This chapter aims to rethink Pakistan's political economy, prompted by S. Akbar Zaidi's critique of Hamza Alavi's influential paradigm. The Alavian model describes the relations between different institutions in Pakistan. These institutions interact with class formations, both ‘indigenous’ and ‘metropolitan’. Zaidi (2014) and Akhtar (2008) amongst others have characterised this model as ‘static’ and ‘dated’. Indeed, much has changed in the intervening forty-five years, both in Pakistan as well as in the study of the processes of political subjection in general. This chapter addresses these changes with particular reference to one of the most significant aspect of the Alavian model – his theory of the state.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING?

It is conceivable that Hamza Alavi might have glimpsed something right at the moment of its demise. His encounter with this spectre has become the cornerstone of his legacy. Alavi's scholarly corpus is undeniably sophisticated, substantial and significant, and his insights continue to animate important avenues of research on the political process in Pakistan and beyond. However, it is his theorisation of the nature of the postcolonial state that remains his most widely cited insight. Indeed, since its publication, Alavi's outline of this framework in the New Left Review has been cited, according to Google Scholar, more than eleven hundred times by scholars all over the world. This article outlining the idea of the ‘Overdeveloped State’ has been scholars’ primary window into Alavi's work, being cited three times more than anything else he has written.

At the time, Alavi was responding to prevailing debates on the nature of the state internal to a community of scholars who identified themselves as Marxian or Marxist. Much of this debate followed the development of ‘the state’ in the European context from which were derived generally applicable models of the state. Alavi was responding to this geographic bias by considering the manifestation of ‘the state’ in postcolonial societies. His analysis was based on sociological observations made at a specific moment in the social history of Pakistan. This moment was the turbulent 1970s, when the political order was in flux and the eastern half of Pakistan had just managed to liberate itself to form Bangladesh. The debate Alavi was responding to, however, was not centred on Pakistan. His aim, much like his interlocutors at the New Left Review, was to arrive at a ‘generalised’ theory of the state.

The genesis of this book lies in teaching a course on the economic development of South Asia, at both Oxford University and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and in trying to assess and explore ideas about the political economy of regions and states other than those of India. Unlike the rich academic literature on studying India and other countries of the Global South across a variety of schools of thought in economics, politics and political economy, the limited focus on Pakistan has largely been dominated by a single framework, one proposed by Hamza Alavi, which focused on the notion of an overdeveloped state, with regard to Pakistan and, later, Bangladesh, in a paper published in the New Left Review in 1972. One option for teaching such a course was to use the comparative nature of scholarship, primarily one based on the Indian academic and social science tradition and historical context, and consider its relevance for Pakistan. However, as academics, researchers and scholars of India, or the other countries which constitute South Asia realise, that while this is how much of the academic teaching and research in and on South Asia usually functions, it is a very suboptimal choice of teaching and scholarship, given the specificities of the different countries. Pakistan, like the other South Asian countries, differs substantially from India, given its political economy and history, and requires an examination based on its own terms and in its own context. While exceptional scholarship of social scientists from India and those who work on India is now increasingly providing theoretical and empirical evidence redefining numerous theoretical paradigms – as we find in this volume as well – what has been lacking for at least four decades now is rigorous assessment of Pakistan's political economy, which, until recently, has continued to be dominated by the work and influence of Hamza Alavi.

In February 2016, Professor Matthew McCartney and his student Muhammad Ali Jan organised a workshop in Oxford sponsored by Wolfson College and the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme (CSASP) to address this problem and to assess the state of scholarship in the social sciences and of the political economy of Pakistan, almost four-and-a-half decades after Alavi's thesis.

INTRODUCTION

In his thoughtful and expansive essay, S. Akbar Zaidi (2014) invites us to rethink and destabilise the ‘statist bias’ in the political economy scholarship on Pakistan, considering the significant transformation in both state and society dynamics in recent decades. He does not claim to offer an alternative theory; his intentions are more modest: to get the intellectual ball rolling by highlighting an important weakness in the literature. Specifically, Zaidi (2014) seeks to emancipate social science theorising about the Pakistani state from what he thinks is the wilted straitjacket of Alavi's (1972) ‘overdeveloped state’ thesis.1

Zaidi (2014) rightly considers Alavi's analysis to be dated and static. Drawing on Akhtar's (2008) critical recent re-examination of Alavi, he believes the biggest flaw in the overdeveloped state formulation is its ‘inability to examine – or even understand and recognise – social forces’ (Zaidi 2014:48). Zaidi (2014) does concede that Alavi's thesis may have been relevant in the past, but is losing relevance given the increasing ‘fracturization’ of state authority in Pakistan, with changes in the social structure, and the concomitant rise of violent non-state actors.

