Destruction as Rule: Containment, Censuring and Confusion in Pakistani Balochistan

This dissertation explores the contour and content of state-ordered destruction in the construction of state, territory, and subjects. To do so, it carries out a historical and ethnographic study of state violence, from the colonial era until today, in Pakistan’s southern province of Balochistan. Through this study, the dissertation argues: Where the construction of state, territory, and subjects requires a rendering of society as legible in order to create it and make it manipulable for the purposes of rule, the destruction of politics, places and peoples requires a rendering of networks opposing the state as obscure in order to dismantle them and make them docile for the same purpose. These networks, or “counter-societies,” are collective identities that transgress and resist the state’s version of society proper, e.g. through the collective identities of the anti-colonial rebel, the revolutionary communist, or the separatist ethnonationalist. In turn, society proper is constituted by state-sanctioned identities considered necessary for rule, like the “tribal” colonial subject or the loyal and growth-minded Pakistani citizen. Through a close reading of three cases of state violence in the colonial, early post-colonial, and contemporary era–a 1918 colonial-era military expedition, a 1973-’77 counterinsurgency campaign, and post-9/11 displacements, disappearances, killings, and army raids–the dissertation argues that the state sought to contain the “infection” of “fanaticism” in the colonial era, censure alternative ideas of Pakistan as socialist and multi-national in the early post-colonial era, and confuse attempts to articulate a counter-hegemonic front against the violence of the state in the contemporary era.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Ahmad, Mahvish

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Desai, Manali
• Navaro, Yael

• Balochistan
• Pakistan
• South Asia
• violence
• state
• sovereignty
• citizenship
• political subjectivity
• hegemony
• counter-hegemony
• colonial violence
• British India
• indirect rule
• colonialism
• post-colonial violence
• counter-insurgency
• Cold War
• communism
• National Awami Party
• Baloch Popular Liberation Front
• Pararis
• Jabbal
• confusion
• opacity
• destruction
• censorship
• containment
• illegibility
• legibility

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/5c4da25b-355e-4301-9afa-f2572723ea91/download
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.38970

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/291810