This paper examines how the political economy of Pakistan has changed, both in theory and reality, when one considers the country as it actually exists today, and identifies the problems and challenges in trying to theorise about the new political economy. It is a critique of how the political economy has been constructed in Pakistan, especially with regard to the state and the military (perhaps for understandable reasons usually seen as one and the same), ignoring the actually existing country. Since Pakistan has changed in so many fundamental ways, one needs new ways of looking at the state, the military, and its society.

I begin with a brief summary of what theorisation has existed, and for this assess the contribution of the country’s main theoretician of the state and its political economy, Hamza Alavi, to show how he envisioned the state. I then examine some critiques of Alavi that suggest new ways to build on his work, where relevant. I also examine some new formulations about how Pakistan is seen, especially in the context of Islam, 9/11, and some institutions. I identify some of the major changes that have taken place in Pakistan’s social structure and its broad political economy and how the state functions. Following this, I turn to identify the restrictions or problems that exist in providing a systematic analysis of Pakistan’s political economy. Unlike many countries in south Asia and elsewhere, it is difficult to look at trajectories of the Pakistani state in evolutionary terms or on the basis of social structures and path dependence, or what Kaviraj calls "a combination of structural processes and conjunctural openings". The old debate on the autonomy of the state - relative or otherwise - with regard to social structure and class formation poses an interesting challenge. To what extent does Pakistan’s social formation and social structure inform the behaviour and nature of its state?

Theorising the Pakistani State

Despite a number of eminent scholars and academics, there has only been one serious attempt of any significance theorising on Pakistan’s state, but, importantly, not its society. Alavi’s 1972 article and its subsequent reorderings by him (1972, 1983, 1990) have defined, unfortunately for far too long, the limited debate on the state in Pakistan. His thesis of an "overdeveloped state" laid the path for all scholars looking at the state in Pakistan to follow. This is not the place to examine whether Alavi’s simplistic structuralist interpretation of the state in Pakistan was a faithful and careful explanation at that time. For, much work has been built on this erroneous foundation, and any serious scholar in Pakistan today would certainly recognise a very different state and class structure in the country. One could even argue that Alavi’s analysis is irrelevant to what Pakistan is today and the theorisation is merely of historical relevance because the country is very different now by every account.

That all scholarship on the state in Pakistan owes its allegiance to Alavi speaks less about his intellectual insight and prowess than the inability of Pakistani intellectuals, academics and scholars to think for themselves. Alavi’s analysis laid the foundations for an unchanging, static, statist mode and model of analysis, which still dominates discourses on social change and the nature and foundations of the state in Pakistan in the fields of political economy, sociology and political science. However, there are some notable exceptions that have opted to evolve different paths, looking more at the social structure - that is, the country as it actually exists - than what was considered to be the omnipresent and overbearing institution of the state and its core components. While there were and still are numerous flaws in Alavi’s analysis, perhaps the inability to examine - or even understand and recognise - social forces must stand out as his biggest failing. That numerous scholars after 1972 have not recognised or corrected for this failing illustrates the poverty of ideas among Pakistani scholars examining the country’s state and society. Only with it becoming amply clear that Alavi’s highly statist analysis does not help in explaining Pakistan today has recent work emerged that is free of the earlier rigidities.

I briefly summarise Alavi’s key arguments about the nature of the state in Pakistan in 1972 through the work of Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, the most recent and thorough interpreter of the overdeveloped state thesis. Akhtar critiques Alavi’s formulation and builds on it, highlighting significant weaknesses and adapting it to the present socio-economic and political formation of Pakistan. Following this, I provide some pointers that may help in designing and developing a further understanding of Pakistan’s state, its classes, and its institutions.

Simply put, Alavi’s argument is based on the notion that a nexus of power exists in Pakistan between landlords, the military, the bureaucracy, and what he calls "metropolitan capital", which, based on Pakistan’s colonial legacy and evolution, has resulted in an "overdeveloped" postcolonial state presiding over an undeveloped or underdeveloped society. It is the military-bureaucratic "oligarchy" with the three propertied classes of landlords, industrialists, and metropolitan or foreign capital that has kept what can be called Pakistan’s political settlement in place, perhaps too functionally and rigidly. One of Akhtar’s many critiques dismisses Alavi’s "static conception of structure that underlies his understanding of the overdeveloped state". Using a Gramscian framework, he brings in an analysis of the political and cultural spheres, which were missing in much of the neo-Marxist analyses of the 1970s.

