres, Peripheries, and the Politics of the Universal
Pakistan is one of the most militarised and unevenly developed political economies in the post‐colonial world. Already acute extractive logics in long‐suffering ethnic peripheries have intensified alongside state repression after the regime of the so‐called “war on terror” was initiated in 2001. In this paper, I contrast the brutalising effects of securitised infrastructure, or what I call the “checkpost state”, with the “politics of the universa…
The War of Terror in Praetorian Pakistan: The Emergence and Struggle of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement
In January 2018, a spontaneous march of young men from the region of Waziristan descended upon the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, dramatically exploding the myths about the so-called war on terror in the "tribal" border zone with Afghanistan. This organic mobilisation became the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), a civil rights uprising embodying the repressed rage of a generation of Pashtun youth that had come of age in the shadow of violence pro…
Pakistan: Crisis of a Frontline State
For more than 50 years, Pakistan has functioned as imperialism's "frontline state." The military has remained the country's dominant political player and the basic precepts of bourgeois democracy remain conspicuous by their absence. Since the military coup in October 1999, the configuration of power in Pakistan has become subject to serious internal contradictions, in large part because of the "war on terror" and the loss of public prestige of th…
The Spatial Politics of Infrastructure‐Led Development: Notes from an Asian Postcolony
This essay introduces the Symposium on the spatial politics of infrastructure‐led development in Pakistan. It situates the Symposium (and the research site of Pakistan) with respect to the geographical literature on infrastructural politics more broadly, and the Belt and Road Initiative specifically. The essay also previews the seven contributing articles of the Symposium through a discussion of three cross‐cutting themes: securing the periphery,…
Conspiracy and statecraft in postcolonial states: Theories and realities of the hidden hand in Pakistan’s war on terror
This paper is a cautiously sympathetic treatment of conspiracy theory in Pakistan, relating it to Marxist theories of the state, structural functionalism and Machiavellian realism in international relations. Unlike moralising mainstream news reports describing terrorism in terms of horrific events and academic research endlessly lamenting the ‘failure’, ‘weakness’ and mendacity of the Pakistani state, conspiracy theory has much in common with rea…
Dreams of a Secular Republic: Elite Alienation in Post-Zia Pakistan
Since the onset of the "war on terror," an apparently irreconcilable "secular-religious" divide has come to the fore in Pakistani society with ostensibly deep historical roots. In this article the "divide" is critically interrogated through an historical-sociological analysis, including detailed interviews with a small sample of both "secularists" and leftists who do not subscribe to the "secular-religious" binary. The article emphasises that sub…
Reading between the lines: The mullah – military alliance in Pakistan
While the history of political Islam is intricately connected to southwest Asian geo-politics, there is evidence that the emergence of the religious right as a political force in Pakistan is an outcome of state patronage. Following the ‘War on Terror’, corporate media and official western representations of revivalist trends in Pakistan have been almost completely de-contextualised. This representation has provided both the dominant military stat…
Privatization at Gunpoint
The transfer of assets from peripheral states to international financial oligarchies is one of the defining tenets of the neoliberal counter-revolution. As a general rule, this latest form of neocolonial transfer of surplus to the industrialized core has proceeded relatively successfully in many peripheral states, with many Latin American states standing out as significant exceptions. In Pakistan, where the ruling state oligarchy has historically…
Transforming a praetorian polity: The political economy of democratization in Pakistan
This paper analyzes the hegemonic role of the military vis-à-vis elected civilian governments in Pakistan from the vantage point of institutional political economy. Absence of “good governance” on the part of elected civilian governments is often depicted as the key underlying factor that allows the military to maintain its dominance over state and society. In sharp contrast, we argue that the emphasis on “good” governance as a pathway to democra…
The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor
Three hundred years after what became known in the nineteenth century as the Great Game—a struggle for regional hegemony between the British and Russian Empires—Southwest Asia remains an imperial staging ground. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in September 2001 signaled Washington's desire to cement its hegemonic position, but seventeen years later it is mired in an unwinnable war, even as the U.S. economy—and that of much of the Western world—e…
Islam as Ideology of Tradition and Change: The “New Jihad” in Swat, Northern Pakistan
Scholarly interest in religio-political movements in the Muslim world has increased dramatically in recent times. Given the considerable variety of movements that are inspired by Islam, it is imperative that overly general and descriptive analyses be avoided in favor of thoroughly contextualized studies of individual movements. In this article I adopt an interdisciplinary approach bridging the fields of history, anthropology, and politics to stud…
