A History of Pashtun Migration, 1775-2006

A History of Pashtun Migration, 1775-2006

Author: Robert Nichols

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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For centuries Pashtuns from the Peshawar Valley and today's Pakistan-Afghan borderlands have circulated throughout the sub-continent and the Indian Ocean region. This interregional history of migration and mobility in the modern period from 1775 to 2006 follows Pashtun individuals and communities as they left homelands and responded to colonial and post-colonial opportunities and challenges in eighteenth century Rohilkhand, nineteenth century northern India and Hyderabad, Pakistan after 1947, and the Gulf region from the nineteenth century to the present. Pashtuns in permanent or temporary diaspora were transformed by the range of possible social consequences as they circulated in South Asia and the greater Indian Ocean region, variously experiencing degrees of assimilation, integration, sustained ethnic self-awareness, and, increasingly, notions of "national" identity. Pashtuns in home villages and in distant locations exhibited personal initiative and agency even as they were affected by wider European imperial policies, national and interregional political competition, and the evolving pressures of an expanding world economy. This work illuminates the history of Pashtuns and Pakistan and offers insight into how Asian regional populations have been integrated into, and often subordinated by, the dynamics of contemporary globalization.


The Defiant Border

The Defiant Border

Author: Elisabeth Leake

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1107126029

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This book explores why the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands have remained largely independent of state controls throughout the twentieth century.


Defeat is an Orphan

Defeat is an Orphan

Author: Myra MacDonald

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-01-01

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1849048584

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When India and Pakistan held nuclear tests in 1998, they restarted the clock on a competition that had begun half a century earlier. Nuclear weapons restored strategic parity, erasing the advantage of India's much larger size and conventional military superiority. Yet in the years that followed Pakistan went on to lose decisively to India. It lost any ability to stake a serious claim to Kashmir, a region it called its jugular vein. Its ability to influence events in Afghanistan diminished. While India's growing economy won it recognition as a rising world power, Pakistan became known as a failing state. Pakistan had lost to India before but the setbacks since 1998 made this defeat irreversible. Defeat is an Orphan follows the rollercoaster ride through post-nuclear India-Pakistan, from bitter conflict in the mountains to military confrontation in the plains, from the hijacking of an Indian plane to the assault on Mumbai. Nuclear weapons proved to be Pakistan's undoing. They encouraged a reckless reliance on militant proxies even as the jihadis spun out of control outside and inside Pakistan. By shielding it from retaliation, the nuclear weapons also sealed it into its own dysfunction -- so much so that the Great South Asian War, fought on-and-off since 1947, was not so much won by India as lost by Pakistan.


The Dark Side of News Fixing

The Dark Side of News Fixing

Author: Syed Irfan Ashraf

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2021-11-02

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1839981385

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This book provides a local journalist’s perspective on a four-decade long regional contribution to global news production. It shows how the fixers’ risky news pursuits made possible for global media to access distant regions and dangerous caves on Pakistan and Afghanistan borders, causing unprecedented deaths of the local reporters in the context of the U.S-led war on terror. The book analyzes the fixer as a role in its relationship with militarization. It is not a coincidence that fixers become valuable to commercial media only during the height of violence or crises. Emerging under conditions of scarcity or war, the value of this role, in turn, is intrinsically tied to the fear of extinction. It is this vulnerability or perceived expendability— imposed by the need to find work—that binds fixers in a symbiotic relationship with global market and global war. This book, then, serves as a vantage point from which one can clearly see the connection between the regional wars and commercial media, as well as local journalists’ transformation into daily wage earners in a global media shift toward neoliberalism.


Imagining Pakistan

Imagining Pakistan

Author: Rasul Bakhsh Rais

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-08-30

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1498553966

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Imagining Pakistan argues that the creation of Pakistan is a result of Muslim modernism in the Subcontinent, as it defined the struggle for identity, nationalism, and empowerment of Muslim communities. This modernist movement represented the ideals of inclusivity, equal rights, a liberal constitutional framework, and a shared sense of political community among diverse ethnic and regional groups. However, while this modernity was the ideal of Pakistan’s founders, it faced resistance from Islamists obsessed with recovering a past legacy of lost Muslim glory. A major threat to political modernism also came from the military that wanted to create a strong and secure Pakistan through ‘controlled’ democracy. Multiple interventions by the military and deviations from the foundational republican ideas left Pakistan in the rough sea of power struggles, causing institutional decay and creating space for the rise of radical Islam. Imagining Pakistan analyzes the institutional imbalance between the military and the civilian groups, the idea of the security state, and the Islamist social forces and movements that have been engaged in the politics of Islamic revival. It argues that Pakistan’s stability, security and progress will depend on pursuing the path of political modernity. Although the restoration of parliamentary democracy and the resilience of the Pakistani society are hopeful signs, resolving the critical issues that Pakistan faces today will require consolidation of democracy, better leadership, and a moderate and modernist vision of both, the state and the society.


