PhD Panel III: Religion, Ethnicity and Institutional Change in Pakistan

Speaker 1: Salman Rafi (SOAS); Johann Chacko (SOAS); Discussant: Dr. Yasser Kureshi (Oxford)

Speaker 1: Salman Rafi

Talk Title: Intra-Ethnic Fragmentation and the Politics of Ethnically Decentralising Constitutional Changes in Pakistan: A Comparative Study

Abstract:

Within the literature on the politics of ethnic conflict, ethnic ‘majorities’ are often presumed to oppose constitutional forms of power-sharing. In this thesis, I challenge this assumption to show how institutionalised forms of intra-ethnic divisions within the dominant ethnic groups in the ethnic majoritarian states of Pakistan, Indonesia and Fiji drove the political process of ethnic decentralisation. Ethnic decentralisation happens when these internal divisions combine with or manifest as: a) civil-military institutional tensions involving the political and military elites from within the dominant ethnic group as mutually competing ethnic factions, b) social movements emerging from within the dominant ethnic group and pushing for, in alliance with the relevant elites, ethnic decentralisation, and c) a politics of cross-ethnic, multi-party consensus involving the relevant political elites from within the dominant and non-dominant ethnic groups. Employing process tracing as my primary method, I show how these variables casually combine to produce constitutional forms of ethnic decentralisation. When these factors do not exist as such, ethnic decentralisation, as the Sri Lankan case shows, fails to happen. I conclude: the persistence of an ethnic majoritarian system is tied, not to ‘majoritarian intransigence’ but to the absence of the causal mechanism of ethnic decentralisation.

Biography:

Before winning the highly prestigious ‘SOAS PhD Research Scholarship’ in 2018 to read for an M.Phil./ PhD degree in Politics and International Studies, Salman Rafi Sheikh read for an M.Phil. degree in Pakistan Studies at the National Institute of Pakistan Studies (NIPS), Quaidi-Azam University, Islamabad (2013-16). Before that, Salman worked as a full-time lecturer in Pakistan for a year. His publications include a book based upon his M.Phil. research: The Genesis of Baloch Nationalism: Politics and Ethnicity in Pakistan, 1947-1977 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). His op-eds regularly appear in international and regional media, including Asia Times and Himal Southasian.

Speaker 2: Johann Chacko

Talk Title: Power and Faith in the Divine Republic: Religious Parties and Pakistan’s Political System

Abstract:

My project attempts to explain the persistent mismatch between the poor electoral performance of ‘Islamic’ parties in Pakistan and the significant power they exercise in national political life. I argue that elections are only one of four power-generating mechanisms employed, alongside contentious politics, religious norm-setting, and religious legitimation. Pakistan’s Islamic parties work in conditions seen elsewhere in South Asia, i.e. staggeringly high levels of denominational diversity and competition in an atmosphere of heightened religious populism and nationalism and offset by often transactional and patronage-based politics. Yet two structural elements differentiate Pakistan: The Islamic Republic’s deeply encoded and entwined need for both popular and religious legitimacy; and a security state that has proved too weak to rule directly, but too strong to be subdued by politicians. Lastly, I argue that the neglected theoretical framework of David Easton’s political systems theory, especially in conjunction with the methodological paradigm of Critical Realism offers some new possibilities in overcoming the epistemological challenges of accounting for parapolitics, whether in liberal democracies or hybrid regimes.

Biography:

Johann received a B.A. in Geography and Middle East Studies and an M.A. in Middle East Studies from the University of Arizona. He has just joined Knology, a New York City based think-tank as a full-time researcher and is also the South Asia columnist for the UAE’s The National. Elements of this talk are drawn from his doctoral thesis, which he is currently writing up and from his chapter “Religious Parties” in the edited anthology Pakistan’s Political Parties: Surviving Between Dictatorship and Democracy published by Georgetown University Press (2020). He can be followed on Twitter @johann_c_c

Zoom link: https://soas-ac-uk. zoom.us/j/95050056553?pwd= SERVeHNPWmZORHVDRkhSSEpUMjl6QT 09
Meeting ID: 950 5005 6553
Passcode: 05ytuKiDvX