Amna Qayyum

“The War on Reproduction” traces how reproduction became central to the rise, expansion, and crisis of postcolonial authoritarianism in Pakistan. In the decades after the 1947 Partition, as East and West Pakistan navigated decolonization and Cold War geopolitics, Ayub Khan’s military regime cast population growth as the country’s “problem number one.” Working with a transnational network of experts and institutions, the regime built one of the world’s earliest, and most ambitious, population control programs, linking research and policy to clinics, contraceptives, publicity campaigns, and tens of thousands of family planning workers. These workers carried family planning into villages, mosques, and households, shaping reproductive practices through developmental and Islamic idioms of ethical childrearing, public welfare, and responsible citizenship. By 1971, Pakistan’s program was celebrated internationally, even as it deepened inequities between East and West Pakistan and became a flashpoint in the stormy downfall of Ayub’s regime. Centering the country as an active site of global knowledge-making, the project shows how Pakistani actors shaped the models, metrics, and moral vocabularies of reproductive governance across authoritarian contexts in the decolonizing world. In so doing, “The War on Reproduction” reveals how struggles over intimate life remain a key site for understanding state power today.

“The Demographic State” traces histories of population management to analyze state-making and unmaking in East and West Pakistan. It argues that Pakistan was not simply a Cold War laboratory, but rather a critical geography in the production of global demographic knowledge. Drawing on materials from social scientists, medical professionals, women’s welfare activists, bureaucrats, and Islamic modernists, this study demonstrates how family planning became an intimate site through which Pakistani citizens experienced the state. In so doing, it explores the emergence of the postcolonial family as an object of transnational development. This was not solely driven by imperatives of economic growth, but also reshaped concepts of public health, technology, gender, and religious authority. These transnational projects of population control stimulated debate over state power, modernization, and foreign aid in Pakistan—ultimately shaping protests against Ayub Khan’s authoritarian regime. Based on multi-sited archives and interviews, this study examines how the encounter between postcolonial sovereignty and global development unfolded in everyday Pakistan.