Why and how do terrorism-sponsoring states weaponise their complicity through controlled confession? The case of Pakistan
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12918799 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Azmat Khan (0000-0001-7743-4104, Wabash College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 1-23 |
| Publication date | 2026-01-27 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critical Studies on Terrorism (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1753-9161 • E-ISSN: 1753-9153 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17539153.2026.2620917 |
| OpenAlex | W7125968204 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 31 |
The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), a grassroots civil rights collective, accuses the Pakistan Army of instrumentalizing Islamist militancy in the Pak-Afghan borderlands to extract lucrative “counterterrorism rents” at the catastrophic expense of local populations. To support its claims, PTM mobilises a series of confessions issued by top-ranking military and civilian officials, which acknowledge the state’s longstanding patronage of terrorist outfits. While the confessing state remains unaccountable, PTM faces intensified repression. To unpack this paradox, the paper employs Michel Foucault’s theorisation of confession as a technology of statecraft while engaging PTM’s counter-discourse as an empirical entry point. Analysing seven state confessions gathered during two years of fieldwork, the essay challenges the liberal assumption that confession constitutes a gesture of moral reckoning that leads to accountability and justice. Instead, it demonstrates how confessions are deployed to perpetuate the state’s geopolitical utility and rent-seeking diplomacy abroad, while pre-empting and neutralising dissent at home. Yet these confessions also create unintended discursive openings that PTM seizes to rearticulate counterterrorism apparatus as a profitable political economy. By attending to insurgent discourses from a militarised periphery, the article deepens our understanding of how truth-telling, rather than undermining state violence and impunity, can be co-opted to reproduce it.
Complicity · Human rights · State (computer science · Terrorism · Work (physics · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence
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Fighting to the End
The Army and Democracy
An Introduction to Discourse Analysis
New Thinking In International Relations Theory
Critical Terrorism Studies
Deadly Connections
Digital black hole
What the War on Terror leaves behind
The state terrorist as terrorism racketeer – the case of Egypt
A critical analysis of India and Pakistan’s terrorism discourse in the context of geopolitics and imperialism
Media Portrayal of a Civil Rights Movement
Pakistani military’s rhetorical construction of an Indigenous civil rights movement
The Core Commitments of Critical Terrorism Studies
Closing chapters of the past? Rhetorical strategies in political apologies for human rights violations across the world
Human rights and the ‘work of memory’ in international relations
Watan , loss, and the Pashtun ethno-nationalism
Ethno-Territorialized Bodies
Of terrorism and revenue
Beyond the Double Game
Settler state apologies and the elusiveness of forgiveness
Pashtun Neo-Ethnonationalism
Engaging Foucault
The War of Terror in Praetorian Pakistan
US foreign aid, interstate rivalry, and incentives for counterterrorism cooperation
Pakistan's "Tribal" Pashtuns, Their "Violent" Representation, and the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement
Qualitative Quality
Governmentalities of an Airport
Confessions without guilt
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |