Ruling elite, ideology and power-politics : a critical analysis of Pakistan's geopolitics

• Main Author: Iqbal, Imran
• Published: University of Leeds 2015
• Subjects: 320.95491
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.713497

This thesis provides a critical analysis of Pakistan's geopolitics. It examines why Pakistan remains preoccupied with a state-centric view of conventional security, based on military defense of territorial security/integrity against external threats. It questions why the ruling elite of Pakistan perceive and interpret this geopolitical order as a given, unproblematic and therefore natural condition. Drawing on critical insights — in particular, critical perspectives on geopolitics and ideology — the research explores how the ruling elite, during successive regimes in Pakistan, have employed a confluence of ideological and strategic 'imperatives' to rationalize and naturalize the state-centric view of conventional geopolitics. In this regard, the thesis makes a significant contribution to the existing body of literature on power-elites, the 'construction' of security threats, and the ideological character of Pakistan's geopolitics. In examining the ideological and strategic orientation of the ruling-elite of Pakistan, this thesis explores four major and self-contradictory ideological projects in Pakistan: Islamic- Democracy of the 1950s, Islamic-Socialism of the 1970s, Islamisation of the 1980s, and Enlightened-Moderation of the 2000s. In so doing, it considers if the ruling elite constructed ideological rhetoric into the strategic environment of Pakistan in order to conflate it with the changing contours of international and regional geopolitics. The thesis argues that this enabled elite to rationalise and justify the state-centric view of conventional geopolitics in the service of a number of interests. In particular, elite used this geopolitical order to draw legitimacy, economic, diplomatic and military support and to claim an exclusive and dominant role in the realms of domestic and strategic decision making. The research mainly relies on qualitative methods that include interviews and text-analysis of both primary and secondary sources.