As Akhtar reminds us, not only was an analysis and evaluation of society missing in most of Alavi’s work, but also that of resistance and of the working classes. As he argues, "While Alavi’s model of this state has offered much insight into the legacy of colonialism and the state forms it left behind, arguably the most gaping hole in his theoretical treatise is the lack of attention paid to the politics of the subordinate classes, or in other words, the working people upon whose exploitation the entire system of power rests".

There seems to be a complete absence of the dynamics of change and transition in Alavi’s work, and one wonders how a theory of superstructure could have been so easily formulated while ignoring social and class dynamics.

Read next: Role of Intermediate and Propertied Classes

Role of Intermediate and Propertied Classes

Four decades after Alavi’s formulation, it is not surprising that much has changed, not only in how theorisation takes place, but also in terms of social structures and classes in Pakistan. Akhtar recognises these changes and introduces the notion of an "intermediate class" (loosely called the middle class by others), brings in religio-political movements and forces as players in the political arena in Pakistan, and presents the idea of the politics of "common sense". The last refers to how people accept the norm of how power is articulated in Pakistan, hindering the possibility of popular politics and resistance. Instead, "the existing configuration of power is reproduced as a function of both dominance and consent". Alavi interpreted Pakistan’s political settlement and nexus "from above", leading to a statist approach to analysis that has left a deep mark on all the social sciences in the country. But by bringing in subordinate classes as well as groups and classes resisting the nature of the state, Akhtar adds much value to the analysis "from below".

This mode of analysis allows Akhtar to argue that "the structure of power" has changed and is continuously evolving. This dialectic and articulation between state, society, social classes, resistance, and the like, was missing in Alavi’s analysis. As Akhtar argues, "The post-Bhutto conjuncture has been hegemonic insofar as the subordinate classes have participated in the designated political sphere from below as a matter of ‘common sense’. In other words, working people directly contribute to the reproduction of power relations on the one hand by ascribing to the existing patronage-based rules of the game and on the other hand by choosing not to engage in a politics of opposition, confrontation, or what I have called here ‘resistance’. This formulation is premised upon a dialectical logic whereby economic, cultural and political spheres are considered as a holistic unity, suggesting that there is an urgent need to understand politics and culture in greater complexity than has been done in Marxist analyses of Pakistan to date". And, "Ultimately however the emergence of a counter-hegemony that can reorder the prevailing configuration of power depends on the subordinate classes being able to regenerate a ‘politics of resistance’ to displace the ‘politics of common sense".

Another critical correction by Akhtar is critiquing Alavi’s notion of the three "propertied classes". He considers the metropolitan bourgeoisie to be the most powerful of the three. Akhtar makes a distinction between the capitalist logic of imperialism and its territorial logic, arguing that the nature of relationship between imperialism and Pakistan need not be of the capitalist extraction kind, but one which fits into a broader world view of the territorial logic of imperialism, something that seems well articulated after 1979. He correctly states that "Alavi tends to analytically conflate the role of metropolitan capital, with the political impulse of metropolitan states, implying that the operational dynamics of these two qualitatively different manifestations of metropolitan power in the Pakistani social formation are indistinguishable".

Akhtar also argues, "The state oligarchy that existed at partition has changed considerably, as have the three propertied classes in Alavi’s formulation. Crucially it has been the military’s ability to lead the other members of the historical bloc, as well as new contenders for power that have emerged since the 1960s that explains the persistence of the Alavian nexus of power from above. Having said this the military’s embeddedness within the patronage-based political system has in recent times given rise to increasing alienation because of its growing economic and political clout. The military’s rapid rise to the pinnacle of economic, political and social power is in fact the greatest threat to oligarchic rule because it has endangered its historical relationships with other components of the historical bloc whilst also exploding the myth of its selflessness amongst the subordinate classes".