Along the way, Zaidi (2014) advances several bold and important claims. First, he urges scholars to formulate a theory of the state that integrates the complex social processes that are feeding into and modifying the nature of state–society relations in Pakistan. Some of these processes are ‘[t]he growth of urbanisation, of a middle class, and of a hugely buoyant informal sector, and the breakdown of state authority and of state institutions’ (Zaidi 2014:53). Second, he believes that the military is no longer the domineering Godzilla that it once was. Instead, newer centres of power, such as the higher judiciary and private electronic media, as well as mainstream political parties, have begun to contest its domination (understood here as the recurrent use of violence, threats and other means to make others do what they otherwise would not do). While by no means a decisive shift, Zaidi (2014) believes this friction and resistance is important to recognise in our thinking about civil–military relations. Third, Zaidi complains that scholars and intellectuals have abandoned the study of class in favour of institutions, which in his neo-Marxian view, are primarily ‘multi-class’ entities dedicated to preserving capitalism. Since institutions (and other political actors) exist to reproduce the capitalist system, he casts doubt on the utility of institutions as independent or explanatory variables.

Much of the literature on politics in Pakistan starts with the assumption that the country is characterised by clientelistic politics. Such politics can be defined as the politics that comes into being when powerful patrons drawn from the ruling elite perpetuate their hold on power through the use of their official position and access to the state, to provide voters and constituents with goods and services in exchange for the latter's continued support. Whether it is landlords in Punjab (Javid 2011; Martin 2014; Mohmand 2014) or criminal networks aligned with political parties in Karachi (Gayer 2014), the proposition that citizens support politically connected elites capable of providing them with patronage amidst the existence of a broadly undemocratic and dysfunctional system of governance, what Akhtar (2008) has referred to the as the ‘politics of common sense’, is one that has achieved the status of conventional wisdom. However, despite a broad consensus on the existence of patronage politics in Pakistan, comparatively little work has been done on outlining the precise mechanisms through which this form of politics operates; while it is acknowledged that patron–client politics exists, and ethnographic work on the subject has demonstrated the everyday forms of negotiation and contestation that characterise it at the local level, there is a corresponding lack of focus on the institutional framework of patronage politics, particularly in terms of how legislation, political parties and the formal apparatuses of the state shape and determine the receipt and disbursement of patronage.

The lack of attention paid to the actual institutional moorings of patronage politics in Pakistan is compounded by an absence of analytical work focusing on the changes and opportunities generated by the country's recent transition to democracy. While there is a considerable body of scholarly work that has examined the impact of colonialism and military authoritarianism on the structure of Pakistan's political institutions, less has been said about the ways in which almost a decade of uninterrupted, if often flawed, democracy has begun to transform the country's politics into something arguably akin to what Chandra (2004) has called a ‘patronage democracy’, in which the public sector remains an essential provider of employment and services,1 and in which those charged with distributing state resources can exercise considerable discretion in doing so.

This is not a book about Hamza Alavi (1921–2003), the Pakistani Marxist sociologist/anthropologist, but about social science in Pakistan, with a particular focus on its political economy, broadly interpreted. Specifically, this book is trying to understand why, how and with what consequences did one particular theoretical perspective come to exercise such a dominating influence on the analysis of state and society in post-independence Pakistan. There was much brilliant and insightful work done in the 1970s and 1980s on agrarian transition (S. Ahmad 1977; Khan 1975; Khan 1981; Hussain 1980), on industrial concentration (Amjad 1983), ethnicity (Ahmed 1998), and democratisation (A. Ahmad 1985, 2000). Yet it was Alavi's overdeveloped state thesis that dominated discussions and continued to determine how the Pakistani state was envisaged.