The Professionalization of Political Culture
Cuban Doctors in Pakistan: Why Cuba Still Inspires
The signs point to the fact that the symbol of the Cuban revolution is reaching the end of his road. Even if it does not formally mark the definitive end of almost fifty years of undisputed leadership at the helm of the island republic, Fidel Castro's handing over of power to brother Raul in late July is surely a precursor to what will happen sooner rather than laterThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent a…
Are We Not a Working-Class Movement
Privatization at Gunpoint
The transfer of assets from peripheral states to international financial oligarchies is one of the defining tenets of the neoliberal counter-revolution. As a general rule, this latest form of neocolonial transfer of surplus to the industrialized core has proceeded relatively successfully in many peripheral states, with many Latin American states standing out as significant exceptions. In Pakistan, where the ruling state oligarchy has historically…
Reading between the lines: The mullah – military alliance in Pakistan
While the history of political Islam is intricately connected to southwest Asian geo-politics, there is evidence that the emergence of the religious right as a political force in Pakistan is an outcome of state patronage. Following the ‘War on Terror’, corporate media and official western representations of revivalist trends in Pakistan have been almost completely de-contextualised. This representation has provided both the dominant military stat…
Cuban Doctors in Pakistan: Why Cuba Still Inspires
The signs point to the fact that the symbol of the Cuban revolution is reaching the end of his road. Even if it does not formally mark the definitive end of almost fifty years of undisputed leadership at the helm of the island republic, Fidel Castro's handing over of power to brother Raul in late July is surely a precursor to what will happen sooner rather than laterThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent a…
The Professionalization of Political Culture
The state as landlord in Pakistani Punjab: Peasant struggles on the Okara military farms
Marxist theories of peasant revolt have identified different strata within the peasantry that adopt widely varying roles in rural conflict. However, a complex interplay of class and primordial factors has been identified in studies of Pakistani Punjab, where in a unique revolt beginning in 2000, peasants cultivating not private but public land have engaged in a widespread civil disobedience campaign against the state. This group of tenant farmers…
The New Vanguard: Challenges for the Left in Asia and Africa∗
The ever intensifying calls for the building of a “21st-century socialism” spearheaded by Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales mark another phase in the stunning resurrection of the global left. Comprehensi
Why Capitalism has Failed: And Why We Must Not
If Seattle 1999 and subsequent mobilizations of the anti-capitalist movement could not compel the ideologues of capitalism to concede that their predictions of the “end of history” had been prematu
Islam as Ideology of Tradition and Change: The “New Jihad” in Swat, Northern Pakistan
Scholarly interest in religio-political movements in the Muslim world has increased dramatically in recent times. Given the considerable variety of movements that are inspired by Islam, it is imperative that overly general and descriptive analyses be avoided in favor of thoroughly contextualized studies of individual movements. In this article I adopt an interdisciplinary approach bridging the fields of history, anthropology, and politics to stud…
Pakistan: Crisis of a Frontline State
For more than 50 years, Pakistan has functioned as imperialism's "frontline state." The military has remained the country's dominant political player and the basic precepts of bourgeois democracy remain conspicuous by their absence. Since the military coup in October 1999, the configuration of power in Pakistan has become subject to serious internal contradictions, in large part because of the "war on terror" and the loss of public prestige of th…
Conspiracy and statecraft in postcolonial states: Theories and realities of the hidden hand in Pakistan’s war on terror
This paper is a cautiously sympathetic treatment of conspiracy theory in Pakistan, relating it to Marxist theories of the state, structural functionalism and Machiavellian realism in international relations. Unlike moralising mainstream news reports describing terrorism in terms of horrific events and academic research endlessly lamenting the ‘failure’, ‘weakness’ and mendacity of the Pakistani state, conspiracy theory has much in common with rea…
The Socialist Imperative: Left Politics in Contemporary Pakistan
It has been almost a quarter of a century since the onset of events that culminated in the collapse of 20th-century state socialism. In many mainstream accounts, the disintegration of the Soviet Un
Dreams of a Secular Republic: Elite Alienation in Post-Zia Pakistan
Since the onset of the "war on terror," an apparently irreconcilable "secular-religious" divide has come to the fore in Pakistani society with ostensibly deep historical roots. In this article the "divide" is critically interrogated through an historical-sociological analysis, including detailed interviews with a small sample of both "secularists" and leftists who do not subscribe to the "secular-religious" binary. The article emphasises that sub…