While there is much to build on in Akhtar’s departure from Alavi, there is also some difference of emphasis and understanding. I cannot agree with Akhtar when he states that "Alavi’s basic contention that the post-colonial state is little more than a coercive apparatus and that this apparatus is directly inherited from the colonial state is compelling because the ‘military-bureaucratic oligarchy’ that was essentially a British creation is still the country’s dominant political force," and that "Few scholars of Pakistan would disagree that the coercive role of the state and its ability to maintain a consensus with the dominant classes would appear to be the two defining features of Pakistan’s political economy well into the 21st century". As I will show, it is perhaps not possible to see the state as such, given its fracturisation and inability to function even at a "normal" level.

Due to factors which Akhtar himself recognises - the growth of informalisation in relations of production and exchange - it becomes difficult to acknowledge the coercive nature of the state. Disagreeing with the understanding of scholars who argue that the state has weakened, Akhtar argues that the … "state structure has remained largely unchanged in spite of the dramatic changes that have taken place throughout the social formation, primarily on account of the deepening of capitalism. On the other hand Cheema insists that the state has undergone considerable changes that have both conditioned and been conditioned by changes within society at large. In my understanding the state has changed considerably, thereby losing some of its power to direct the nature of change within the social formation. Yet the Alavian nexus of power has remained intact by adapting the exercise of power through state personnel and emergent social forces so as to facilitate both the accumulation of power and the accumulation of capital". And, "This thesis argues that, though the empirics of capital accumulation in the unorganised sector as posited by Cheema, Hasan and Addleton are largely indisputable, the politics of the process has been such that the state has not been weakened, but has in fact negotiated change in such a manner as to consolidate its power. In other words, given that my concern is with the actual exercise of power, what Cheema and Addleton refer to as the fragmentation and weakening of the state has featured the institutionalisation of a patronage-heavy politics that has insulated the oligarchy and dominant classes from counter-hegemonic challenges".

Other disagreements exist over the role of the landed class. While at the micro level of articulation of power in rural areas, landed power may still be strong in many regions, other intermediate classes have emerged to challenge the old landed power, as Akhtar recognises. It is therefore difficult to agree with him when he says, "Despite the fact that the social power of the landed class has been eroded, it continues to exercise considerable political power primarily because of its continuing patronage by the state oligarchy, but also due to its long-standing politico-cultural entrenchment in the rural social formation. The state’s continuing patronage of the landed class explains why the latter - and therefore the major political parties of the country - does not challenge the oligarchy and consents to remaining junior partner in the Alavian nexus of power".

One is not convinced that the landed class, especially in political parties, which Akhtar correctly recognises are a new vehicle for patronage and access to the state, holds power beyond its immediate locational foothold. It is difficult to accept that "The mainstream political parties - excepting the religious parties - are still dominated by the landed class, and thus there is a feeling that if these parties were to represent any class interest unambiguously, it would be that of the rural notables". This contradicts his observation that "Given that the new bourgeoisie ostensibly can now represent itself through the political party, it is not totally reliant on the civil bureaucracy - or the military as the case may be - to gain access to the state". However, Akhtar does maintain throughout his thesis that the urban commercial classes are now big players and that the landed class is now one patron among many.

There is little doubt that Akhtar’s reworking of Alavi’s arguments of four decades ago offers a corrective to the original formulation, critiques some key failings, and remaps key new developments. Most importantly, unlike Alavi, Akhtar brings in the dominated classes as a subject of analysis. While there has been able scholarship on the Pakistani industrial worker and the peasant, there has been little analysis that examines the subordinate classes or the intermediate classes as a broader political category with the potential, according to Akhtar, to counter-hegemony. Based on Mushtaq Khan’s development of the notion of "political settlement", our understanding of the Pakistani state has been much enriched beyond the static analysis of Alavi. However, despite the value added to our understanding by Akhtar, some questions emerge in the current context of Pakistan’s social formulation, which need further understanding and analysis. These are discussed below.

Read next: A State without Power? Fracturisation of Power and Who Holds Power in Pakistan?

