Muhammad Shaban Rafi and Ayesha Saddiqa

Hollywood is not just about cinema. It is a political machine, a partner in shaping America’s image and its enemies. Since 9/11, the film industry has marched in step with the Pentagon, producing war stories that blur the line between screen fiction and foreign policy. It is not far-fetched to claim that Hollywood and the […]

In On Populist Reason, Laclau defines populism as the performative act of constructing “the people” by articulating disparate demands into a common identity through discourse, symbols, and antagonism. This process occurs through the creation of chains of equivalence among diverse and heterogeneous demands, unified in opposition to an antagonistic “other,” such as ruling elites or […]

On 14 August 1947, as the clock struck midnight, the air in newly born Pakistan was charged with a single electrifying word-Azadi. For millions, it was more than a political term; it was a lived feeling of freedom from colonial slavery, a promise of dignity, and the dawn of self-determination. In his address to the […]

Pakistan’s civil-military relationship has long defined its democratic trajectory. Even the world, including the US, has accepted it as a new normal. While the country is a multiparty parliamentary democracy, the military establishment remains a dominant actor, shaping alliances, policy outcomes, the economy, and even the rise and fall of dysfunctional governments. In recent years, […]

In an age where pixels often substitute for power, a single smartphone can now expose what decades of silence tried to bury. On a blistering afternoon in the arid landscape of Balochistan, a young couple, Bano Bibi and Ahsan Ullah, were brutally killed for choosing each other over tribal decrees. Once upon a time, such […]

In the sprawling digital landscape of Pakistan, a new form of resistance is quietly taking shape, not on the streets, but on the screens of smartphones and computers. Behind the hashtags and viral posts lie communities of individuals who are leveraging social media not just to vent frustrations, but to document injustices, challenge power structures, […]

Among the many faculties endowed to humanity, language is both a gift and a battleground. In Pakistan, the linguistic terms, such as “ethnic” and “nationalist”, do not just describe speech communities, they shape how they are perceived, included, or excluded. These words have come to represent more than linguistic or cultural categories. Terms like ethnic […]

In Pakistan, political language rarely belongs to the present alone. Whether shouted in a street protest, tweeted by a party loyalist, or aired on primetime television, the language is steeped in memory, often painful, always politicized. Political and apolitical groups alike invoke past traumas using what psychoanalyst Vamik D. Volkan describes as “time collapse”, the […]

In the digital age of diplomacy, the battlefield is no longer confined to deserts and skies, it also unfolds across the digital spaces. During the recent 12-day war between Israel and Iran, the X account of the US President, Mr. Donald Trump, became a commanding force in narrating, managing, and ultimately containing the war discourse. […]

In a strikingly defiant interview aired by ABC News of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on June 16th. He defended his country’s ongoing military strikes against Iran, portraying the campaign not only as a matter of national defense but as a moral obligation to humanity. “This regime is the cult of death,” Netanyahu said, speaking […]