Constructing ‘Pakistan’ through Knowledge Production in International Relations and Area Studies

What is it about?

This book analyses the discourse on Pakistan by exploring the knowledge production processes through which the International Relations community, South Asian area study centres, and think-tanks construct Pakistan’s identity. This book does not attempt to trace how Pakistan has been historically defined, explained, or understood by the International Relations interpretive communities or to supplant these understandings with the author’s version of what Pakistan is. Instead, this study focuses on investigating how the identity of Pakistan is fixed or stabilized via practices of the interpretive communities. In other words, this book attempts to address the following questions: How is the knowledge on Pakistan produced discursively? How is this knowledge represented in the writings on Pakistan? What are the conditions under which it is possible to make authoritative claims about Pakistan.

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Why is it important?

“A remarkable deconstruction of the mainstream Western discourse on Pakistan in the field of International Relations with its ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes and ethnocentric attitudes. Due to its strategic cum politico-cultural location, Pakistan is a prime topic for such a needed investigation that should be emulated for other countries and areas.” — Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations, SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom. “How do countries take on identities—like ‘failed state’—in scholarly literature? Many realize that IR and Area Studies are American social sciences, seeing the world from the point of view of the powerful. But few scholars subject this knowledge/power problem to sustained inquiry. In this groundbreaking study, Ahmed Waheed shows us how ‘knowledge’ about Pakistan is produced and comes to seem like truth. His study will become a model of critique as we try to rebuild international and area studies in the wake of Western hegemony.” — Tarak Barkawi, Professor of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom

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