One possible explanation why Hamza Alavi's thesis has persisted and dominated, especially in the context of Pakistani scholarship, is the sheer breadth of Alavi's intellectual and practical engagement. Many of the studies and academics mentioned above are essential references confined to relatively narrower terms of engagement and disciplines, but wherever one approaches Pakistan through the broad political economy perspective, one finds that Alavi's pioneering work to be of noted relevance.

Before casting the spotlight on this one intervention, a quick digression on the extraordinary range of Alavi's career and scholarship would be worth our while. After all, he ‘was one of the most important intellectuals from the Asian subcontinent to participate in (and in many cases formulate the terms of) debates from the 1960s onwards about Third World development’ (TB 2004:341). This digression may help us understand some aspects of his overdeveloped state thesis.

Alavi started his career in the Bank of India as a Research Officer in 1945 and by 1952 he was one of its five principal officers. Unlike most (if not quite all) Marxist intellectuals, Alavi left a comfortable career and moved to Tanzania to take up farming. He later enrolled for a PhD at the London School of Economics and then pursued a more conventional academic career at the Universities of Sussex, Leeds and Manchester. He was editor of Pakistan Today and was on the editorial boards of the Journal of Contemporary Asia and the Journal of Peasant Studies.

INTRODUCTION

In his ‘Rethinking Pakistan's Political Economy’, S. Akbar Zaidi (2014:50) argues that ‘“class” has become a category that has lost relevance for the social sciences’ in Pakistan and that ‘the country has been forced into an analytical Islamic framework as if no other sense of existence or identity existed’. This chapter confirms Zaidi's observation by referencing it against Alavi's (1988) thesis on women, class and Islam. The comparison reveals how Alavi's earlier class analysis has since been replaced by the privileging of Islam as a category of analysis in a body of post 9/11 scholarship. It also demonstrates how defensive apologia, offered by those who claim a left identity, has prevented the emergence of a new and gendered reading of Pakistan's political economy, since it has been busy saving Islam and the Muslim man from feminist critique and global imperialism.

The first three decades of the newly independent state of Pakistan were marked by successful pressure from women's groups and activists for the feminisation of its policies and institutions. The 1977 military coup by General Zia ul Haq was followed by a regime under which the earlier ambitious modernisation period was replaced by an aggressive conservatism enforced by a social and legal Islamisation campaign. This was met with resistance from a small but vocal Pakistani women's movement during the 1980s. According to Hamza Alavi,

This acknowledgement of the agency of women's resistance to a masculinist state and of the importance of their contributions towards Pakistan's democratisation is a departure from Alavi's (1972) original un-gendered thesis of the overdeveloped Pakistani state in which women are an invisible category. But the criticism regarding Alavi's gender blindness warrants deeper investigation. Women's rights movements in Pakistan have held contradictory relations with military regimes. These relations have been hostile and confrontational at times and at others, yielded advantageous or beneficial policies for women.

INTRODUCTION

S. Akbar Zaidi (2014) advocates a need for a critical reappraisal of the most influential works of Hamza Alavi on the postcolonial state of Pakistan. Alavi is significant because most of the critical political economic literature on Pakistan can trace back its roots from the original works of Alavi (Zaidi 2014:48). To understand Alavi's work, it is necessary to be cognizant of the following three broad conjectures: the historical legacy of colonialism, internal class formations of the postcolonial society and the relationship of the postcolonial state with the external world (core countries of the Global North). This chapter primarily focuses on the first two conjectures.

This chapter builds on recent scholarship (see Akhtar 2018; Zaidi 2014) and presents a new understanding of the postcolonial state-society in Pakistan by drawing from Lefebvre's (2009) work on state-spatiality and the Marxian circuit of capital framework. It is argued in this chapter that the postcolonial state of Pakistan can be best characterised by uneven state spatiality. The dynamics of state-spatiality have been largely overlooked in the existing literature2 on postcolonial Pakistan. It is time to draw from this rich strand of literature to delineate the inherent contradictions of the postcolonial state and society of Pakistan. Zaidi (2014) marks a major departure from Alavi's class formulation by arguing that institutions are more significant as compared to class in understanding dynamics of postcolonial Pakistan. This chapter adds to the class versus institutions debate by using the Marxian circuit of capital framework. It is argued here that both class and institutions are dialectically interlinked and they mutually co-determine the underlying political economic dynamics of postcolonial capitalism in Pakistan.