Hyderabad, British India, and the World

Hyderabad, British India, and the World

Author: Eric Lewis Beverley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-06-01

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1316300293

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This examination of the formally autonomous state of Hyderabad in a global comparative framework challenges the idea of the dominant British Raj as the sole sovereign power in the late colonial period. Beverley argues that Hyderabad's position as a subordinate yet sovereign 'minor state' was not just a legal formality, but that in exercising the right to internal self-government and acting as a conduit for the regeneration of transnational Muslim intellectual and political networks, Hyderabad was indicative of the fragmentation of sovereignty between multiple political entities amidst empires. By exploring connections with the Muslim world beyond South Asia, law and policy administration along frontiers with the colonial state, and urban planning in expanding Hyderabad City, Beverley presents Hyderabad as a locus for experimentation in global and regional forms of political modernity. This book recasts the political geography of late imperialism and historicises Muslim political modernity in South Asia and beyond.


Afghan Modern

Afghan Modern

Author: Robert D. Crews

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2015-09-14

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 0674495764

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Rugged, remote, riven by tribal rivalries and religious violence, Afghanistan seems to many a country frozen in time and forsaken by the world. Afghan Modern presents a bold challenge to these misperceptions, revealing how Afghans, over the course of their history, have engaged and connected with a wider world and come to share in our modern globalized age. Always a mobile people, Afghan travelers, traders, pilgrims, scholars, and artists have ventured abroad for centuries, their cosmopolitan sensibilities providing a compass for navigating a constantly changing world. Robert Crews traces the roots of Afghan globalism to the early modern period, when, as the subjects of sprawling empires, the residents of Kabul, Kandahar, and other urban centers forged linkages with far-flung imperial centers throughout the Middle East and Asia. Focusing on the emergence of an Afghan state out of this imperial milieu, he shows how Afghan nation-making was part of a series of global processes, refuting the usual portrayal of Afghans as pawns in the “Great Game” of European powers and of Afghanistan as a “hermit kingdom.” In the twentieth century, the pace of Afghan interaction with the rest of the world dramatically increased, and many Afghan men and women came to see themselves at the center of ideological struggles that spanned the globe. Through revolution, war, and foreign occupations, Afghanistan became even more enmeshed in the global circulation of modern politics, occupying a pivotal position in the Cold War and the tumultuous decades that followed.


Beyond the Silk Roads

Beyond the Silk Roads

Author: Magnus Marsden

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-09-09

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1108976506

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Small-scale traders play a crucial role in forging Asian connectivity, forming networks and informal institutions separate from those driven by nation-states, such as China's Belt and Road Initiative. This ambitious study provides a unique insight into the lives of the mobile traders from Afghanistan who traverse Eurasia. Reflecting on over a decade of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, Magnus Marsden introduces readers to a dynamic yet historically durable universe of commercial and cultural connections. Through an exploration of the traders' networks, cultural and religious identities, as well as the nodes in which they operate, Marsden emphasises their ability to navigate Eurasia's geopolitical tensions and to forge transregional routes that channel significant flows of people, resources, and ideas. Beyond the Silk Roads will interest those seeking to understand contemporary iterations of the Silk Road within the context of geopolitics in the region. This title is also available as Open Access.


Refugee Cities

Refugee Cities

Author: Sanaa Alimia

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2022-09-13

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1512822795

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Situated between the 1970s Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and the post–2001 War on Terror, Refugee Cities tells the story of how global wars affect everyday life for Afghans who have been living as refugees in Pakistan. This book provides a necessary glimpse of what ordinary life looks like for a long-term refugee population, beyond the headlines of war, terror, or helpless suffering. It also increases our understanding of how cities—rather than the nation—are important sites of identity-making for people of migrant origins. In Refugee Cities, Sanaa Alimia reconstructs local microhistories to chronicle the lives of ordinary people living in low-income neighborhoods in Peshawar and Karachi and the ways in which they have transformed the cities of which they are a part. In Pakistan, formal citizenship is almost impossible for Afghans to access; despite this, Afghans have made new neighborhoods, expanded city boundaries, built cities through their labor in construction projects, and created new urban identities—and often they have done so alongside Pakistanis. Their struggles are a crucial, neglected dimension of Pakistan’s urban history. Yet given that the Afghan experience in Pakistan is profoundly shaped by geopolitics, the book also documents how, in the War-on-Terror era, many Afghans have been forced to leave Pakistan. This book, then, is also a documentation of the multiple displacements migrants are subject to and the increased normalization of deportation as a part of “refugee management.”


The Pakistan Paradox

The Pakistan Paradox

Author: Christophe Jaffrelot

Publisher: Random House India

Published: 2016-06-16

Total Pages: 525

ISBN-13: 8184007078

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The idea of Pakistan stands riddled with tensions. Initiated by a small group of select Urdu-speaking Muslims who envisioned a unified Islamic state, today Pakistan suffers the divisive forces of various separatist movements and religious fundamentalism. A small entrenched elite continue to dominate the country’s corridors of power, and democratic forces and legal institutions remain weak. But despite these seemingly insurmountable problems, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan continues to endure. The Pakistan Paradox is the definitive history of democracy in Pakistan, and its survival despite ethnic strife, Islamism and deepseated elitism. This edition focuses on three kinds of tensions that are as old as Pakistan itself. The tension between the unitary definition of the nation inherited from Jinnah and centrifugal ethnic forces; between civilians and army officers who are not always in favour of or against democracy; and between the Islamists and those who define Islam only as a cultural identity marker.