Afghan Refugees, Pakistani Media and the State
Afghan Refugees, Pakistani Media and the State

Author: Ayesha Jehangir

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-01

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1003822355

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Drawing on the frameworks of peace journalism, this book offers new insights into the Pakistani media coverage of Afghan refugees and their forced repatriation from Pakistan. Based on a three-year-study, the author examines the political, social and economic forces that influence and govern the reporting practices of journalists covering the protracted refugee conflict between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Through a critical discourse analysis of the structures of journalistic iterability of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, the author distils four dominant and three emerging frames, and proposes a new teleological turn for peace journalism as deliberative practice, that is to say practice that by promoting transparency and accountability (recognition) and challenging dominant power-proposed narratives and perspectives (resistance) encourages public engagement and participation (cosmopolitan solidarity). The author also privileges an analytical approach that conceptualises the nexus between digital witnessing and peace journalism through the paradigm of cosmopolitanism. The author finds routinely accommodated media narratives of security that represent Afghan refugees as a ‘threat’, a ‘burden’ and the ‘other’ that, through reinforcement, have become an incontestable reality for the public in Pakistan. This book will appeal to those interested in studying and practicing journalism as a conscientious communicative practice that elicits the very public it seeks to inform.

The Making of Pakistani Human Bombs
The Making of Pakistani Human Bombs

Author: Khuram Iqbal

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2015-10-30

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1498516491

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A multi-level analysis of Pakistani human bombs reveals that suicide terrorism is caused by multiple factors with perceived effectiveness, vengeance, poverty, and religious fundamentalism playing a varying role at the individual, organizational, and environmental levels. Nationalism and resistance to foreign occupation appear as the least relevant factors behind suicide terrorism in Pakistan. The findings of this research are based on a multi-level analysis of suicide bombings, incorporating both primary and secondary data. In this study, the author also decodes personal, demographic, economic and marital characteristics of Pakistani human bombs. On average, Pakistani suicide bombers are the youngest but the deadliest in the world, and more than 71 percent of their victims are civilians. Earlier concepts of a weak link linking terrorism with poverty and illiteracy do not hold up against the recent data gathered on the post-9/11 generation of fighters in Pakistan (in suicidal and non-suicidal categories), as the majority of fighters from a variety of terrorist organizations are economically deprived and semi-literate. The majority of Pakistani human bombs come from rural backgrounds, with very few from major urban centres. Suicide bombings in Pakistan remain a male-dominated phenomenon, with most bombers being single men. Demographic profiling of Pakistani suicide bombers, based on a random sample of 80 failed and successful attackers, dents the notion that American drone strikes play a primary role in promoting terrorism in all its manifestations. The study concludes that previous scholarly attempts to explain suicide bombings are largely based on Middle Eastern data, thus their application in the case of Pakistan can be misleading. The Pakistani case study of suicide terrorism demonstrates unique characteristics, hence it needs to be understood and countered through a context-specific and multi-level approach.

Extremism and Counter-Extremism Narratives in Pakistan
Extremism and Counter-Extremism Narratives in Pakistan

Author: Sadia Nasir

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-05-19

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 1000889173

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The book provides an extensive analysis of extremism, extremist narratives and counter-narratives and their role in consolidating exclusive religious, cultural and social identities in Pakistan. Focusing on the construction and institutionalization of extremist tendencies, the book studies the process of the adoption of the narrow interpretation of religion and society, which subsequently was equated with national identity. It looks at the efforts of counter-extremism narratives, which tend to focus on violent extremism while overlooking non-violent manifestations. The author highlights that the main issue with counter-narratives is the difficulty in presenting extremism and its narratives as a threat since they have been normalized with the state being part of facilitating and building them. A valuable and much-required contribution to the existing literature on extremism and narrative building in Pakistan, this book would help students, academics and policymakers in identifying the limitations of counter-narratives in Pakistan, while providing them with a detailed overview of extremism and extremist narratives. It will also be of interest to researchers studying Security Studies and Asian Politics, especially in the context of South Asia.