The rest of this chapter is structured as follows. The second section introduces the processual concept of the state. The third section presents the notion of state spatiality and socio-spatial dialectic and the next section juxtaposes the concept of processual state and state-spatiality in the context of the postcolonial state of Pakistan. In the fifth section, the political economy of informalisation in Pakistan is discussed in the context of the heterogeneity and fractured nature of the postcolonial state. The sixth section discusses the importance of using the Marxian circuit of capital framework to conceptualise the political economic processes as a dialectical interplay of class and institution in the context of the postcolonial state of Pakistan. The final section provides a conclusion to the chapter.

Class, a neo-colonial state, ethnic–national oppression, patriarchy and imperialism continue to shape Pakistan's political economy as they have always done, albeit in ever-changing ways. Some notable efforts aside, attempts to understand how these various elements come together to produce a contradictory social totality are increasingly rare. In short, ‘grand’ theorising in the mould of Hamza Alavi's structural Marxism is no longer in vogue. Academic fashion now demands an emphasis on the everyday and discursive realms (Go 2016; Chibber 2014).

This chapter presents a somewhat traditional historical materialist analysis of the Pakistani state and its society, employing a Gramscian framework to elucidate my understanding of state and capitalism and the modes of politics that have become predominant since the 1980s. Gramsci is a traditionalist; it is another matter altogether that a particular reading of Gramsci has come to animate so many ‘post-Marxist’ theoretical formulations over the past couple of decades following from the seminal contribution of Laclau and Mouffe (1985). Subaltern Studies, of course, traced at least some of its genesis to Gramsci, but its focus shifted steadily away from the history of subaltern politics in colonial India towards more textual concerns (Sarkar 2002).

To a significant extent, this chapter shares with the Subaltern Studies project a suspicion of mainstream scholarship in which actors, events and processes ‘from below’ are conspicuous by their absence. Indeed, the need to move beyond the bird's-eye formulations that have long dominated radical discussions is even more urgent in Pakistan than in postcolonial contexts such as India where scholarship in the social sciences and humanities has been much more dynamic. In this spirit, this chapter presents a critical engagement with Alavi and his seminal theory of the overdeveloped postcolonial state (Alavi 1972), following Zaidi (2014). While recognising the substantial contributions that Alavi made to our understanding of Pakistan, and the post-colony at large, it is high time that we look beyond such icons, because critical scholarship cannot remain beholden to even seminal formulations indefinitely. It is an indication of how barren the Pakistani intellectual landscape has been since the 1980s that many scholars still automatically defer to Alavi's work, a point emphasised by McCartney and Zaidi in the Introduction to this volume.

INTRODUCTION

In his important essay ‘Rethinking Pakistan's Political Economy’, S. Akbar Zaidi has drawn our attention to the crucial task of updating the work of one of Pakistan's most seminal social scientists, Hamza Alavi (Zaidi 2014). Zaidi rightly points out that despite Alavi's path-breaking contributions to the study of Pakistan, his categorisation of the Pakistani state as a ‘military–bureaucratic’ oligarchy no longer holds as an accurate depiction of the state's evolution and needs to be reformulated. Not only have new power centres emerged from within state institutions, such as the judiciary, but formerly powerful ones no longer enjoy the kind of influence and prestige that they once possessed, most notably the bureaucracy and the landed elites. As a result, Alavi's thesis requires a major rethinking which takes into account these momentous changes in state institutions.

Two other observations by Zaidi are noteworthy: first, there has been a fracturing of state power in recent decades alongside the increasing informalisation of the economy, with many ‘competing contenders for power, all located at different places in the class and state hierarchy’ (Zaidi 2014:51); second, the bulk of studies analysing changes in the character of the Pakistani state tend to eschew class in favour of purely institutional explanations such as the competition (and co-operation) between the military, judiciary and the private media. Zaidi concludes by arguing that although the ruling bloc by and large works in the interest of reproducing capital, in the absence of rigorous research there is less certainty as to the component parts of this bloc.

