Pakistan

Despite experiencing multiple political and economic crises in recent times, Pakistan’s economy has so far avoided a collapse similar to Sri Lanka’s. It is argued that the key to understanding its economic survival has been the effective utilisation of its unique geography, thereby exhibiting features of a rentier state. Its strategic location has enabled Pakistan to secure military and economic support from three major countries, namely the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia. While this enabled a razor’s edge type unstable economic survival, it also prevented the country from undertaking significant political and economic reforms. 

As Pakistan’s worst affected recover from the recent floods, the province of Sindh and Balochistan will need serious reparatory action from both local and international actors. International actors continue to profit from the extractions and lending enterprises, while locally, the most climate vulnerable are systematically excluded from dialogue and process for development projects that impact their rights to housing and livelihood and protect them from climate change.

Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz decried the dominant narrative in Western feminism of Muslim women as wholly marginalised and without agency.

Vol VI, No 49 DECEMBER 4, 1971

In the 1940s, Bengali Muslim intellectuals sought to find a new autonomy in a comprehensive break with the texts and language of the Hindu-dominated literature of the “Bengal Renaissance.” But within a few years of Pakistan’s founding, a new generation argued that disavowing the past was not libe