Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in Pakistan’s Punjab, the country’s agricultural heartland and home to the world’s largest contiguous irrigation network, this essay posits a structure of feeling of devaluation among officials of an irrigation department. It examines everyday practices of supplementing salaries, anti‐corruption measures, World Bank intervention, and officials’ efforts for an enhancement of the bureaucratic scale and refusals of work. It argues that alienation from official roles, erosion of authority, knowledge practices amid patchy information, and ill will vis‐à‐vis donor organizations cohere as a structure of feeling of devaluation. The devaluation is inflected by individual career trajectories, challenged, and deepened even as quotidian corruption yields gains. Examining corruption as part of the labor process, the essay expands the scholarly lexicon of corruption and bureaucratic work.

This essay tracks the relationship between the legal and the lethal in the Central Intelligence Agency’s operations in Pakistan as part of the U.S.-led war on terror. I juxtapose an account of an automobile accident in Lahore on 26 January 2011 involving the Blackwater employee, Raymond Davis, with a drone strike in the North Waziristan Agency in Pakistan’s (former) Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the day after Davis was released by a court in Pakistan. I examine these “sovereign accidents” as articulations of the legal, political and democratic, and as sites upon which to (re)build understandings of sovereignty and its flourishes. Contrary to the popular tendency to see FATA as a marginal border region, that quintessential space of exception, I examine the FATA as jurisdiction. I thread together political discourse and practice in the U.S. and Pakistan, and by examining media coverage and litigation around the accidents, I show how a question of freedom of information in one setting is a question of life itself in another setting. At stake is the meaning and valence of law, the political, and the promise of postcolonial sovereignty.

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