Malakand district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan has been going through phenomenal transformations in the socioeconomic, political, and ecological spheres since 1969. To understand these transformations, this article employs the theories of ‘panarchy’, ‘resilience’, and ‘adaptive cycles’, borrowed from the literature on socio-ecological systems and sustainability transformation. These studies see disruptive transformation as a systemic change in the economy and society in relation to ecology. The evidence for the article is derived from fieldwork conducted by the first author during his doctoral study in 2007–2008 and later visits in September to October 2012. The scales chosen for the analysis are local (Batkhela, Malakand) and regional (North West of Pakistan). The article argues that theoretical constructs such as panarchy, and adaptive cycles have explanatory value to delineate the socioeconomic, political, and ecological transformation, in the Malakand region, over a period. The article finds out that in Malakand, smaller actors at smaller scales enacted change at bigger scales of adaptive cycles. The change at a smaller scale due to the emergence of Batkhela Bazaar brought changes at bigger scales in the region. However, due to the interaction between multiple cycles at different scales, the system demonstrated some resilience to change, consequently forging a sustainable change in the region. Despite these explicit findings, we understand that interpreting theoretical constructs such as panarchies and adaptive cycles requires more rigorous research, particularly to develop a more precise connection between ecological change and socio-economic transformation in Malakand.

This study aims to evaluate the religious and the alternate discourses on women’s political rights in Pakistan; such debates were heightened and intensified as a result of General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization vision and policies implemented between 1977 to 1988. Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization is argued to have polarized women’s participation in politics and challenged the standing of feminist groups, Islamic feminists, and secularists, which made Islam and women’s political participation the subject of debates that are still relevant in the case of Pakistan. The paper argues that Pakistani state’s Islamic disposition in general and Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization in particular provoked religious conservatism and promoted gender-based discrimination that deeply affected women’s political participation. This study seeks to reconcile the different perspectives of Islamic and secular feminism for realizing the goals of effective participation of women in politics. The paper uses a qualitative research method concentrating on thematic analysis, which employs for identifying and analyzing patterns or themes within qualitative data analysis approaches. The findings suggest that in the case of women rights, Islamic feminism and secular feminism are compatible and complementary, and a synthesis of both is imperative to realize the effective participation of women in politics.

This paper explores the concepts of humanitarianism and responsibility to protect, which have most influentially guided state building interventions in the post Cold War period. With more than fifty states intervened in the guise of ‘responsibility to protect,’ this paper attempts to analyze why interventionist state building has developed as a major concern for the international state system. It further delves into the impacts of such interventionist rationale on the nature and functioning of the international state system. This paper argues the rise of sovereignty as responsibility and humanitarianism challenged the inviolable sovereignty of states by making it conditional on the government’s exercise of monopoly over violence within its territory and extension of protection to its citizens against war, crimes, violence and bloodshed. The paper further argues that the selective application of the principle of human security and non-intervention by major powers in crucial conflicts makes the moral ground of this principle very dubious. It also highlights that in post 9/11 period, the mixed successes of these concepts in practice, resulting form a large number of political, institutional and operational challenges, underlie the need to use non-military diplomatic, political and economic means for conflict resolution.

In the wake of a protracted militancy in the Malakand region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the post-2007 military operations in the Swat valley culminated in the soft counter-insurgency approach under the De-Radicalization and Emancipation Programs (DREP). In doing so, Sabaoon was established in 2009 as the first de-radicalization initiative in Pakistan and the only program in the world to de-radicalize juvenile militants associated with Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Furthermore, Saboon focused on reintegrating the juvenile into their communities as productive and valuable citizens. By drawing on primary and secondary data sources, this paper attempts to highlight the push and pull factors that led the children towards militancy, their rehabilitation methods and techniques used at Sabaoon, and the impacts of the rehabilitation program on reintegration into society. The paper argues that the Sabaoon program aimed to promote religious harmony and tolerance by addressing the ideological and social problems that drove the children towards militancy. The study further argues that most reintegrated children are now running their own small businesses, such as auto-mechanic workshops, carpentry, electronic appliances repair, etc., while some serve in government and non-government institutions. However, the data also suggests a higher recidivism ratio among these juveniles.

Taking ‘Ahmadzai Wazirs’ of erstwhile FATA, Pakistan as a case study, this research attempts to explore the impacts of the securitization discourse and border fencing on the socio-cultural lives of the tribesmen who have lived for centuries in the Pakistan and Afghanistan borderland area. This is done by focusing on the perceptions which Ahmadzai Wazir tribes have on the state’s securitization and border fencing narrative, and the resultant impacts on them. In the wake of the policy maker’s decision to fence the border, this paper investigates the perception of the border community about the ongoing border fencing project and the ways in which the border landers defy the territorial notion of state sovereignty. We thus try to engage this comparatively newer theoretical framework, the borderland theory to investigate perceptions of the local people as a distinct cross-border community in order to investigate the notion of security from the perspective of the people on the borderland. The theory allows us to see borderland as a distinct entity as opposed to the hitherto dominant state-centred approach of looking at the border region as state peripheries. A mixed research method was employed to get primary and secondary data and draw analysis.