A State without Power? Fracturisation of Power

This section is an attempt to provide a sketch, or markers by looking at institutions, structures, and classes, which might lead to a theory of Pakistan’s political economy. It is exploratory and tentative in every sense of the term, examining possibilities for other scholars to reject, modify or develop. While there is no denying that there is the need for such theorisation, one must also acknowledge the difficulty of the task given the dearth of social science assessment in Pakistan. While many academics and scholars now talk about the "clash of institutions" in the country, or social classes, especially the middle class, and other such sociological phenomena, there has been only sporadic work of any quality that examines social formations or the class structure and class interests, or analyses the nature of the state beyond the mundane and banal. Increasingly, "class" has become a category that has lost relevance for the social sciences, and the discourse, especially in Pakistan, focuses on very broad categories, such as institutions, and on "feudals" and the military.

In recent years, understanding Pakistan has been premised on notions of "Islam", and the country has been forced into an analytical Islamic framework as if no other sense of existence or identity existed. While Islam may be important in analysing Pakistan, it is certainly not the only or even dominant category to examine it, especially its social formation and class categories. It seems that almost all books written on Pakistan, not just by westerners but also by Pakistanis, especially the diaspora privilege Islam over everything else when trying to understand the country. Moreover, it is the Islam of the post-9/11 era that has suddenly surfaced as the core of such analyses. Due to this essentialising of Islam in Pakistan, numerous political events and actors are framed in this straightjacket. Hence, the Taliban, the war on terror, the markers of identity after 9/11, and the invasion of Afghanistan by the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces are all seen as part of an Islamic framework. Responses to the war on terror are also seen as Islamic responses to jihad. While Islam clearly does play a role, this overdetermining use of it as an explanatory category undermines the role of geography, money, tribal loyalties, politics, classes, social formations, and many other more mundane factors.

Work on ethnic politics has also ignored the role of class within ethnic categories, and there has been a clumping together of different ethnic groupings without regard to class, gender, or any further differentiation. The question of imperialism and Pakistan’s place in it has also become blurred by the simplistic approach of seeing the war on terror as the only manifestation of imperialism and opposition to drone attacks as "anti-imperialism". Again, largely by the Pakistani diaspora without seeing the social, economic, and cultural manifestations of how imperialism is really articulated in specific contexts.  The overlap with Pakistani religious parties cannot be ignored here, for whom anti-imperialism simply means being "against drones" or at best being anti-American while continuing to eagerly take aid and money provided by the US.

I now highlight some issues and questions which require far greater analysis and interpretation to give some direction to thinking about Pakistan’s political economy.

Who Holds Power in Pakistan?

Which is the most dominant of the many groups that wield power over the state and its institutions and over society? Until around sometime in 2007, the question "which is the strongest institution in Pakistan?" was always met with the reply "the military". This was unambiguous and did not call for any elaboration. For almost six decades after independence, Pakistan’s military, specifically its army, reigned supreme over the political economy. However, since 2007, there is not just greater ambiguity around the question, but also a number of possible answers. While the military is still powerful, it has now been forced to share the stage with at least two, and possibly three, institutions that can make some valid and genuine claim to being powerful. Perhaps not dominant but at least vying for power in varying degrees.

The military’s hegemony has been questioned and at times even challenged after 2007 by institutions that had not been able to do so until then. The judiciary, parliament, and to some extent the media have tried to assert their independence and sovereignty over the public and political domain, in effect pushing the military aside and making room at the table for themselves. In 2007, the lawyers’ movement for the reinstatement of the chief justice of Pakistan, who was dismissed by President General Pervez Musharraf, became one of the first movements of protest against the chief of the army staff, and by extension, against military rule and its hegemony. The supreme judiciary and the reinstated chief justice have since 2009 passed numerous judgments that have found the military as an institution, as well as serving and retired senior officers, guilty of treasonable offences. While many decisions and judgments are still pending and under review, and while some of those that have already been made have not resulted in the officers concerned being imprisoned, it is highly significant that the judiciary, which had until recently been a partner of the military in its anti-democratic stance and decisions, is in a position to challenge the military and assert its independent stance.

