The Checkpost State in Pakistan’s War of Terror: Centres, Peripheries, and the Politics of the Universal

Abstract

Pakistan is one of the most militarised and unevenly developed political economies in the post‐colonial world. Already acute extractive logics in long‐suffering ethnic peripheries have intensified alongside state repression after the regime of the so‐called “war on terror” was initiated in 2001. In this paper, I contrast the brutalising effects of securitised infrastructure, or what I call the “checkpost state”, with the “politics of the universal” espoused by various popular movements across uneven historical‐geographical terrain. On the basis of personal experience as a political organiser, I highlight difficulties and modest successes in cultivating what Frantz Fanon termed “universalising values” in the building of an emancipatory politics bridging centres and peripheries. I argue that the challenge posed by Fanon during the heyday of revolutionary internationalism is today even more urgent as hitherto spatially insulated peripheries stretch into metropolitan settings.

The Geopolitics of Infrastructure and Securitisation in a Postcolony Frontier Space

“…In this article I have argued that statecraft in the Karakoram has bypassed normative law and administration, and has been periodically accompanied by calibrated violence, evidenced in the impunity that religious militias and banned sectarian groups have enjoyed, as well as in the use of anti‐terrorism legislation against social protest. And as accompanying articles in this issue illustrate, in the present epoch infrastructure and securitisation is a state project linked to uneven development and extraction, financial and legal regimes, ideas of modernity and efficiency (Akhtar 2022; Akhter 2022; Hong 2022).…”

“…It serves as a backdrop not to extraordinary, but to everyday experiences: routine movement, use of public space and public transport, lawful assembly and protest. The causal relationships I identify, violence and authority, dispossession and capitalism, irregular mobility and security, are not unique to the Karakoram, but exist variously in borderlands, internal peripheries, and under settler colonialism (Akhtar 2022;Akhter 2022;Aradau 2016;LaDuke and Cowen 2020). Infrastructure is the "material systems that engineer and sustain" these frequently violent political economies (LaDuke and Cowen 2020:253).…”

The Spatial Politics of Infrastructure‐Led Development: Notes from an Asian Postcolony

“…Meanwhile consumption-hungry, upwardly mobile segments in metropolitan centres like Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad served as a captive, consenting audience to the militarised neoliberal regime. As with its predecessor Zia junta, the Musharraf regime also generated substantial geopolitical rents by taking on the role of frontline state in yet another US-led imperialist war; the so-called "War on Terror" played out not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan's own tribal Pashtun districts, brutalising local populations but, as Akhtar's (2022a) paper in the Symposium highlights, also engendering popular resistance.…”

“…But the contributions to this Symposium advance our conceptualisations of core/periphery dyad in several ways. Akhtar (2022a) develops the concept of the “moving periphery” by analysing how the state controls or channels the mobility of people with origins in the traditional peripheries of the country, even when they are in Punjab. In a similar vein, Karrar (2022) examines the securitisation of mobility in the northern borderland region of Gilgit‐Baltistan, especially in the context of its undemocratic constitutional status in the federation of Pakistan.…”

Dams, Development, and Racialised Internal Peripheries: Hydraulic Imaginaries as Hegemonic Strategy in Pakistan

“…Pakistani historical geography is marked by distinct ethno‐regions and regional autonomy movements, a highly uneven economic geography, a long and intimate history with river development, and a history of technocratic and authoritarian military rule. As such, the country’s history provides a privileged site of theorisation of the political geographies of peripheries—a theme that connects several of the articles in this special issue (Ahmad 2022; Akhtar 2022; Karrar 2022).…”