The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor
Three hundred years after what became known in the nineteenth century as the Great Game—a struggle for regional hegemony between the British and Russian Empires—Southwest Asia remains an imperial staging ground. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in September 2001 signaled Washington's desire to cement its hegemonic position, but seventeen years later it is mired in an unwinnable war, even as the U.S. economy—and that of much of the Western world—e…
Dispossession and the militarised developer state: Financialisation and class power on the agrarian–urban frontier of Islamabad, Pakistan
Pakistan’s capital Islamabad is one of the country’s fastest growing cities, the labouring poor comprising the majority of its residents. Many migrants from rural hinterlands and war-ravaged regions reside in informal squatter settlements on the city’s rapidly expanding agrarian–urban frontier. In recent years, violent demolitions of these settlements, known as katchi abadis, have increased in accordance with the growing demand for land as a fina…
The War of Terror in Praetorian Pakistan: The Emergence and Struggle of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement
In January 2018, a spontaneous march of young men from the region of Waziristan descended upon the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, dramatically exploding the myths about the so-called war on terror in the "tribal" border zone with Afghanistan. This organic mobilisation became the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), a civil rights uprising embodying the repressed rage of a generation of Pashtun youth that had come of age in the shadow of violence pro…
Transforming a praetorian polity: The political economy of democratization in Pakistan
This paper analyzes the hegemonic role of the military vis-à-vis elected civilian governments in Pakistan from the vantage point of institutional political economy. Absence of “good governance” on the part of elected civilian governments is often depicted as the key underlying factor that allows the military to maintain its dominance over state and society. In sharp contrast, we argue that the emphasis on “good” governance as a pathway to democra…
The Spatial Politics of Infrastructure‐Led Development: Notes from an Asian Postcolony
This essay introduces the Symposium on the spatial politics of infrastructure‐led development in Pakistan. It situates the Symposium (and the research site of Pakistan) with respect to the geographical literature on infrastructural politics more broadly, and the Belt and Road Initiative specifically. The essay also previews the seven contributing articles of the Symposium through a discussion of three cross‐cutting themes: securing the periphery,…
The Checkpost State in Pakistan’s War of Terror: Centres, Peripheries, and the Politics of the Universal
Pakistan is one of the most militarised and unevenly developed political economies in the post‐colonial world. Already acute extractive logics in long‐suffering ethnic peripheries have intensified alongside state repression after the regime of the so‐called “war on terror” was initiated in 2001. In this paper, I contrast the brutalising effects of securitised infrastructure, or what I call the “checkpost state”, with the “politics of the universa…
The unfinished project of decolonisation: A revisionist reading of Pakistan at 75
For much of its history, Pakistan has been analysed through binaries that suggest an existential conflict between liberal democrats and illiberal theocrats. In fact, ideological polarisation has always existed within Pakistan’s militarised structure of power. This article proposes a revisionist reading of Pakistan’s history prefacing foundational logics of class, ethnic-national and state power. It is only by explicating such underlying structura…
Climate Breakdown in Pakistan: (Post) Colonial Capitalism on the Global Periphery
Amongst the most devastating extreme weather events in recent years, the 2022 Pakistan floods ostensibly triggered a new-found urgency to reduce emissions and redress other underlying causes of human-induced global warming. Yet multinational corporations and Western governments remain non-committal about shifting away from non-renewable energy, offering meaningful climate and debt financing, or substantively reducing emissions. Meanwhile, the mod…
The Delusions of Liberal Democracy: Imperialism and Militarism in Pakistan
Against a backdrop of political turmoil and a popular uprising, Aasim Sajjad Akhtar examines how the contradictions of liberal democracy have played out in Pakistan. Exploring the dynamic between the U.S.-backed, militarized Pakistani political elite and the rise of reactionary politician Imran Khan, Akhtar shows how Khan has employed empty anti-imperialist rhetoric to mobilize a discontented populace—and how this could be counteracted with a gen…
State, imperialism, and the national question in Pakistan
Situated at the gateway of South and West Asia, the Pakistani state has garnered significant geostrategic rents from global and regional powers through much of its history. US imperialism has been its primary external patron, facilitating a dominant role for the military, which, in turn, has presided over an uneven developmental regime based on the extraction of resources from, and suppression of, ethnic peripheries. This imperialist-backed and m…
Political science (22 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Political economy (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East (13 works) · Economics (9 works) · History (7 works) · State (computer science (7 works)