As Najam Sethi has argued, "The reality is that the Pakistan Army exists as a state within the state in Pakistan. It is unaccountable to the civilians but it periodically holds them accountable via imprisonments and exiles during periods of martial law. Until recently, even the actions of a lowly serving military officer in relation to any civilian of any status could not be challenged in a civilian court. Indeed, court-martial decisions could not be overturned even in the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Defence secretaries have been nominated by the GHQ and routinely taken to spurning prime ministerial orders when these did not suit GHQ. And army chiefs have stopped saluting elected prime ministers and presidents of the country. But this reality is changing with the establishment of a strong and questioning media, an aggressive parliament and an activist and independent supreme court. The many omissions and commissions, historical and current, of the generals are now being revealed and shed unfavourable light on their invincibility and credibility. Indeed, there is a rising consensus in civil society, media, government and opposition, that the military cannot lord it over them in the future. Under the circumstances, GHQ would be advised not to spurn public opinion just to save the face of three erring generals from its stock. Two decades ago, the ‘midnight jackals’, as disgruntled officers in the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] so called themselves, launched an operation to oust Benazir Bhutto from power. Today, the ‘day of the jackal’ is fast drawing to a close."

The Asghar Khan case, as it is known, where a retired air marshal of the Pakistan air force filed a petition against the involvement of the military and the ISI in the election of 1990, has probably been the icing on the cake, signifying a militant and activist judiciary, and a vulnerable and retreating military. As Raja, the lawyer involved in the case, has written in 2012, "This was a case primarily about the army officers who had acted with scant regard for their role prescribed by the constitution. The prosecution and conviction of a bunch of politicians could be pursued once the liability of the generals had been determined … Despite the court’s clear declaration that it did not propose to say anything about the armed forces or the ISI as institutions it was clear that the judgment in Asghar Khan’s case would have profound implications, formal as well as informal, for the civil-military imbalance that has plagued the state throughout its history."

While it is inconclusive about how justice will prevail in terms of actionable outcomes in this case and at least two others involving retired military generals, there has not been much precedence of courts headed by civilians passing judgments against prominent military generals.

Equally refreshing is that the military general who removed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from office in October 1999 to become Pakistan’s chief executive was in a jail from May to November 2013, with many cases, including one of treason, still under investigation. It is not often that one can celebrate that Pakistan’s former president/general, the former chief of the army staff, is under arrest and investigation by the courts; ironically by many of the judges of the Supreme Court who sanctified his coup in October 1999. While there is speculation that Musharraf will be allowed to "get away", even this temporary judicial and public humiliation is an important first in Pakistan. As Walsh argues, "In a country where senior military officers are generally considered to be above the law, the sight of a former military ruler facing justice in a civilian court is a startling novelty". Moreover, an extraordinary and unprecedented public debate has taken place on the so-called security agencies, and by extension on the covert role of the military, after the Abbottabad raid on Osama bin Laden in May 2011. While the military and its agencies have their supporters, there has been much criticism of their role and purpose. Public criticism of the military has never been so vocal in Pakistan.

This is probably the first time that Pakistan’s military has been publicly criticised and attacked for numerous shortcomings that led to some of the events of May 2011. Neither the "humiliating" loss of East Pakistan nor the stupidity of Kargil elicited the same public response. Of course, the new non-state electronic media has played a major role in this. Sadly, military generals, whether in 1958, 1977, or 1999, have been welcomed by civilian politicians to take over the government, always supported by some political group or the other, and in Musharraf’s case by civil society and lifestyle liberals. Since military generals, and the military more generally, have been seen as saviours of the nation, there has been little criticism or opposition to their taking over power.

Parliament has also flexed its independent muscles after 2008, though not enough, to demonstrate its right to govern, challenging the hegemony of the military. The media, which has been a participant in this transition, has been a tool for democratic forces to hound the military for its past anti-democratic behaviour. The undisputed dominance of the military in the Pakistani political settlement has been successfully challenged, and from being a hegemon, it may at the moment be just a veto player. While there is no clear winner at this moment, for a country that has known military dominance for more than six decades, these are extraordinary developments. The military is not what it once was in the eyes of the public or in the equation that explains Pakistan’s political economy.

