The struggle for Pakistan: a Muslim homeland and global politics, by Ayesha Jalal, Cambridge, MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014, 435 pp., $19.95 (paperback)

Abstract

In the long aftermath of September 11, there has been a renewed focus on the challenges facing Pakistan and its relationship to matters of regional stability and global security. Its unusual history as a nuclear armed frontline state in regional conflicts has profoundly shaped the production of knowledge about Pakistan. Analyses of Pakistani politics have often been framed and driven ostensibly through the prism of informing policy-making and securing Western interests. The resulting scholarship has constructed Pakistan as a strategic problem to solve in the struggle against religious militancy and global terrorism. Whether or not Pakistan is teetering on the precipice of self-destruction and the potential consequences of its demise have been contested points of speculation. <i>The Struggle for Pakistan</i> aspires to challenge prevailing narratives that the country is flawed, failed or failing by design. It aims to show that Pakistan's past was never predetermined, nor its future preordained. Throughout the text, Ayesha Jalal emphasises human agency and historical contingencies as the driving forces behind political and historical outcomes in the country. In this regard, it is a fine work of historical scholarship.