Melbourne Law School - Theses
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ItemThe state of knowledge and knowledges of the state in Pakistan( 2019)The subject matter of this thesis is the Pakistani state in its early years of founding. A broad ranging study of the conditions and discourses that organized the offices of the state, offices inherited and or formally authorized by an outgoing colonial power, has mostly been absent across studies that have found a great deal of other matter to investigate in reference to the Pakistani state and nation. In fact, as attention is often directed at a state that operates above and below as well as through the law in a manner that elides the imposition of limits on it’s powers, this lacunae is significant. Understanding the quality of interaction between branches of government or between the state and its citizenry requires a a slowing down of analysis to take account of these founding conditions; specifically, that representative government was chimerical at best and administrative office holders and members of the high executive acted with considerable latitude in a context of crisis and against ever present fears of national disintegration. In this thesis I argue from the premise that the actualization of governmental order simultaneous to the formal announcement of founding is a central aspect of post-colonial state formation. Furthermore, the priority of sovereignty and the challenges posed to its specific articulation make visible the logics and techniques to mark a dominant site of power in the new state. While it is tempting to see the primacy accorded to administrative offices thereafter merely as a hangover of colonial rule, by which the processes and hence the possibilities of popular sovereignty are denatured, it is my argument that more complicated operations were at play at this moment. To develop this argument I have taken four sites at which definite and deliberate choices were made to give shape to the administrative state. These are: the appropriation of colonial governmental forms and technologies; the promotion of aspirations related to a dominant Muslim nationalism and the quelling of other ideological programs; the alignment of territory and population to enable a concurrence between them in reference to identity and ideology; and the management of Pakistan’s relations with other states to bolster the powers of certain offices and officeholders. These sites enter into fields of operations by which early office holders, as evidenced by a record of their deliberations on a range of issues, engineer a novel governmental order The larger part of this thesis is focused on the early years after 1947 and situates a record of cabinet and executive documents from this time in a broader history of local and global events. This record of speeches, meetings, exchange of memo’s and correspondence traverses a vast field of governmental activity including economic and defense planning, foreign affairs, legislative drafting and relations with provinces. In addition, the presence of documents pertaining to private individuals, including intelligence files shared between governmental departments shows how coercive operations upon persons and groupings complemented the innovation and emergence of more diffuse governmental means. Altogether, the governmental operations within these sites are inter-related and emphasize practices of government in relation to the establishment of the state as an entity separate from nation, in the elaboration of a paradigmatic sense of internal security and in the practices of border-marking for the emergent state.