I am not suggesting that there is a power vacuum in Pakistan but, rather, that there are competing contenders for power, all located at different places in the class and state hierarchy. New actors - the media, the judiciary, and parliament - have emerged and have claimed their power to influence the course of the state, its institutions, and the direction and nature of political and economic decisions. Clearly, we are a long way from the classical structuralist or even Marxist formulation of the Pakistani state dominated by landlords, industrialists, and the metropolitan bourgeoisie. Moreover, this re-examination of who holds power in Pakistan leads to a number of important theoretical questions based on how the country actually exists now.

Read next: Classes, Interests, or Institutions?, Informalisation of Everything and Geography and Geopolitics 

Classes, Interests, or Institutions?

The analysis in Pakistan suggests that institutions rather than class determine the nature of the state. The media, judiciary, and parliament are all multi-class institutions, as is the military, although they all work for the defence of the capitalist order in which they function, with the purpose of accumulating more capital. However, they are not class organisations in the way landlords or the industrial bourgeoisie are perceived to be. Yet, these are certainly not institutions that are radical, though they occasionally raise their voices for oppressed nationalities and peoples. Much of the analysis on Pakistan now deals with the role of institutions, their clashes with each other for hegemony, and so on. Class seems lost in the analysis.

The absence of class, of course, follows a global trend where analysis of it has become less relevant generally. It is also because in a country like Pakistan institutions do not easily fit into a class analysis. Nor do classes themselves. The notion of intermediate classes, or the middle class, or working people, rather than the working classes, complicates the ability to use class analysis effectively. In the absence of rigorous research, one would argue that the ruling class or ruling coalition or bloc in Pakistan rules for the interests of capital, its protection, and its reproduction, and for the preservation of the social order. On this there is little ambiguity. However, which classes or groups constitute that ruling coalition is open to debate. That some social groups may be transient in any arrangement of the ruling coalition, dropping in and out of it as circumstances change, also makes analysis more difficult. Nevertheless, despite these challenges, there is a vague implicit understanding on the nature of the ruling coalition, although to what extent this is based on class or institutions, is not very clear.

Informalisation of Everything

It is not just the economy that is a huge mass of the informal - or undocumented, underground, or black - but linked to the question of holding and articulating power, one could argue that the writ of the state does not run across Pakistan and has been replaced by localised interests, vested groups, and mafias.

Estimates show that the informal economy of Pakistan was 91 per cent of the formal economy in 2007-08, which, according to researchers, is a considerable. Given the boom in the unregistered or undocumented economy since then, this constituent of Pakistan’s economy must have increased considerably. Evidence such as that 70 per cent of Pakistan’s population has mobile phones when many economists think more than 40 per cent of the population is poor suggests considerable informalisation of the economy. Pakistan, for the most part, is almost all urban. Even rural areas are now predominantly non-agricultural with non-farm or non-agricultural sources of income dominating. With this, relations of production and exchange have undergone considerable transformation, and become different from what used to be considered the norm.

Not just the economy, but the state’s main instrument that determines who actually wields power, the ability to do violence, has also been parcelled out and informalised and localised. The state’s writ has been reduced geographically, and private militias, goon squads, militants, groups that one can broadly call the "Taliban", and such organisations not only manifest their ability to do violence, but also actually challenge the brute force of the state. Power, or force, or violence, is not concentrated in the Pakistani state alone and numerous groups exercise such power independent of the state.

Even in the case of essential services, such as social services, what is called the private sector provides protection, safety, electricity, water, education, health, and so on to the public, irrespective of where they are on the social and class hierarchy. The state continues to fail in fulfilling its social contract, and even basic aspects such as safety and protection have been parcelled out to private firms. This so-called private sector is barely regulated or monitored and is a law unto itself, usually oblivious to, or regardless of, the law that ought to regulate such non-state activity. Along with the large informal economy, one has informal institutions, all unregulated, undocumented, unchecked. These are elements of a weak, fractured state, not a strong one.

