Crises in the shadows
Ramazan has been a cruel month. A time for piety and forbearance has yielded a harvest of fear, anxiety and vicious political bickering. Terror has surfaced again in Karachi, the…
A flawed scheme
“People do not have enough money to buy medicine. They don’t even have enough money to travel to the hospital. I would wonder how they are managing,” said the prime…
Surmounting crises
Pakistan is in the grip of yet another crisis-this is a recurrent pattern in our history showing weaknesses in the system lacking socio-economic justice, and clash of various conflicting interests…
The crises of a liberal ideology
In an opinion piece published in The News on March 16, ‘The Crisis of an Ideology’, Afiya Shehrbano criticises a particular brand of scholarship, mislabelled as ‘postmodernist’, for adopting a…
Culpability for crises
The debilitating economic crises facing Pakistan and the deplorable state of public services are mostly a result of mismanagement, inaction and the blatantly wrong policies that have been pursued by…
Weaponisation of poverty
In any functioning democracy, poverty should be treated as an economic and human challenge, not a political asset. Yet, in Pakistan, the persistence of poverty has increasingly been converted into…
Climate change is a security threat
The world treats defence as an existential priority – and rightly so, because lapses in readiness can trigger cascading crises. Climate change now carries the same gravity for vulnerable regions…
Why is right-wing populism surging?
Have you ever tried to critically analyse how the global economy structurally functions or which underlying factors influence the world's socioeconomic ecosystem? Edward Bernays, a renowned author and propagandist, states…
A new urban agenda for Pakistan
As World Habitat Day 2025, which falls on October 6, calls for ‘Urban Solutions to Crisis’, Pakistan faces a stark choice. The day could not be more timely for us,…
Darkness closes in
“That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given. Thus hell is not something that awaits us, but…
