For the last four decades, Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun tribal areas have been in a constant state of imperialist wars. In reaction to this organized violence, a local civil rights movement, the PTM, emerged in 2014 which powerfully challenged the military’s discursive regime that legitimates these US-led wars. However, the military challenged the movement’s call for justice by launching a concerted discursive drive to construct an enemy image of the PTM. This study aims to discover how the military constructs the identity, as well as the cultural and political meanings of the movement. The authors found that the military strategically organizes its discourse to first build a symbolic order in which an enemy other, less than human, is created, and then its oppression is normalized and made invisible. They hope that the article contributes to the current critical scholarship on the increasing militarization of contemporary public spaces and democratic cultures, particularly in the context of South Asia.

This paper looks at the question of partition of British India in 1947 and the rise of religious extremism in Pakistan through an analysis of internationally acclaimed and award-winning Pakistani film Khamosh Pani (silent waters). The paper uses Symbolic Interactionism and Feminist Theory with a critical perspective to establish how the present-day religious extremism in Pakistan has its roots in the colonial history of the country. However, it also highlights the diagnostic inability of Symbolic Interactionism as it smacks of the volunteerism and overlooks how statist and organized institutional power infringes upon socio-political meaning making processes. This paper argues that the film connects the communal nature of pre-partition violence to grassroots contemporary religious extremism in Pakistan to show how the rupture of a village life is the continuation of colonial heritage of communal violence. We argue based on the findings of this study that religious extremism that is manifest in today’s Pakistan is not a break from the past; instead, it is rooted in the colonial history connecting the national Pakistani elite with the regional neo-colonial interests.

After taking over Kabul for the second time when the US-led NATO forces left Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban resumed their past practices. To run the affairs of Afghanistan, the Taliban use political Islam, the way they understand and interpret it, as the nodal point around which they articulate the signs and symbols in a chain of equivalence. This paper analyses the Taliban’s policies regarding Afghanistan's historical, national, and cultural symbols. Using epistemicide as an analytical device, we argue that in the name of Puritanism and the reconstitution of Afghanistan, according to Sharia, the Taliban discovered and erased all symbols of historical Afghanistan. This tends to serve as a case of epistemicide of the Afghan culture and wipes the slate of Afghan history clean. This paper explains how the Taliban silenced, devalued, and consequently moved to eradicate Afghanistan's cultural memory and knowledge system. This paper provides an account of what the Taliban’s policies convey by silencing Afghanistan's historical texts, histories, and narratives. The Afghan society is faced with internal colonisation, which refuses that knowledge production is a social practice that takes into cognisance the history and culture of the Afghan people, among other factors.