Geography and Geopolitics

Pakistan’s state and its society have been shaped markedly by events that have originated outside its geographical borders, notably in Afghanistan. Whether it has been fighting Soviet expansionism or US designs, wars in Afghanistan have had major repercussions on the state and society in Pakistan. It is not possible to undertake an analysis of either without bringing foreign interests to the centre of the equation. Whether it is the role of Saudi Arabia or the US, their influence around and in Pakistan may have altered the trajectory of society and of the state, perhaps permanently.

While the rise of Islam and its influence have been marked in Pakistan since at least the mid-1970s, global and regional events have given Islamisation a very different form altogether, well before 9/11. The interaction of money, arms, and influence from abroad has resulted in some of the issues raised above, such as the informalisation of the state, of the economy through remittances, of the ability to do violence with jihadists following an unspecified Wahhabi and sectarian agenda, and the rise of new organisations and institutions that have developed parallel to the state, such as religious institutions. Perhaps the territorial logic of the US may have been the strongest force among the many that assert considerable influence and power over Pakistan. And the extent of US influence also highlights the comprador and co-opted nature of the institutions of Pakistan’s state, especially the military and government. A complicit and comprador civil and military elite is unable to develop national and nationalist agendas, whether they be economic, political, or diplomatic. It is probably local fractures and weaknesses that allow too much space to be appropriated by foreign powers.

Read next: Counter-Hegemony?, Those ‘Unknown Unknowns’ and Conclusions            

Counter-Hegemony?

What of the social groups and classes who oppose the system of exploitation and expropriation? The absence of an organised left political movement since the mid-1970s, and the recent rise of globalised and globalising middle classes and groups have meant that the margins look more like the mainstream. Opposition to the state is led more by sections of what we can call the middle classes - such as those demanding water and electricity, not connections, but an uninterrupted supply - rather than the working classes, labourers, and peasants demanding better working conditions or higher pay. It is the unorganised nature of protest that distinguishes Pakistan from the past, from the 1960s and 1970s. The decline in trade unions and in class politics, broadly defined, has made protest far more middle class, and in many ways is giving rise to an apolitical politics.

The one form of counter-hegemony which stands out in Pakistan is that of militant Islam, which varies its politics and targets depending on specific circumstances. Organised and unorganised Islamic jihadist groups have challenged and continue to challenge the state of Pakistan, and its institutions such as the military and parliament, and politicians perceived to be not Islamic enough. It is also the spontaneous street support of such groups - not all of them are jihadists and many reflect the so-called softer versions of Islam - that underscores the point made above of the privatisation and informalisation of the ability to do violence, as well as the state’s reluctance and inability to directly confront such forces.

If there is any counter-hegemony in Pakistan, it is of the Islamic militant kind, ignited more by moral injury of the subaltern classes or the working people (but not one based on class). Yet, a vast proportion of Islamic militants, particularly those that take to the streets, represent what are also subaltern classes and working peoples. The contrast between two events in September 2011 underscored the marked difference in the politics of the street and of the suppressed classes. There were huge protests all across Pakistan many of them very violent in which public and private property was destroyed and two dozen people were killed, in reaction to a YouTube trailer about a film ridiculing the Prophet of Islam. Thousands of Islamists, not all of them militants or jihadis, took to the streets on 19 and 20 September 2011, even in small towns, in a rage to protest against the trailer. In sharp contrast, when 259 workers, both men and women, were burnt to death in a garment factory in Karachi on 11 September 2011, a week earlier, there was barely any reaction from any political party or segment of civil society, or even by workers and the trade union movement against the owners of the factory or the labour department responsible for overseeing the safety and security of workers. The nature of the Islamists’ protest and politics does not have class issues as motivators. They are not limited to local or domestic issues, and are frequently triggered by global and international responses of a religious kind. Such apparently non-material and abstract triggers, do, of course, have very real and material consequences, but they make analysis even more problematic.

