Defence Minister Khawaja Asif took to social media on Wednesday to swat away Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest provocation, dismissing the claim that Pakistan was running foreign bot farms to poison U.S. opinion against Israel. Netanyahu would do well to read the writing on the wall before taking cock-and-bull stories to international media. According […]
narratives
Balochistan Beyond Economics: Legitimacy, Narratives, and the State’s Responsibility
Balochistan has long stood at the centre of one of Pakistan’s most tenacious governance challenges. As the country’s largest province by landmass and most resource-rich region, it holds immense strategic and economic significance. Yet it continues to experience underdevelopment, political alienation, and sporadic cycles of insurgency. Any serious national dialogue must begin by acknowledging that […]
Safeguarding Sovereignty: Why Pakistan Must Resist Politicised Human Rights Narratives
The contemporary international system is marked by the expansion of conflict into non-traditional spheres. Beyond conventional military engagements, states increasingly confront challenges in the realms of information, digital communication, and narrative construction. Human rights discourse, while central to global normative frameworks, can also become entangled in geopolitical contestation. Present-day security environments increasingly blur the boundaries […]
Students can counter false narratives through digital literacy: PID DG
Director General Press Information Department (PID) Lahore Shafqat Abbas has said that students can effectively counter the spread of false narratives by equipping themselves with media literacy, critical thinking, and digital verification skills, ensuring that truth prevails over propaganda. He stressed that universities and colleges must integrate digital awareness and ethical communication into their learning […]
Cost of Simplistic Narratives
When The Telegraph published Hardeep Singh’s article titled “The Grooming Gangs Rapists Are Mainly Pakistani Muslims, Not ‘Asian’,” it revived a narrative Britain has been trying to move past; one where the fight against child sexual exploitation is reduced to a matter of ethnicity and religion. The piece claimed to expose a “suppressed truth,” yet […]
CPEC versus hostile narratives
Modern technology has been used, since its very inception, as a tool to drive and regulate how people form an opinion. In a web-ified society, social media has become a key driver for starting trends, whether social or political. It is now used even to influence an election process (the world saw traces of alleged […]
The influence of power structures on popular cinematic discourse
Discourses impact our lives. They shape our minds and influence our perceptions towards the realities of it. In addition to this, discourses contribute to the construction of our social realities too. Though the influence of media and books is important in the studies of discourses, the impact of cinema, in this regard, demands intellectual curiosity. Cinema’s […]