Articles by S Akbar Zaidi

With an election due by late summer, the Pakistani military and its clandestine wings have begun attempts to manage, if not control and influence, events leading up to the polls. Journalists and bloggers have been picked up and beaten by “masked armed men,” and mentioning Balochistan or talking and writing about what is happening in one of Pakistan’s provinces is dangerous to life and liberty. The silenced, missing Baloch has become a symbol of the Pakistani state’s intransigence, not much reported in the local or international media.

There is a political transition taking place in Pakistan. Although the dominance of the army has not diminished, in the last two decades there has been a noticeable deepening of democratisation processes. In the future, if there is another attempt to impose military rule, there could be greater opposition; processes to undermine the military's hegemony are already evident.

The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics by Ayesha Jalal; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014; pp xii + 435, $35.

Examining the numerous and often contradictory issuesand problems that emerge in trying to look at a statist or Islamist Pakistan, this paper points out that both undermine the vast array of processes that are at work and feed into the nature of Pakistan's state and society. Scholarship on Pakistan's political economy still lacks a comprehensive theory of the Pakistani state and of its society. The attempt here is to identify and explain the issues and constraints in doing so.

The victory of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's party, the geographically fragmented verdict, the lack of a clear ideological distinction between the political parties in the fray and the poor showing of progressive, left wing forces – suggest that there are part things “new” and part things “old” in Pakistani politics following the election results in 2013.