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Political conflict is endemic to a postcolonial state such as Pakistan. Reformulation of the political system after independence draws on a gradual encroachment of tradition defined in terms of identity and ideology over modernity represented by institutional design and citizen orientations. Partition led to structural discontinuity in Pakistan as a seceding state as opposed to India which was a successor state. This book explores the way militarization and judicialization of politics centralized state authority and rendered the federalist arrangement into an empty shell. Waseem traces the emergence of the master narrative based on Islamic agenda and the national project at one end and alternative narratives based on "sons of the soil" movements in East Bengal, Sindh, KP and Balochistan provinces at the other. Analyzing various patterns of conflict, between high culture seeking to transform the society and low culture rooted in the land and the people, between modernists committed to state-building and traditionalists seeking to dismantle the "colonial" state apparatus, and between civil and military elites, the book looks at education and media as longer-term breeders of conflict. The book is a wide-ranging account of a country of multiple contestations. (Abstract)

Political conflict is endemic to a postcolonial state such as Pakistan. Reformulation of the political system after independence draws on a gradual encroachment of tradition defined in terms of identity and ideology over modernity represented by institutional design and citizen orientations. Partition led to structural discontinuity in Pakistan as a seceding state as opposed to India which was a successor state. This book explores the way militarization and judicialization of politics centralized state authority and rendered the federalist arrangement into an empty shell.

The chapter explores the dialectical nature of domestic politics & foreign policy in Pakistan in terms of the colonial legacy, the divorce of public input from policy making, & regional instability. While it is not suggested that public opinion has no influence on Pakistani foreign policy (especially given the wide popular support for the state's nuclear, Kashmir, & pro-Islamist positions), smaller-level ethno-spatial & temporal elements problematize the assumption of popular unanimity. Moreover, Pakistan's foreign policy objectives & priorities have proven themselves susceptible to political change, the dynamics of which are delineated in this paper. K. Coddon