This chapter aims to contribute towards a clearer understanding of Pakistan's changing class relations and their implications for state policy and politics, by observing more closely what Alavi identified as the ‘most powerful indigenous class in Pakistan’: the landlords and how their internal composition and power has changed over time and what it can tell us about Pakistan's changing political economy (Alavi 1998:27). Drawing on secondary literature and the author's own ten months of fieldwork in two districts of Pakistani Punjab during 2013, this chapter argues that greater attention needs to be paid to the internal segmentation within the landlord class.

INTRODUCTION

Hamza Alavi published ‘The State in Post-Colonial Societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh’ in 1972 with the aim of drawing general lessons for the classical Marxist theory of the state from a single case study – postcolonial Pakistan. He argued that Pakistan's colonial experience endowed it with a state that was ‘overdeveloped’ after independence relative to the developing economy and society of Pakistan. What Alavi called the ‘three propertied classes’ (the indigenous bourgeoisie, metropolitan bourgeoisie and large farmers) at independence had convergent, not competing, economic interests which allowed a bureaucratic-military-dominated state to mediate between them and so gave the state a relatively autonomous role. Two subsequent essays ‘Class and State’ and ‘Elite Farmer Strategy and Regional Disparities in Agricultural Development’ were published by Alavi in 1983 in an edited collection (Gardezi and Rashid 1983). These essays sought to explore in greater detail ‘the social character of the civil bureaucracy and military, class origins, class affiliations and class commitments of the dominant classes and the struggle of subordinate classes’.

While other chapters in this book look forward to thinking about the validity of Alavi and his overdeveloped state argument in the decades since publication, this chapter looks backwards. This chapter considers the validity of Alavi's model in the post-independence decades up to the early 1980s in light of the evidence which would have been available to Alavi himself. In doing so this chapter goes back to Alavi and looks in careful detail at the strengths and weaknesses of his model of the overdeveloped state and asks how valid the model was as a representation of the Pakistani state and society between the 1950s and early 1980s.

The next section looks in detail at the three propertied classes, followed by a section on state autonomy and the overdeveloped state, after which we turn to factors that were missing from Alavi's analysis, such as politicians and labour, and then concludes with an overall evaluation of Alavi's model of the overdeveloped state.

THREE PROPERTIED CLASSES

The colonial state was what Guha called ‘an autocracy set up and sustained by a democracy’ the consequences of which was the ‘historic failure of capital to realise its universalising tendency under colonial conditions’ (1997:12).

Recent scholarship on Pakistan's political economy is in broad agreement about the need to revise extant formulations. The principal starting point for this revision is Hamza Alavi's (1972) notion of a powerful, ‘overdeveloped’ state apparatus bequeathed by colonialism, controlled by the powerful civil–military bureaucracy and supported by an entrenched landed elite.

The Alavian formulation, as Akhtar (2008) and Zaidi (2014, 2015) argue, does not hold true for twenty-first-century Pakistan in its original shape. Transformations such as deepening capitalism, increased urbanisation, and gradual, albeit often curtailed, democratisation during the last four decades have changed the terms of state–society engagement and, consequently, the nature of the political sphere itself. As a result, there is a growing realisation among authors contributing to this volume that the unilateral power of a cohesive and autonomous Pakistani state, as envisioned in both Alavi's writings and subsequent work that emerged in its long shadow, no longer holds true. In its stead has emerged a state internally fragmented along the civil–military axis, and consisting of new institutional pockets of authority in the form of parliament and the judiciary, both of which place sporadic checks on the military's control of the political sphere.

Alongside these changes internal to the formal state apparatus, the nature of authority and power has also transformed due to urbanisation and the opening up of spaces for political participation and contestation. In particular, the old landed elite, which according to Alavi was responsible for incorporating subaltern groups within the immediate postcolonial power dispensation, has seen its political monopoly diffused among a variety of propertied classes. In turn, it is these new classes that are now central to the reproduction of an unequal, or as Akhtar (2008:14) calls it, an ‘oligarchic’, structure of power in contemporary Pakistan.