Those ‘Unknown Unknowns’

Any objective analysis ought to be based on current understanding and knowledge to answer questions, even on the nature of Pakistan’s state. Yet, time and time again, social scientists in Pakistan have not been able to identify likely scenarios, or give a convincing explanation of what happened even after the event. Predictions in Pakistan are notoriously impossible and predicting Pakistan’s future is equally difficult, given that events around the country have such a strong bearing within it. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, 9/11, and other less dramatic events, all unpredictable, have had an impact on Pakistan that has lasted decades, and taken it on a course unanticipated before them. Unlike many other countries that have a logic of path dependence and internal consistency, and allow one to make projections into the future, one must emphasise that Pakistan poses a severe challenge, to say the least.

Conclusions

When the chief justice of the supreme court of Pakistan has to take suo motu notice of a killing of a taxi driver in Karachi by the Rangers, a paralegal institution, one wonders if there is such a thing as a functioning "state" in the country that goes about its normal business in a supposedly normal manner. Either that, or whatever the norm for the state in Pakistan is, it seems different from the norm of a functioning state in many developing countries. Moreover, this particular suo motu notice was one of many where the chief justice has had to intervene in the way the government sets prices, deals with vested interests, and goes about its daily business. Where is the state in the way Pakistan functions? Even if one concedes that theoretically the monopoly of violence rests with the state, in the context of Pakistan, that monopoly has been fractured and appropriated by numerous militias and mafias right across the country. Non-state actors are probably more powerful than state actors in many regions of Pakistan, and one is not talking about the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but Karachi. The state does not any longer have monopoly over violence in Pakistan, and it does not have the ability to tax or to protect its people (including the elite). The overdetermined dependence on analysing Pakistan’s state, over its society or social formation, has resulted in much of the scholarship on the country’s political economy and political science being largely "statist" and straitjacketed. It has resulted in scholarship undermining and ignoring the changing nature of Pakistan’s social formation and the continuously changing nature of the state. This not just static, but statist, analysis, which owes much to the path dependence created by Alavi’s analysis of 1972, has followed a top-down approach, disregarding actually lived conditions and relationships. Pakistan may not have an overdeveloped state, but it certainly does have overdeveloped statist analysis.

While there has been some change over the last couple of decades, much of the discourse on Pakistan’s state and its social formation is still very Alavian and statist. In some cases, this statism has more recently been replaced by an Islamic lens where all developments in the country are realised and explained not just through an Islamist perspective, but one deeply embedded in 9/11. Often scholars fail to distinguish between the Islam that actually exists in Pakistan and the war on terror and the changing geometry after 9/11. Islam and 9/11 are used interchangeably, obfuscating any serious analysis. Alavi’s analysis of the Pakistani state was constructed at a time of top-down military dictatorship and has limited temporal value. Perhaps the reason why his analysis lacked an analysis of the social relations of production and of the social structure was because the nature of the state under military dictatorship may have been considerably more autonomous, which made it unimportant to explain how the state responded to social structures and developments. Under civilian and democratic government, it becomes far more difficult to ignore social structures.

As has happened so many times in Pakistan’s history, events with unintended consequences have shaped developments. Yet, social and economic change has also been somewhat anticipated and predictable, giving rise to somewhat more certain outcomes. The growth of urbanisation, of a middle class, and of a hugely buoyant informal sector, and the breakdown of state authority and of state institutions has been unfolding almost expectantly. The previous trend of the "urbanisation of everybody" seems to have morphed into an "urbanisation with informalisation" with the co-movements of urbanisation and informal relations of production and exchange dominating social and political interaction. What this means for subsequent developments remains uncertain and one can merely speculate about alternative scenarios.

What this exploration has tried to do is to examine the numerous and often contradictory issues and problems that emerge in trying to look at a statist or Islamist Pakistan. Both undermine the vast array of processes that are at work and feed into the nature of Pakistan’s state and society. Scholarship in and on Pakistan’s political economy still lacks a comprehensive theory of the Pakistani state and of its society. My attempt to identify and explain the issues and constraints to doing so does not resolve the problem of how to construct a new political economy of Pakistan, but I hope it will point in the right direction to begin a conversation on ways of doing so.

The writer (sakbarzaidi@gmail.com) is a Karachi-based political economist currently teaching at Columbia University, New York.

The article was published in EPW