Shades of Sovereignty: Explaining Political Order and Disorder in Pakistan’s Northwest

Cascades of Violence: War, Crime and Peacebuilding Across South Asia

“…These military surges tended to be taps turned on when new fires started, but turned off when the fire got hot. Naseemullah (2014) argues that FATA was always ruled by a form of 'hybrid governance' that divided coercive power between state and society. State military power was part of the mix, especially because of the way it would arrive in moments of crisis, even if it would step back before the crisis was resolved to allow a return to indirect rule.…”

“…State military power was part of the mix, especially because of the way it would arrive in moments of crisis, even if it would step back before the crisis was resolved to allow a return to indirect rule. Naseemullah (2014) contends that this hybrid governance maintained political order in a restive region. It allowed, for example, a space for those who supported blossoming of the wonderful artistic traditions of the region discussed earlier.…”

Indirect Rule and Varieties of Governance

“…For certain strategically important territories, titular rulers desire more structural capacity for day‐to‐day intervention, yet are unable or unwilling to fully deploy a monopoly of force. In these territories, hybrid governance was established, in which the state explicitly shares authority with social actors, in overlapping spheres of social control and coercion (Naseemullah ). Two features separate hybrid rule from suzerain rule.…”

“…The solution to this security concern, balancing the requirements of state actors for continual surveillance and engagement with tribal groups with the limited resources available for coercive activities, was to create a buffer zone in between the boundaries of conventional state power—the administrative border with British India's districts—and the international border, maintaining an intermediate category of governance between suzerain and de jure rule (Beattie , 195–196). The buffer zone was operated and policed by agents of hybrid governance: political agents and constabularies who could act simultaneously as diplomats, administrators, and soldiers in concert with tribal leaders in the maintenance of political order (Khan 2005; Naseemullah ). Hybrid governance also was implemented in the rural areas of Balochistan, where political order was maintained by tribal levies collaborating with political agents, and the far northeastern borders of British India, where sensitive tribal territories on the borders between Assam and the encroaching states of Tibet and China were amalgamated into the North East Frontier Agency in the 1820s (Bose ).…”

“…Geopolitical considerations are most likely to lead to hybrid rule when a state decides that local social structures and extant political institutions can be key components of a defense strategy and directly interfaces with local actors in hopes of bolstering semiautonomous fighting forces. In Pakistan's Tribal Agencies between 1947 until approximately 2004, state forces operated with a light footprint and shared coercive power with nonstate actors through hybrid rule arrangements (Naseemullah ; White ). The goal was to keep the frontier stable while maintaining political influence against Afghan irredentism.…”