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Legalizing Repression: The Anti-Terror Law and the War on Baloch Political Activists

In June 2025, the Balochistan Provincial Assembly passed a controversial amendment to the anti-terrorism law, granting sweeping powers to law enforcement agencies. The amendment allows individuals to be detained without trial for up to 90 days based solely on suspicion. Far from being a measure to enhance public security, the law marks a dangerous shift…

This Threshold We Call Form: Reading No Man’s Land

“Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers... Live the questions now.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M.D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1934), p. 35 We met…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

The Birth of Necropolitics: How the Riyasat of Pakistan Governs Balochistan

Ask any Baloch, and they will tell you: governance here means "kill and dump." They’re not wrong. In academic language, this is called necropolitics - a mode of rule that governs through the power to decide who lives and who dies. Coined by Achille Mbembe, necropolitics refers to a form of sovereignty in which the…

ByQalandar Bux Memon

A User’s Guide to Western Moral Clarity

“Every empire, however grandiose, is a fragile construction, not unlike a literary text, subject to interpretation, rewriting, and even dismantling.” —Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 331. Let us begin not with politics, but with a parable. On 13th October 2022, Josep Borrell, the European Union's chief diplomat,…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

This is not a curse: On the Iranian people

The destruction of the third world continues with the illegal and potentially genocidal attack on Iran through the American instrument of Israël. Both Israël, and its controllers, especially the United States of America, have been unambiguous in their declaration of intent to strike and cause calamity upon the nuclear sites of Iran. It is certainly…

In the Shadow of Sovereignty

“The world has turned its order upside down; Time has traded one fate for another.” — Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, ca. 1010 CE, trans. Dick Davis, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (Penguin Classics, 2006) Vali Nasr's Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History arrives not a moment too soon. With a nuclear…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Why Gilgit-Baltistan Is Rising Against Pakistan’s Land Seizures

India and Pakistan exchanged aircraft and missile fire under the cover of darkness. The short war, which followed the Pehelgam attack in Indian-occupied Kashmir, cast a long shadow—one under which political repression and elite plunder intensified. While attention turned to airstrikes and patriotic soundbites, the Pakistani state used this moment to unleash a brutal crackdown—not…

ByHaider Buluk & Qalandar Bux Memon

The Cross-Examiner of Memory: Marcel Ophuls and the Documentary as Moral Reckoning

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men.” — Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (1947) Marcel Ophuls died on May 24, 2025, at the age of 97. His death passed with quiet headlines, but the silence belies the magnitude of his…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: A Liberator of the African Imagination

“Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it.” — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics: Essays (Heinemann, 1981), p. 72. As the sun sets on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's life, what vanishes is not just…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé