The President of Pakistan issued Tax Laws (Amendment) Ordinance, 2025, published in The Gazette of Pakistan on May 2, 2025, made effective at once. Presidential Ordinance No. IV of 2025…
FOR the last several weeks, life in Balochistan has been paralysed with most highways connecting the province with the rest of the country blocked by protesters, while mobile services have been suspended.…
THE recent in-camera civil-military huddle at Parliament House once again unfolded three conceptual cleavages that have rent apart the polity. One, the establishment continues to seek stability through a ‘hard state’, or…
The COAS has said that Pakistan needs to turn into a hard state, to be able to counter internal and external threats. For far too long has Pakistan trudged along…
OUR violence is counterterrorism; theirs is terrorism. Recently, the army chief addressed parliament after the Jaffar Express train attack in Balochistan. He said Pakistan had to become a “hard state” to fight militancy and…
PAKISTAN appears to fit the definition of a ‘predator state’ which, according to economist James K. Galbraith, is “a political system in which a narrow band of elites uses policy…
Chief of Army Staff General Asim Munir's determination to transform Pakistan into a hard state has started a new debate on social media. The statement came to light during the…
THE discourse on democracy in the West — in particular — is self-congratulatory, and other systems that have delivered hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, hunger, illness, illiteracy…
WHAT is the state of Pakistan’s political system today? Is the country experiencing significant democratic erosion? Is this different from the past? Pakistan doesn’t, after all, have an edifying democratic…
State and society are two distinct institutions. Eroding this distinction opens the doors to state intervention in personal, family and social relations and to loss of individual rights and protection…
