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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

The Witness and the Wound: Seeing with Sebastião Salgado

“I photograph to testify, not to preserve.” - Sebastião Salgado, quoted in Lélia Wanick Salgado (ed.), Genesis (Cologne: Taschen, 2013), 14. It was Fall 2005, and I had made my way to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris to see Sebastião Salgado: Territories and Lives. More than an exhibition, it was a map…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

The Lawyer vs the Oligarchy: An Interview with Ehsan Ali Advocate

Below we present a composite write up of three interviews with Ehsan Ali by Qalandar Bux Memon, Haider Ali, and Sonia Qadir. The interviews took place between 2015 and 2022. Comrade Ehsan Ali is a Marxist leader from Gilgit-Baltistan and member of Inqalabi Communist Party. He is the founder of Gilgit-Baltistan Awami Action Committee and…

ByQalandar Bux Memon

Art History’s Unfinished Argument with Itself

"Which art history should I teach in Khartoum?” —Salah M. Hassan, an art historian, critic, and curator, Cornell University. Art history occupies a unique position in the longue durée of intellectual thought. It is a narrative of images and a history of ideas inscribed in pigment and stone, language, philosophy, and shifting regimes of visibility.…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé

ESHAN ALI AND THE GILGIT-BALTISTAN WHEAT MOVEMENT

‘Gandum Subsidy Tehreek’ (Wheat Subsidy Movement) stands as thelargest protest in the history of Gilgit Baltistan region. At its height, it spanned every area and involved hundreds of thousands of people — men, women, children, Shia, Sunni, Ismaili, Noorbakshi, Balti, Burusho, Wakhi, Yasini, Puniali, Astori, Shin, Pathan, Kashgari, Gujjar, Chilasi and Dareli. In Skardu city…

ByQalandar Bux Memon

We Will Not Forget: Feroz’s Life Matters.

The last three years have been a long wait, and it's not over yet, with countless nights and nightmares. Balochistan has been entrenched in conflict for a long time, where students have been the primary victims of state violence. Throughout the last two decades, starting from the 2000s, students have been the vanguard for a…

ByChangeez Nazeer

Histories of the Ephemeral: The Qawwali Legacy of Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad

“ To be a qawwal is more than being a performer, more than being an artist, One must be willing to release one's mind and soul from one's body to achieve ecstasy through music. Qawwali is enlightenment itself.” — Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Gateway Theatre in Chicago, 1993 in an interview to Andy Carvin The…

ByNarendra Pachkhédé