The socialisation of power within an expanded dominant coalition, and the exercise of authority by ascendant societal fractions is the focus of this chapter. Specifically, this chapter brings attention to the political and social ascendancy of one particular group – the bazaar traders – in Pakistan's largest province, Punjab.

Before proceeding further, the particularities of Pakistan's capitalist transformation since Alavi's original theorisation, and the emergence and expansion of multiple classes, demands a clear delineation of the societal fraction that lies at the centre of this study.

In recent years, the negotiation of various trade agreements, such as the TPP, TTIP and CETA, has been accompanied by a large public backlash. Are we observing a paradigm shift in public perception of world trade or just temporary shifts in public support for the global economic order that oscillate around a more or less steady level? This chapter provides an overview of the major determinants of support for or opposition against PTAs and discusses how much room to maneuver policy makers have in designing such agreements. Furthermore, we discuss what policy makers can do to increase support for such agreements. We thereby focus on framing strategies and provide an analysis of which types of arguments are conducive to increase support for PTAs and how individuals process such information. This allows us to construct different future scenarios for policy makers to better align the negotiation and design of future trade agreements with the demand of their constituencies.

The chapter provides an overview of the current and emerging trends in disruptive technologies and discusses the sweeping effects of digitization at different levels of the economy. The chapters focus then shifts to the effects of digitization on trade and explores the implications for trade policy. In order to understand what needs to be changed or at least calibrated in existing external trade policies, we need to know what we have in terms of existing regulatory frameworks – both at the international and at the regional and bilateral levels. It is the objective of the chapter’s third part to attend to this need as well as to show how selected countries have responded to the digital challenge and formulated distinct or less distinct responses in their respective external trade policies. Here, in particular, an understanding of the digital agenda of the United States, as well as of the new templates for electronic commerce, is essential and the chapter conveys this knowledge by focusing on the most advanced model so far - that of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). The chapter goes on to contextualize and assess the impact of the existing legal frameworks, as shaped by preferential trade agreements.

The introductory chapter outlines key factors that we expect to shape global trade regulation for years to come. We briefly discuss how these factors put pressure on trade governance to adapt and to change. We also summarize the rationale for the various sections and the individual contributions to the volume.

Our climate crisis is now an emergency. While efforts at multilateral cooperation should continue, it is too late to delay legal multilateral and unilateral trade measures any longer. This chapter sketches a preliminary illustration of a border carbon adjustment (BCA) proposal that differs significantly from earlier ones. Its goals are to induce policy improvement by governments of high-polluting countries and defend the Paris Agreement. Each country that imposes positive net taxes on fossil fuel use at home should set a default BCA on an imported product from a high-emitting country equal to net fossil energy taxes applied on the competing home good throughout its supply chain. The government should deduct from this surcharge for a given import shipment to the extent that costs due to carbon energy taxes — or other measures that are comparable in effectiveness in reducing emissions — have already been paid on the import. These surcharges should exempt all exports from countries whose per capita carbon dioxide emissions are low. Such BCAs could be consistent with World Trade Organization rules and should minimize additional transaction costs on trade. Objections are addressed. Paradoxically trade itself in the long term needs carefully limited trade restrictions in the short term.

After three decades of companionship, investment protection rules and trade agreements are heading for a divorce. Investment chapters have been included in preferential trade and investment agreements (PTIAs) since the late 1980s, but they have recently come under fire. The U.S. administration considers privately enforceable investment protection obligations as an unwanted incentive to offshore American jobs, and the EU Commission seeks to omit them to benefit from the accelerated ratification process reserved for trade agreements that fall under exclusive EU competency. After decades of coexistence, investment protection rules and trade agreements are thus likely to go their separate ways. This chapter empirically evaluates the impact of their thirty-year companionship to assess the implications of their looming split. It finds that investment chapters remain little more than a bilateral investment treaty plugged into a trade agreement. PTIAs and self-standing investment treaties do not vary systematically in investment protection content, and the wider trade agreement context does little to affect the interpretation of investment rules in PTIAs. In spite of their coexistence in the same treaty, there is thus little evidence of cross-fertilization between trade and investment protection rules in PTIAs. This absence of normative convergence suggests that their looming split merely formalizes the continuous normative distinction between trade liberalization and investment protection.